A University of Tennessee, Knoxville, professor has been awarded $18 million from the National Science Foundation to figure out what factors lead infections to become epidemics or pandemics.
Nina Fefferman, director of the National Institute for Modeling Biological Systems and associate director of the UT One Health Initiative, will launch and lead the new NSF Center for Analysis and Prediction of Pandemic Expansion (NSF APPEX). A multidisciplinary group of researchers from academia will collaborate with government, industry, and nongovernmental organizations to identify the human-driven factors that constitute ideal conditions for pandemic expansion.
Factors could include everything from the built environment and economic resources to media and social networks. Researchers will work to identify the minimally sufficient sets of conditions that lead to an outbreak. For a set of conditions to be considered minimally sufficient, the exclusion of any factor within the set must change the outcome from outbreak expansion to outbreak die-out.
“A lot of pandemic research is immunology and virology, work that happens in medical schools, but that’s only two parts among the very many parts that come together to create a pandemic,” said Fefferman, who has worked in pandemic preparedness for 20 years. “Think about it: A very small portion of an epidemic is what is happening inside one person. Public health is about changing the lives of an entire population.”