The Rockefeller Foundation https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org is providing $3 million in funding for Global.health, an open source data science platform to strengthen pathogen surveillance and response.
The new funding will support data integration between Global.health, and others to analyze genomic, climate, wastewater, mobility epidemiological and clinical data. The goal is to be able to better predict emerging threats of infectious disease and to coordinate the global response by:
- Evaluating the impact of different data sources to define which data points are the most useful during the first 100 days of an infectious disease outbreak
- Developing scalable and robust open source algorithms and data pipelines to detect and predict the emergence and geographic spread of new COVID-19 Variants of Concern globally
- Combining human mobility data with network science algorithms to optimally configure and distribute public health interventions during emerging epidemics beyond the constraints of country or state borders
- Creating open source methods and frameworks for pandemic response analyses so outputs can be directly usable by groups engaged in pandemic preparedness and improve the translation of science into practical applications that can work with real world outbreak response
- Cultivating working groups with international teams of scientists while prioritizing lower and middle income countries to co-develop applications and translate them into real world impact as they are being generated
Dr. Moritz Kraemer Associate Professor, University of Oxford, and John Brownstein, Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and Co-Founders of Global.health, commented, “The new funding from the Rockefeller Foundation will allow us to dive deeper into which data and interventions have the most impact for controlling disease outbreaks at different stages of a pandemic.”
The $3 million in funding for Global.health was made by RF Catalytic Capital, Inc., the foundation’s public charity launched in 2020 as a new innovative tool for foundations, impact investors, businesses, and governments. The goal is to combine their resource to scale funding solutions to bring about transformational change during the COVID-19 response and recovery.