AUSTIN, Texas — The National Science Foundation has selected the University of Texas at Austin for a pilot grant to establish the UT Center for Pandemic Decision Science (CPDS). The new interdisciplinary center will bring together scientists, engineers, clinicians and policy makers to address the grand challenge of preparing the world to combat future pandemic threats.
“This represents an ambitious next step for the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, professor of integrative biology and statistics and data sciences who is directing the effort. “Over the past three years, the consortium has been a major force in pandemic forecasting to help individuals, schools, communities and global leaders navigate the changing risks of the virus.”
The new center will address three fundamental challenges that have dominated the global response to COVID-19 and are critical to the future resilience of our planet:
“COVID-19 has revealed a fundamental failure of imagination,” Meyers said. “Going into 2020, we assumed that the next pandemic will resemble those we have seen in the past. But COVID-19 was different. The international playbook did not include face masks, mass testing or stay-at-home orders. It didn’t plan for misinformation campaigns, devastating racial disparities, years of lost education or botched viral evolution.”
There are more than 40 multidisciplinary investigators from 11 institutions who are collaborating to establish the new CPDS. Over the next 18 months, the center will host five workshops and run five pilot projects, including a hackathon to predict human health behaviors and a pathogen “wargame” exercise for public agencies of ‘Texas.
These activities are designed to “build a roadmap for closing fundamental gaps in our understanding of pandemics,” Meyers said. The new center will also provide educational and research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students at UT.
UT Austin is the coordinating institution for the $1 million PIPP Phase I grant. Joining Meyers in leading the project from UT are Radu Marculescu, professor of electrical and computer engineering, Risto Miikkulainen, professor of computer science, and Claus Wilke, chair of the department of integrative biology. The leaders of the external projects are Dr. Mark Escott, chief medical officer of the City of Austin; David Morton, chair of the department of industrial engineering and management sciences at Northwestern University and formerly with UT; Akihiro Nishi, assistant professor of epidemiology at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health; and Holly Wichman, director for the Institute for Modeling Collaboration and Innovation at the University of Idaho. CPDS will also collaborate closely with the Santa Fe Institute and the Center for Advanced Pathogen Threat and Response Simulation.
