COVID Modeling Accelerator

Overview

Fenris partnered with the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM) and Rockefeller Foundation to help a cohort of academic research teams better meet the needs of state and local decision-makers for actionable insights from epidemiological, economic and operational data models.

The COVID Modeling Accelerator was created to support a cohort of academic research teams to meet the needs of state and local decision-makers for actionable insights to better respond to the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fenris partnered with the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM) and Rockefeller Foundation to support these academic research teams through user research, product strategy, and UI design.

You can read Rockefeller Foundation’s announcement of this initiative for more information.

Engagements and Grantees

The CMA team interviewed dozens of modeling teams and invited a set of candidates to apply. Fenris team members worked with candidates to help develop objectives and milestones, and to create a proposal in less than a month. Proposals were reviewed by SMDM, and the funds were administered via a vendor contract from Johns Hopkins University. Guidance was provided by the steering committee, which included members from RF, SMDM, and Fenris. The committee also helped determine allocation of technical assistance to the awardees.

The data modeling teams are multi-disciplinary teams composed of epidemiologists, numerical modelers, and experts in public health, operations research, and related fields. They included:

• University of Washington. Ryan McGee and Carl Bergstrom.
• University of Texas at Austin. Lauren Meyers and Michael Lachmann.
• University of Michigan. Marisa Eisenberg, Paul Resnick, and team.
• Covid19Sim.org - Jagpreet Chhatwal (Massachusetts General Hospital Harvard), Benjamin Linas (Boston Medical Center) and Turgay Ayer (Georgia Tech).
• University of Wisconsin—Madison. Corey Jackson, Michael Ferris.
• UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. Lauren Ancel Meyers (UT- Austin) and David Morton (Northwestern University).
• Vaccine Equity Planner at Boston Children’s Hospital. John Brownstein, Ben Rader.
• Johns Hopkins University. Kimia Ghobadi, Felix Parker.

More information is available about the awardees of the COVID Modeling Accelerator on the SMDM website at https://nursing.jhu.edu/cma. We thank these teams for the opportunity to work with them and learn from them.