The WHO has identified scientific misinformation as a public health crisis, calling it an “infodemic.” Social media allows misinformation to spread quickly and out-compete scientifically grounded information. Dear Pandemic is an innovative, multidisciplinary, social media-based science communication project led by women scientists across several institutions around the US and the UK. The mission is to educate and empower individuals to successfully navigate the overwhelming amount of information. The goals are: 1) To disseminate trustworthy, comprehensive, and timely scientific content about the pandemic to lay audiences, and 2) To promote media and health literacy, equipping readers to better manage the COVID-19 infodemic within their own networks. More than one year after launch, the project has a combined monthly reach of > 5 million people across 4 social media channels (2 Facebook pages in English and Spanish; Instagram; and Twitter).

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The impact of an outage, congestion, hijacking, and many other Internet phenomena depends on how many users or how much traffic use the route, but researchers lack visibility into how important routes are, and, distressingly, seem to have lost hope of obtaining this information without proprietary datasets or privileged viewpoints. We believe that there is hope – new measurement methods and changes in Internet structure make it possible to construct an “Internet Traffic Map” identifying the locations (logical and perhaps geographical) of Internet users and major services, the paths between users and major services, and the relative activity levels (traffic, queries, or number of users) routed along these paths. We will construct this map. The realization of an Internet Traffic Map will be an Internet-scale effort that will have Internet-scale consequences that reach far beyond the research community.

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The pandemic brought with it a range of tools for virtual collaboration. In 2020, the Brown Institute space was taken offline and our events were virtual. The affordances of virtual platforms, and in particular the highly-programmable ohyay.co, quickly became obvious — people participated in events who ordinarily would not, either as presenters or as audience members, and scriptable interactions helped boost the depth of involvement in our discussions. As we begin returning to in-person events, we would like to hold onto the best properties of a virtual environment. Our proposal is for the development of a “multi-modal” Extension to the Brown Institute space. This will be a series of interventions both in ohyay.co as well as in the physical Brown Institute. Partnering with the original architect and with engineers from ohyay.co, the Brown Institute Extension will be a space for unique collaboration. The Extension will support and enhance our programming in the technical tools of journalism, including data+computation, data visualization, AR/VR, machine learning, natural language processing… and the list goes on. We hope to find an intern with an interest in HCI and computation to help us design and program our Extension.

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Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) is highly associated with antibiotic exposure, but it is uncertain which classes of antibiotics confer the greatest risk for CDI. This project will use the MarketScan database, a large commercial insurance billing database containing 40 million patient records, outpatient antibiotic prescription data, and ICD-based disease information, to test for associations between specific antibiotic classes and risk for CDI.

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Immune checkpoint blockade therapy has shown successful clinical outcomes in the treatment of various solid tumors such as head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), melanoma, non- small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and others. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors work best in patients who exhibit certain tumor biomarkers. In a collaboration with the Department of Hematology Oncology, the Department of Systems Biology, and the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University we aim to identify biomarkers which are associated with treatment outcome in patients with solid tumors who underwent immunotherapy. The project includes bioinformatic analysis of sequencing data. Mentoring and training will be provided.

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There are 2 projects under consideration- the first one is well underway.

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