Symposium Fall 2020 – Keynote Speaker Lauren Gardner
Title – Tracking COVID-19 in Real-time: Challenges Faced and Lessons Learned
Abstract: In response to the COVID-19 public health emergency, we developed an online interactive dashboard, first released publicly on January 22, 2020, hosted by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. The dashboard visualizes and tracks the number of reported confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries for all countries affected by COVID-19. Further, all the data collected and displayed on the dashboard is made freely available in a GitHub repository, along with the live feature layers of the dashboard. The motivation behind the development of the dashboard was to provide researchers, public health authorities and the general public with a user-friendly tool to track the outbreak situation as it unfolds, critically, with access to the data underlying it. The demand for such a service became evident in the first weeks the dashboard was online, and by the end of February we were receiving over one billion requests for the dashboard feature layers every day, which since increased to between three and 4.5 billion requests every day. The dashboard has been featured on most major national and international media outlets (NYT, Washington Post, CNN, BBC, etc), and is either directly embedded in their websites, or used as the data source for in house mapping efforts. Further, members of the public health community, including local and national governmental organizations, emergency response teams, public health agencies, and infectious disease researchers around the world rely on the dashboard and its data for informing and planning COVID-19 response. In this talk I will give a brief overview of the evolution of the dashboard, discuss some of the challenges we faced along the way, and suggest some methods by which disease tracking could be done better in the future.
Bio: Lauren Gardner, associate professor in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, is the creator of the interactive web-based dashboard being used by public health authorities, researchers, and the general public around the globe to track the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. The dashboard, which debuted on January 22, became the authoritative source of global COVID-19 epidemiological data for public health policy makers and many major news outlets worldwide. Because of her expertise and leadership, Gardner was one of six Johns Hopkins experts who briefed congressional staff about the outbreak during a Capitol Hill event in early March 2020, and in September was recognized by TIME Magazine, as one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2020. Gardner is co-director of the Center for Systems Science and Engineering and affiliated faculty in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Prior to joining JHU in 2019, Gardner was a senior lecturer in civil engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, in Australia. Her research expertise is in integrated transport and epidemiological modeling. Gardner has previously led related interdisciplinary research projects which utilize network optimization and mathematical modeling to progress the state of the art in global epidemiological risk assessment. Beyond mobility, her work focuses more holistically on virus diffusion as a function of climate, land use, mobility, and other contributing risk factors. On these topics Gardner has received research funding from organizations including NIH, NSF, NASA, and the CDC. Outcomes from her research projects have led to publications in leading interdisciplinary and infectious disease journals, presentations at international academic conferences, as well invited seminars and keynote talks at Universities and various events. Gardner is also an invited member of multiple international professional committees, reviewer for top-tier journals and grant funding organizations, and invited participant of various Scientific Advisory Committees. She has also supervised more than 30 graduate students and post-docs, and teaches courses on network science and systems engineering.