Upcoming events
epiENGAGE February 2024 Meeting
This event is designed to kick off our CDC cooperative agreement and get to know each other. Together we will explore existing modeling tools, hear from public health professionals, and set the agenda for the next two years of working together.
More detailed information for participants can be found here.
Workshop: Understanding, Tracking, Predicting, and Influencing Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Dynamics During Public Health Crises
The workshop will bring together experts spanning the sciences, social sciences, engineering, and public health to address the social, cognitive, and emotional dynamics that emerge and influence the course of public health threats, the role of social media in shaping these dynamics, and the potential to incorporate social and behavioral data into the surveillance, forecasting and control of pandemics.
Through a combination of expert panels and breakout discussions, we aim to articulate a 5-10 year research agenda for advancing the art and science of investigating the dynamics of pathogens and human behavior.
More detailed information for participants can be found here.
Hackathon: HPC in the City
Pandemic science in the time of COVID-19 has done a remarkable job of understanding the virus, its spread, and the mechanics of prevention. What we missed – as we did in the 1918 flu pandemic – was an understanding of how to anticipate community behavioral responses to the disease. Our health behaviors were strongly driven by the ways we understood the disease, who we trusted as reliable sources of information, and our capacity to take protective measures such as working from home. HPC in the City: Pandemics focuses on discovering how novel digital signals can explain community behaviors and anticipate epidemiological trends, with a focus on using anonymized mobility data to anticipate and understand mass gathering events and health equity and using community conversations on the Reddit platform to understand protective behaviors like mask wearing and opinions related to local pandemic policy changes. The hackathon is hosted by the Texas Advanced Computing Center as part of SC23 in Denver, CO.
Workshop: Anticipating and Detecting Pathogen Evolution: Analyzing the Past, Planning for the Future
This in-person two-day workshop will convene experts in zoonotic epidemiology, ecology, virology, public health and emergency preparedness, machine learning, and drug and vaccine development with the goals of:
identifying, cataloging, and characterizing pathogens that may likely cross species barriers
developing methods to detect the emergence of species-crossing pathogens, both to humans and domesticated animals
simulating plausible (unknown) threats based on our understanding of known pathogens
Through a combination of expert panels and provocative breakout discussions, we aim to articulate a 5-10 year research agenda for detecting unknown pathogen threats.
More detailed information for participants can be found here.
Workshop: Simulation Games for Global Pandemic Resilience
This in-person two-day workshop will convene scientists, engineers, public health experts, and military game designers to envision the application of simulation gaming to advance global preparedness for uncertain pathogen threats. We will survey the state-of-the art in gaming science and explore the development of simulation-based games that:
improve individual and collaborative decision making in the face of uncertain pathogen threats
enable the design of robust pathogen-related threat surveillance, prevention and response systems
elucidate cognitive and behavioral processes that drive human responses to pathogen threats.
Through a combination of expert panels and provocative breakout discussions, we aim to articulate a 5-10 year research agenda for advancing the art and science of simulation gaming for global threat resilience.
More detailed information for participants can be found here.
Small-scale preparedness exercise to advance simulation of unknown unknowns
This pilot study will implement one or more techniques in an existing simulation framework, and run a small-scale planning exercise to evaluate its ability to generate meaningful challenges. Participants will be a team of local and state public health and emergency response officials.
Workshop: Decision Support Paradigms to Reduce Uncertainty and Ground Policy
This in-person two-day workshop will convene scientists, engineers, public health experts, and policy makers with the goals of: (i) improving model-based optimization of strategies to detect, prevent and mitigate pandemic threats; (ii) building strong, responsive, and nimble bridges between scientists and policy makers; and (iii) developing robust and transparent paradigms to support decision making and promote public adherence in response to uncertain pathogen threats. A central question of the workshop will be whether staged-alert systems provide an attractive framework for (i)-(iii).
Through a combination of expert panels and breakout discussions, we aim to articulate a 5-10 year research agenda for advancing the art and science of decision-support systems for global threat resilience. Three panels are planned, focusing on policy optimization, forming bridges between policy makers and scientists, and understanding how people will respond to policy.
More detailed information for participants can be found here.