National Science Foundation awards UT $18 million to study human factors in pandemics

Nina Fefferman (Photo from University of Tennessee website) 

The U.S. National Science Foundation recently awarded a research team led by University of Tennessee ecology and evolutionary biology professor Nina Fefferman $18 million to study how infectious diseases can spread to become a pandemic rather than dying out.

According to a university announcement, Fefferman, who also serves as director of the National Institute for Modeling Biological Systems and associate director of the UT One Health Initiative at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is using that funding to launch the NSF Center for Analysis and Prediction of Pandemic Expansion (NSF APPEX) in the fall. She said the new multidisciplinary center will identify factors that create the “perfect storm” for epidemics and pandemics to occur, as well as ways to prevent or mitigate those threats.

“A lot of pandemic research is immunology and virology, work that happens in medical schools, but that’s only two parts among the very many parts that come together to create a pandemic,” she said in the announcement. “Think about it: A very small portion of an epidemic is what is happening inside one person. Public health is about changing the lives of an entire population.”

Fefferman, who has worked in pandemic preparedness for about 20 years, told Tennessee Firefly that the center will focus largely on the human factors that play into the spread of infectious diseases, such as economic resources, media, safety systems engineering, social networks and surveillance. She said issues on these fronts are likely what exacerbated the COVID-19 pandemic in many places, despite significant advancements in immunology and the rapid development of vaccines early on during the pandemic.

“We have seen fantastic work on the microbiology, virology and the immunology [fronts]. We saw vaccines developed so fast for COVID-19 because amazing work has already been done that allowed us to roll out really great vaccines really quickly for a completely novel threat,” she said. “But we really sort of failed at going, ‘How does human understanding, the messaging, the politics, social behavior, immunology, and supply chains all play together in order to really shape whether or not we can be effective in leveraging the scientific knowledge that we have to affect real-world change?’”

Fefferman said the seven-year $18 million grant will build on other funds awarded by the NSF in 2022. That Phase I award, Predicting Emergence in Multidisciplinary Pandemic Tipping-points, or NSF PREEMPT, brought together Fefferman and other researchers from 17 different academic disciplines to collaborate on common problems and see if they could accelerate scientific progress.

“It was great to work with people who were excited to do something outside their native areas,” she said of the 18-month, $1 million project.

According to the announcement, Fefferman’s proposal for the new center will expand the multidisciplinary group of researchers from NSF PREEMPT and add members from government, industry and nongovernmental organizations to those from academia. It said researchers will restrict much of their focus to “the period after the emergence of a pathogen and the ways in which human activities shape and alter the environment in which the pathogen will either die out or spread and cause havoc.”

“Right now, when researchers look at when an outbreak happens, they have a tendency to ask, ‘What are the factors that [contributed] there? And how do we think each of those factors contributed to the creation of that outbreak being threatening?’ But what we don't do yet is look at what isn't there and compare it to other places that maybe had those factors that didn't have an outbreak so that we can differentiate which things created the perfect storm, and what came together to really make that possible,” Fefferman told Tennessee Firefly.

The university announcement said Fefferman will stay on as both the principal investigator for NSF APPEX and director of the center. She will be joined by co-principal investigators Lydia Bourouiba, a fluid and mathematical physicist at 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 involves Clinical Associate Professor Elizabeth Strand of UT’s College of Veterinary Medicine, serving as consilience coordinator, and at least 80 other researchers in addition to postdoctoral staff and graduate students.

“I’m pinching myself that we get to do this unique and special work that will not just shape pandemic science but will shape the way we do multidisciplinary science,” Fefferman said in a public statement.