Infrastructure for Predicting, Understanding, and Mitigating Zoonotic Disease Outbreaks

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

This award to the University of Florida supports a series of workshops that will catalyze collaborations around suites of data housed in natural history collections. The workshops will identify gaps in biodiversity and infectious disease data to address basic research and broader social issues pertinent to diseases that originate from other animals. An outcome of the workshops will be a strategy for framing an integrated agenda for transdisciplinary training and research. Products of the workshops will be broadly applicable for improving the community’s understanding of infectious diseases in general, achieved through the strengthening the cyberinfrastructure supporting and connecting the important data stored in natural history collections. The plan is to assemble a diverse group of participants that includes students and contributes to the preparation of the next generation of STEM researchers to sustain these conversations. The funded series of workshops will bring together representatives from natural history collections, biodiversity informatics, taxonomy, systematics, ecology, genetics, virology, pathobiology, infectious disease, epidemiology, social science, and communications. This transdisciplinary effort will establish a dialogue and frame an integrated research agenda for understanding, mitigating, and predicting emerging zoonotic disease. A primary aim of the activity is to unveil the potential role of natural history specimens in pathogen discovery and mitigation, resulting in new approaches to gather, share, and interpret data and knowledge for deployment in preventing, predicting, and responding to diseases of zoonotic origins (future pandemics). To achieve this, the project will identify gaps in biodiversity and pathobiology data connections, develop possible solutions to close these gaps and enable a more synthetic view of biodiversity and human health, establish a plan for framing an integrated research agenda, and develop a plan for interdisciplinary training and research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.