About the series
The National Science Foundation to Support a Series of Workshops on Pandemic Prediction and Prevention
The Directorates for Biological Sciences (BIO); Computer Information Science and Engineering (CISE); Engineering (ENG); Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE); and the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE) at the National Science Foundation (NSF) are jointly supporting a series of interdisciplinary workshops to engage research communities around the topic of Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention. This topic arises both from fundamental scientific questions and pressing societal needs. Consequently, NSF is holding a series of virtual workshops that bring together interdisciplinary experts in the biological, engineering, computer, and social and behavioral sciences to start conversations and catalyze ideas on how to advance scientific understanding beyond the state-of-the-art in pre-emergence and emergence forecasting, real-time monitoring, and detection of inflection point events in order to prevent and mitigate the occurrence of future pandemics. These goals will be met through integration of fundamental science and engineering advances related but not limited to: synergistic biological interactions spanning molecular, organismal, and epidemiological scales; computational algorithms and frameworks for intelligent processing, analyzing and modeling of data; multiscale smart bio-sensing technologies, networked sensors, in-situ computation; understanding disease transmission due to human social behavior and attitudes and the drivers underlying both. As per our mission, these NSF-supported workshops will focus on the foundational knowledge and capabilities needed to inform future infectious disease outbreak prediction and pandemic prevention.
Each of these workshops is expected to have up to 50 invited active participants. The community can participate in a listen-only mode and interact through chat and Q&A functions.
Workshop 1: February 16-17, 2021
Description: Rapidly detect and assess the threat of emerging pathogens through advanced biosensing, surveillance, and the tracking of human and non-human populations for risk modeling and pandemic preparedness.
URL (for video recording and workshop report): thepipp.org
Workshop 2: February 22-23, 2021
Description: Understanding of how the global behavior of an organism emerges from the interactions that begin occurring between components at the molecular, cellular, and physiological scales.
URL (for video recording and workshop report):
PRedicting Emergence of Virulent Entities by Novel Technologies (PREVENT) (gatech.edu)
Workshop 3: February 25-26, 2021
Description: Identification of pre-emergence and the predictions of rare events in multiscale, complex, dynamical systems.
URL (for video recording and workshop report): predictingpandemics.com
Workshop 4: March 22-23, 2021
Description: Examining how human attitudes, social behavior, and the drivers underlying both contribute to disease transmission through their determination of policy and behavioral obstacles and supports.
URL (for video recording and workshop report): humanpipp.org
Note: Additional workshops are currently being planned. Stay tuned.
