The University of Wyoming has been chosen as one of a few institutions to conduct vital research on future pandemic preparedness.
The COVID-19 Pandemic in many ways brought to light a collectively dated understanding of pandemics. The research project was enacted by the National Science Foundation to help better understand and navigate future diseases.
In a highly selective process, the NSF selected UW’s $1 million research proposal among roughly eight others.
UW’s proposed research will span across three countries, the US, Sweden, and Norway, and integrate economic models alongside biological and mathematical ones to better understand human responses to an event as jarring as a pandemic.
David Finnoff, a key player in the research initiative, is the Wyoming Excellence Chair in Economics and McMurry Fellow in UW’s Department of Economics.
“Our team’s work digs deeper into the blending of economics and natural sciences to gain a better understanding of the behavioral underpinnings on how people react to unfamiliar risks like those posed by pandemics, epidemics, and public health policies that might be rolled out,” Finnoff said.
The project will draw on real world data, including from the COVID-19 Pandemic, as well as controlled data. Real world data will examine how people reacted, how those reactions contributed to the spread of disease, and what these factors reveal about creating models for future pandemics.
Linda Thunstrom, a fellow economics faculty member and researcher, explained that the team is “an international and interdisciplinary” one, which brings a heightened level of expertise and knowledge to the research that will be conducted over roughly the next three years.
“All team members have unique expertise that is essential to the quality of the project and in some constellations, we have all previously successfully worked together on research that lays the foundation of the current project,” she said. “Although many of us are economists at UW, our team also has mathematicians, psychologists and sociologists, all of whom are indispensable to the success of the project.”
The success of the research will depend on the accuracy of the team’s models and the production of high quality manuscript publications and presentations. However, in simple terms, both Finnoff and Thunstrom agree the real success will be measured in the simple terms of helping to better navigate future pandemics and emotional responses to them.
“We intend for the work to provide better information and data to be useful decision support for policy makers, businesses, and individuals on how best to prepare and eventually respond to future epidemic and pandemic risks,” Finnoff said in closing.
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