Pandemic Prediction and Prevention (Destination Normal: Envisioning a World Free of Pandemics)

PI: TM Murali, Professor of Computer Science

Co-PIs: Debswapna Bhattacharya, Sanket Deshmukh, Luis Escobar, Julie Gerdes, Kathy Hosig, Anuj Karpatne, Lisa Lee, XJ Meng, Padmavathy Rajogopalan, Patricia Raun, Webster Santos, Paul Skolnik, James Weger-Lucarelli

The vision for the PPP project team is to educate and train a transformative new generation of scientists with technical and professional skills to form convergent teams that can anticipate future outbreaks and prevent them from becoming pandemics using practices that will build trust within communities to adopt such interventions. These scientists will forecast and control future global pandemics by:

1. Developing novel computational, predictive models of pathogen transmission and the evolution and human adaptation of viral sequences.
2. Designing new automated methods for mechanistically-guided drug repurposing and redesign.
3. Integrating them with advanced, organoid models of viral infection.

Developing interventions that ethically address the concerns of the public. In this manner, the PPP will address an important, urgent, and unmet need in pandemic forecast and management