Focus on Health

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the US food supply network. Supply chains that were very efficient in meeting the needs of restaurants and supermarkets have had a hard time adapting to changing conditions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the US food supply network. Supply chains that were very efficient in meeting the needs of restaurants and supermarkets have had a hard time adapting to changing conditions.

We tried to understand to what extent people coming from a COVID-19-infected environment interact with the built and natural environment. Specifically, we wanted to understand in three dimensions what people touched, how much they touched, and where they went coming out of hospitals and urgent care facilities at the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Our research examines and compares people’s compliance with these measures over time, across diverse national, cultural, and political contexts. Specifically, it focuses on how different value and belief systems influence (non)compliance with containment measures as the pandemic unfolds.

Understanding the structures of the SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins is essential to understanding its biology, its infectiousness, its transmissibility, and how to develop treatments for it. Our project focuses on enabling the process of structure determination for SARS-CoV-2 proteins.

The role of contaminated surfaces (fomites) in community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 has been debated. Our team is sampling high-touch public surfaces during the ongoing pandemic to improve understanding of the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection when the public accesses essential businesses such as grocery stores, pharmacies, and gas stations.

Modeling COVID-19 in the context of optimizing quarantine policy using mobility patterns

We are designing a public health solution for contact tracing built around digital ecosystems. Our current focus is on improving privacy, user-experience, effectiveness, and adoption of digital contact tracing. With so many issues at forefront, the challenge to solve the contact tracing puzzle is manifold.

People’s ability to understand and personalize threats are key in getting them to adopt protective behaviors. COVID-19 presents a serious threat to health. However, unlike threats from other kinds of hazards, the virus does not offer any visible indication of its threat or presence.

We have a detailed transmission model that specifically focuses on the availability of testing strategies and their effect on the containment and spread of COVID-19, which is amenable to the systematic exploration of a wide range of important “what-if” scenarios.