NSF PREPARE: Science Before the Storm

Welcome to our first researcher match! These scientists have never collaborated before but we thought it would be fun to eavesdrop on their "what if?" conversation. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did! Sameer Patil is an Assistant Professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington (IU) and a fellow of IU’s Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research (CACR). Sameer’s research interests lie at the intersection of Privacy and Cybersecurity, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), and Social Computing. The results of his research have been published at top-tier conferences, such as CHI, CSCW, and SOUPS, and he holds several US patents. Sameer’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and Google. Learn more [https://privacy.luddy.indiana.edu/sameer-patil/]. Indrakshi Ray is a Professor in the Computer Science Department [http://www.cs.colostate.edu/] at Colorado State University [http://www.colostate.edu/]. She has also been a visiting faculty at Air Force Research Laboratory, Naval Research Laboratory, and at INRIA, Rocquencourt, France. Her research interests include security and privacy, database systems, e-commerce and formal methods in software engineering. She has published over a hundred technical papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings. Learn more [https://www.cs.colostate.edu/~iray/]. John Seberger is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in ComArtSci at Michigan State University, where he works with the Dean and an interdisciplinary team of engineers and communications scholars on humanistic and sociotechnical issues in computing and artificial intelligence. Learn more [https://seberger.net/]. Special thanks to Finn Mokrzycki for editing!

IN THIS EPISODE, WE TALK WITH B. ADITYA PRAKASH, KRISTA WIGGINTON, AND JOHN YIN ABOUT THE NSF PREVNT WORKSHOP THEY HELPED TO ORGANIZE IN FEBRUARY 2021. PREVENT (PREDICTING EMERGENCE OF VIRULENT ENTITIES BY NOVEL TECHNOLOGIES) SOUGHT TO ANSWER WHAT ADVANCES IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR WOULD ENABLE PREDICTION AND PREVENTION OF FUTURE PANDEMICS. WE THINK YOU'LL REALLY ENJOY WHAT THEY HAD TO SAY! Learn more about the PREVENT workshop here [http://prevent-symposium.org/]. B. Aditya Prakash is an Associate Professor of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. He is broadly interested in Data Science, Machine Learning and AI with emphasis on solving big-data problems in networks and sequences. Many of the research questions he answers deal with understanding and managing efficiently, dynamical mechanisms (like propagation) on networks, occurring across natural, social and technological systems. These include problems motivated from public health, computational epidemiology, cybersecurity, urban computing and the web. His research combines theoretical analysis of models, developing efficient algorithms and empirical studies on large scale data. Learn more [https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~badityap/]. Krista Wigginton is an assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on applications of environmental biotechnology in drinking water and wastewater treatment. In particular, her research group develops new methods to detect and analyze the fate of emerging pollutants in the environment. Learn more [https://css.umich.edu/person/krista-r-wigginton]. John Yin is Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor, Theme Leader of Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. His research interests are in systems biology - virus-host interactions and systems chemistry - molecular replicators. Learn more [https://directory.engr.wisc.edu/che/Faculty/Yin_John/]. Special thanks to Finn Mokrzycki for editing!

In this episode, we meet Dr. Nina Fefferman, Dr. James Moody, and Dr. Ioannis Paschalidis, co-organizers of NSF's Workshop on Predicting Pandemic Emergence (http://predictingpandemics.com/). We talk about the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to pandemic response - and learn what these esteemed researchers believe is important in preparing the world for the next pandemic. Nina Fefferman, PhD, is a Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dr. Fefferman’s research focuses on the mathematics of epidemiology, evolutionary and behavioral ecology, and self-organizing behaviors, especially of systems described by networks. While the research in the Fefferman Lab frequently focuses on disease in human and/or animal populations, and how disease and disease-related behavioral ecology can affect the short-term survival and long-term evolutionary success of a population, people in the lab have worked on problems as diverse as computer network security to social behaviors in grass-roots organizations that make the movement susceptible to radicalization. Any fun integration of applied mathematics and human or animal processes is fair game! Read more here [https://eeb.utk.edu/people/nina-fefferman/]. James Moody, PhD, is the Robert O. Keohane Professor in the Department of Sociology, Duke University. Dr. Moody has published extensively in the field of social networks, methods, and social theory. His work has focused theoretically on the network foundations of social cohesion and diffusion, with a particular emphasis on building tools and methods for understanding dynamic social networks. He has used network models to help understand school racial segregation, adolescent health, disease spread, economic development, and the development of scientific disciplines. Read more here [https://scholars.duke.edu/person/james.moody]. Ioannis Paschalidis, PhD, is a Professor in the College of Engineering at Boston University with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Division of Systems Engineering. He is Director of the Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE) – a Boston University research center with 39 affiliated faculty, more than 100 affiliated graduate students and on the order of $6.6 million of annual research expenditures from sponsored research directed by CISE faculty. He is also affiliated with the BioMolecular Engineering Research Center (BMERC). Learn more here [https://www.bu.edu/eng/profile/ioannis-paschalidis/]. Special thanks to Finn Mokrzycki for editing!

In this episode we talk with Anil Vullikanti from UVA and Li Xiong from Emory about their involvement as co-PIs on PREPARE and the workshops they've planned on data privacy & security and social, economic, behavioral, & governance issues surrounding pandemics. We hope you enjoy this introduction to a few more members of our team! Anil Vullikanti is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and at the Biocomplexity Institute. Vullikanti‘s research interests are in the broad areas of approximation and randomized algorithms, dynamical systems, wireless networks, social networks, computation epidemiology and the modeling, simulation and analysis of socio-technical systems. Read his full bio here [https://biocomplexity.virginia.edu/person/anil-vullikanti]. Li Xiong is a Professor of Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics at Emory University. She and her research lab, Assured Information Management and Sharing (AIMS), conduct research on algorithms and methods for big data management, machine learning, and data privacy and security, in the context of spatiotemporal and health data. Read her full bio here [http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~lxiong/].

In this episode, we discuss the basis for the PREPARE project, the cool research that brought the dynamic duo of Madhav Marathe and Simon Levin into this project, and how the end deliverable is nothing short of changing the world. Dr. Madhav Marathe is an endowed Distinguished Professor in Biocomplexity, Director of the Network Systems Science and Advanced Computing (NSSAC) Division, Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative, and a tenured Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. Dr. Marathe is a passionate advocate and practitioner of transdisciplinary team science. During his 25-year professional career, he has established and led a number of large transdisciplinary projects and groups. His areas of expertise are network science, artificial intelligence, high performance computing, computational epidemiology, biological and socially coupled systems, and data analytics. You can read his full bio here [https://biocomplexity.virginia.edu/person/madhav-marathe]. Dr. Simon Levin is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Director of the Center for BioComplexity at Princeton University. He retains an Adjunct Professorship at Cornell, where he still has many valued colleagues, was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at UC Irvine from 2007-2016, and recently became a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Arizona State University. His research interests are in understanding how macroscopic patterns and processes are maintained at the level of ecosystems and the biosphere, in terms of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that operate primarily at the level of organisms; in infectious diseases; and in the interface between basic and applied ecology. You can read his full bio here [https://slevin.princeton.edu/].