Research and Design of Crisis Readiness and Response

Hard-to-manage outbreaks of infectious disease are emerging more frequently, and the U.S. requires public health systems that protect populations against the adverse social, economic, political, psychological and physical impacts. This project involves planning for a future academic research center that blends the social and biological sciences with community knowledge to understand and to promote epidemic control strategies that affected communities consider appropriate in terms of core values, feasibility, fairness, and health benefits. Public health experts, a range of social scientists, and community stakeholders will together explore the organizing question, “What infrastructure – including financing, organizations, personnel, processes, and practices – supports epidemic interventions that address the social norms, cultural values, language needs, economic realities, local knowledge, and active participation of socially vulnerable populations?” With hard-to-manage outbreaks of infectious disease emerging more frequently, the U.S. requires systems that protect populations against adverse social, economic, political, psychological and physical impacts. This project constitutes planning for an academic research center that partners with community stakeholders to advance the understanding, design, and implementation of human-centered infrastructure at the community/public health interface which supports “socially astute” epidemic management. Socially astute describes those epidemic controls that affected communities consider appropriate in terms of core values, feasibility, evenhandedness, and health benefits. The planning activities posit a synthesis between the social and the biological, between problem-solving experts and those who experience the problem in the contexts of their everyday lives. Combining human-centered systems thinking with a community-based participatory research approach, the project asks, “What infrastructure – including social milieu, financing, organizations, personnel, processes, and practices – underpins epidemic interventions that adequately address the social norms, cultural values, language needs, economic realities, local knowledge, and active participation of socially vulnerable populations?” Objectives for a series of planning workshops and community stakeholder consultations are: (1) develop a systems map for socially astute epidemic management infrastructure, including an over-arching narrative and visual depiction; (2) build a “living document” research agenda to propel the research center; and (3) draft an organizational management plan that addresses the center’s human capital needs, trajectory of fundamental and use-inspired research, operationalization of community collaboration, and the translation of research into curricula, internships, trainings, and briefings. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.