Congratulations to Dr Babak Pourbohloul and Krista English on their recent $500,000 CIHR Operating Grant “An Integrated Real-time Modeling and Surveillance Decision-support Framework to Inform Public Health Emergency Preparedness”! Using mathematical models, this project will allow researchers to understand how quickly an emerging infectious disease (EID) spreads and generate real-time options for policy makers to stop the spread of disease. The research team will also study how this new research becomes the basis for new policy during such an emergency situation. This will ensure the most efficient flow of research to the policy makers for future public health emergencies, focusing on real-time pandemic management options and knowledge translation networks to provide tools to control EIDs in a coordinated and effective way, reducing both the health and economic burden of these diseases.
The BCCDC Foundation is very pleased to have been able to provide seed funding of $10,000 to the team in 2014 to support their work in understanding organizational knowledge exchange networks to conceptualize and improve the efficiency of these networks by using modeling and visualization tools to capture the characteristics of the pathways that facilitate the process of translating research to policy. This work helped them to develop proof-of-concept evidence needed for the CIHR grant. This is exactly what the Foundation’s internal Open Award Program is meant for – catalyzing $10,000 into $500,000 is a wonderful return on our investment in the BCCDC!
