The PPP DA seeks to move us rapidly towards an aspirational destination: a world where we accurately foresee pandemics and proactively minimize their impact. We seek to address the grand challenge of uncovering the rules of life at the genetic, molecular, cellular, chemical, and social levels that govern the interactions between viruses and their hosts and to discover then through research activities that are grounded in ethics and community.
Across three days in the beautiful Steger Center in Riva San Vitale, the PPP DA has organized the first International Workshop on Pandemic Science with collaborators from across the globe. We have organized the workshop broadly around the four themes of the PPP DA: Jump, Replicate, Spread, and Empower. We have requested our speakers to focus on a high-level discussion of their research, the current challenges that they are addressing, and the top three scientific questions that they believe are important for the research community to answer. Attendees will convene in informal brainstorming sessions and breakout groups to further cogitate on the key topics and research questions that emerged during the presentations and to plan a position paper on pandemic science.
We hope that these three days excite you, stimulate your curiosity, mold your research, and allow you to envision a world of transdisciplinary discovery, learning, and outreach. We expect the breakout groups will result in a detailed outline of a position paper, which attendees will flesh out into a full manuscript over the next few months. Our goal is to have a final version ready for submission in fall 2024. We also hope that attendees will form new collaborations that lead to visits, sabbaticals, collaborative activities, research projects, and proposals!
