CDC Awards $27.5 Million for New Multi-institutional Outbreak Response Network

Northwestern Engineering’s David Morton is a member of a new multi-institutional network that will work with the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics to establish an outbreak response network that uses data to support decision makers during public health emergencies.

Led by the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Northwestern joins one of 13 funded efforts within the network, which is receiving a cumulative $27.5 million grant from the CDC. Northwestern has been awarded $1.7 million in funding.

The national network, composed of both research universities and public health agencies, is the first step toward creating a nationwide resource for outbreak analytics, disease modeling, and forecasting to support more effective response during public health emergencies.

“Each of the grantees will help us move the nation forward in our efforts to better prepare and respond to infectious disease outbreaks that threaten our families and our communities,” said Dylan George, director of the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics. “We are committed to working alongside these outstanding partners to achieve our goal of using data and advanced analytics to support decision-makers at every level of government.”

The network has established three primary goals over the next five years focused on developing tools and methodologies that improve outbreak response integration, innovation, and implementation:

• Support the development of a pipeline of new analytical methods, tools, or platforms for modeling efforts that will ultimately be used to provide information to public health decision makers.
• Take the most promising approaches from the innovation pipeline and pilot test one or two approaches at the state, local, tribal, or territorial level to gauge the success of the technique in practical application by public health decision makers.
• Take pilot projects that have proven successful and scale them for use across jurisdictions.

Morton, professor of industrial engineering and management sciences, will work specifically on developing adaptive warning systems, which are fed by data pipelines of risk indicators, designing staged-alert systems to guide policies, and setting triggers for initiating or modifying interventions. He will also work to optimize mitigation strategies, including developing tools to support the equitable stockpiling and distribution of medical countermeasures and the design of cost effective and equitable nonpharmaceutical interventions.

“This CDC award provides a unique opportunity to work with public health agencies across the US to operationalize our decision-analytic tools from optimization and data science,” Morton said. “By using — and collaboratively advancing — our computer models during routine operations, public health officials and emergency responders will be better equipped to employ these technologies during future crises from infectious disease outbreaks.”

The outbreak response network builds on previous collaborations between Northwestern and partner institutions born out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, Morton was named an external project leader of the UT Center for Pandemic Decision Science, an interdisciplinary center that brought together scientists, engineers, clinicians, and policymakers to tackle the challenge of preparing the world to combat future pandemic threats. Morton is also a member of the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, which in 2021 developed a monitoring system that tracks the number of new daily COVID-19 hospital admissions and triggers changes in guidance when admissions cross specific threshold values.