• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
Tuesday, October 7, 2025
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Health

Federal grants support research to improve pandemic forecasting

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
July 1, 2020
in Health
Reading Time: 2 mins read
0
IMAGE
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

Awards will advance UMass Amherst team’s groundbreaking COVID-19 work

IMAGE

Credit: UMass Amherst

University of Massachusetts Amherst biostatistician Nicholas Reich has been awarded grants from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support innovation and expansion in his groundbreaking pandemic forecasting work.

Reich received a $350,000 award from the CDC to advance the COVID-19 Forecast Hub, which he and his team developed in April. They use the same ensemble approach, unifying multiple models from top forecasters and institutions around the world, for COVID-19 projections as they do for the CDC-designated UMass Influenza Forecasting Center of Excellence.

Each week, the COVID-19 hub is updated with four-week-out projections for COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. and by state. Its centralized, open-science data repository is relied on by the CDC, data journalists and the public for accurate and up-to-date forecasts of the current trajectory of the pandemic in the U.S.

Reich notes that the new investments from the CDC will support a shift toward creating better pandemic forecasting in the U.S. and globally. COVID-19 “represents an unprecedented challenge for the infectious disease modeling community,” Reich says. “This award enables us to track, evaluate and synthesize forecasts from dozens of research groups around the world. Our work continues to underscore the importance of looking at multiple different infectious disease models, just as weather forecasters do with hurricane projections, if we want to have a good sense of what is coming next with COVID-19.”

In addition to compiling the weekly COVID-19 forecasts from multiple models, Reich’s team will work with partners to obtain new relevant data streams, develop new adaptive ensemble methodologies for synthesizing the hub’s forecasts and create new forecasting methodologies.

In the other award, Reich and UMass Amherst colleagues Dan Sheldon, an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher; Andrew Lover, an infectious disease epidemiologist; and biostatistics Ph.D. student Casey Gibson received a $300,000 grant from the NIH to develop new statistical methods for their individual mechanistic Bayesian forecasting model. It’s one of the models featured on the COVID-19 Forecast Hub, the FiveThirtyEight COVID-19 Forecast tracker and the CDC website.

Led by Sheldon, associate professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences, who addresses large-scale data-scientific challenges using massive data sets, the team will explore machine-learning approaches for pandemic scenarios.

“New methods are needed to leverage the wealth of surveillance data at fine spatial and temporal granularity, together with associated information about policy
interventions and environmental conditions over space and time, to reason directly about the mechanisms to forecast and understand the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 transmission,” the researchers say. “These methods must use sound statistical and epidemiological principles while being flexible and computationally efficient to provide real-time forecasts that can guide public health decision-making and response to the highly dynamic aspects of this global crisis.”

These new frameworks need to be developed quickly because of “the very real potential” for COVID-19 to become an endemic, and perhaps seasonal, pathogen in the U.S., causing recurrent waves of the disease.

“Forecasting pandemics of emerging pathogens poses a set of new and important challenges,” Reich says.

###

Media Contact
Patty Shillington
[email protected]

Tags: Algorithms/ModelsComputer ScienceInfectious/Emerging DiseasesMathematics/StatisticsMedicine/HealthPolicy/EthicsPublic HealthRobotry/Artificial IntelligenceSocial/Behavioral ScienceTechnology/Engineering/Computer Science
Share12Tweet8Share2ShareShareShare2

Related Posts

Career Adaptability Patterns in Chinese Cardiovascular Nurses

October 7, 2025

Once-Weekly Insulin Icodec: Efficacy and Safety in India

October 7, 2025

Hydrogen Sulfide Shields Spinal Cord via Rac1 Persulfidation

October 7, 2025

Unveiling Thymbra spicata’s Bioactive Compounds and Actions

October 7, 2025
Please login to join discussion

POPULAR NEWS

  • New Study Reveals the Science Behind Exercise and Weight Loss

    New Study Reveals the Science Behind Exercise and Weight Loss

    95 shares
    Share 38 Tweet 24
  • New Study Indicates Children’s Risk of Long COVID Could Double Following a Second Infection – The Lancet Infectious Diseases

    93 shares
    Share 37 Tweet 23
  • Ohio State Study Reveals Protein Quality Control Breakdown as Key Factor in Cancer Immunotherapy Failure

    74 shares
    Share 30 Tweet 19
  • New Insights Suggest ALS May Be an Autoimmune Disease

    72 shares
    Share 29 Tweet 18

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

Career Adaptability Patterns in Chinese Cardiovascular Nurses

Once-Weekly Insulin Icodec: Efficacy and Safety in India

Hydrogen Sulfide Shields Spinal Cord via Rac1 Persulfidation

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 63 other subscribers
  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.