Project Details
University of Virginia
The SIF-funded program proposes planning and response strategies to contagious phenomena (e.g. infectious disease outbreaks, network contagion, et al) as a complex system big science problem. This integrated science and engineering program in massively interacting networked systems considers the social, behavioral, and political dimensions applicable to contagion and pandemic science. We aim to reduce the global burden of infectious disease through a transdisciplinary approach that brings to bear ideas from different disciplines – including computation and data science, psychological, social and political sciences, economics, public health, and systems engineering – to leverage existing capabilities and knowledge to create fundamentally new ways to reduce the global burden of infectious diseases. Existing theoretical frameworks, engineering techniques, computation, data science, and tools for modeling individual components and their interactions — grounded in empirical data — will be leveraged and further developed to address the interconnected nature of disease dynamics, pandemic science, and response. Furthermore, the ideas developed as a part of this program will lead to new general theories for understanding large scale networked complex systems.
The Biocomplexity Institute serves as the organizing unit with broad and comprehensive partnership of the University of Virginia Schools of Engineering and Applied Science, Data Science, Medicine, and the College of Arts & Sciences. Together, we have agreed to join forces to pursue a preeminent presence in Contagion Science and Technology at the University of Virginia.
Systems of contagion and potential interventions and solutions span questions of basic biology, medicine, and political and social science. Our cross-cutting, interdisciplinary Contagion Science program provides an umbrella for a wide range of existing, unfolding, and novel research questions that address large societal challenges. The program spans multiple UVA schools and relies heavily on information sciences, technologies, and infrastructures to foster and accelerate new collaboration between project partners.
By building on a number of prominent research initiatives at UVA by participating faculty members in the College of Arts and Science, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, School of Data Science, the School of Medicine, and the Biocomplexity Institute, the Contagion Science program aims to generate new knowledge and R&D applications aimed at transdisciplinary research topics spanning from epidemiology, network science and data science, AI, computational social, robotics, biology, and economic science, as well as social and behavioral sciences.
Contagion Science provides an umbrella for fundamental research challenges and acknowledges that mechanisms and patterns of contagion are not limited to pandemics but occur in many areas of our modern societies.
Scientists at UVA acknowledge the need to develop cross-cutting technological computing innovations that interface with real-world societal applications to improve planning and response to contagions of this scale and impact. Fueled by a UVA grant of $5 million in support of the University’s quest to move its research from prominence to preeminence, the Contagion Science program provides a coordinated “big science” approach to exploring ways to address contagions of the magnitude we experienced with the global pandemic of the 21st century. This plan includes hiring faculty and postdoctoral associates at participating organizations.