Published 31 May 2019
Pitt Public Health will lead a multidisciplinary group of computer scientists, biostatisticians and biomedical informatics experts to direct the inaugural Network Coordination Center for the Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS), a collaborative research network originally launched by the NIH in 2004 to assist the nation in preparing for infectious disease threats. Backed by a five-year, $6.7 million NIH grant, the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health will support an open, community-driven discovery process where all scientists and the broader community have the chance to analyze datasets.
Leading the new center is Wilbert van Panhuis, MD, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology at Pitt Public Health and biomedical informatics at Pitt's School of Medicine. "The scientific community is increasingly recognizing that sharing research data and software not only benefits individual research projects, but increases the impact of science and innovation on the greater good. However, nobody's figured out exactly how to do this for global infectious diseases. What we're going to do is leverage that interest in 'open science' to create a framework that will make it easy to share, find and use research data and software to combat infectious diseases," said Van Panhuis. Click here to read the May 20, 2019 press release. (PDF)