Professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Nina Fefferman became a mathematician because she loves puzzles. She has just received $18 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation to solve a puzzle that has the potential to change the world: how, when and why an infection spreads through a population or causes an epidemic or pandemic rather than extinction.
Fefferman, director of the National Institute for Modeling Biological Systems and deputy director of the UT One Health Initiative at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, has secured funding to open the NSF Center for Analysis and Prediction of Pandemic Expansion (NSF APPEX) in the fall. The multidisciplinary center will focus on identifying the factors that create a “perfect storm” for the spread of infections in the population, as well as ways people can prevent or contain these threats.
“A lot of pandemic research is immunology and virology, work that’s done in medical schools, but those are just two of many pieces that combine to create a pandemic,” said Fefferman, who has worked in pandemic preparedness for 20 years. “Think about it: A very small part of an epidemic is what’s happening inside a person. Public health is about changing the lives of an entire population.”
The individual pieces of this puzzle could include the built environment, economic resources, media, security systems engineering, social networks and surveillance, as well as other areas such as ecology, healthcare, immunology, pharmaceuticals and virology.
“That’s the point of assembling a multidisciplinary team of researchers – to gain a better global understanding of how to interrupt the spread of infection so we can help people before they even get sick,” Fefferman said. “Solving the puzzles that are impossible to solve alone – those are the most fun puzzles. This kind of work allows us to take the blindfolds off each other.”
The seven-year, $18 million grant builds on funding the NSF awarded to Fefferman and her co-principals in 2022. This Phase I grant, Predicting Emergence in Multidisciplinary Pandemic Tipping-points (NSF PREEMPT), brought together researchers from 17 different academic disciplines to collaborate on a common problem and see if they could accelerate scientific progress.
“It was a breakneck pace, but we proved it could be done, and the most valuable outcome is that the outcome was different than if we had all worked exclusively in our own disciplines,” Fefferman said of the 18-month, $1 million project. “I realized, ‘Wow, this is not at all what I would have done.’ It was great to work with people who were excited to do something outside of their home areas.”
This approach is not new to UT, which recognizes the inherent value of creative clashes between disciplines for discovery and problem solving. The university’s commitment to perspectives and partnerships that expand thinking in all directions is the foundation of UT’s five Innovation Gateways, which bring together experts, facilities and resources to address complex challenges.
Fefferman’s proposal for the new center calls for an expansion of NSF PREEMPT’s multidisciplinary research group to include members from government, industry, and nongovernmental organizations in addition to academia. Their primary concern will be identifying the human-caused factors that create ideal conditions for a pandemic to spread. They will limit their considerations to the period after a pathogen emerges and to the ways in which human activities shape and change the environment in which the pathogen either dies out or spreads and wreaks havoc.
Researchers at NSF APPEX will change the way they think about pandemics, moving away from the focus of traditional outbreak investigations on location- and context-dependent factors. Instead, they will use a case-control model widely used in medical research to test hypotheses about the conditions that might be associated with an outbreak. Researchers will work to identify what are called minimally sufficient conditions that lead to an outbreak. For a condition to be considered minimally sufficient, the exclusion of any factor within the condition must change the outcome from outbreak spread to outbreak subsidence.
Fefferman remains principal investigator for NSF APPEX and director of the center. She is joined by co-principal investigators Lydia Bourouiba, a fluid dynamics and mathematical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; K. Selcuk Candan, a computer scientist at Arizona State University; Sadie Ryan, a medical geographer at the University of Florida; and Shelby Wilson, a mathematician at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The project also includes Clinical Associate Professor Elizabeth Strand of UT’s College of Veterinary Medicine, who serves as Consilience Coordinator, and at least 80 other researchers, as well as postdoctoral and graduate students.
I could pinch myself because we are allowed to do this unique and special work that will shape not only pandemic science but also the way we do interdisciplinary science.”
Nina Fefferman, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
NSF APPEX goes beyond research and translates progress into accessible policy recommendations that help inform decision makers, train the next generation of researchers and practitioners as multidisciplinary professionals, and communicate to the public how STEM research helps us understand, prepare for, and even prevent pandemics.
“That’s the problem with public health: If you do it right, the public doesn’t know you’re there,” Fefferman said. “If you do it right, it’s easy to forget you ever needed it in the first place.”
Source:
University of Tennessee at Knoxville
