SCC-PG: Toward Disease-Resistant School Communities by Reinventing the Interfaces among Built Environments, Occupants, and Microbiomes

学校是连接社区组成群体的枢纽。学校的这一性质，加上弱势群体高度集中，使学校成为病原体传播的温床。除了令人震惊的死亡人数和医疗系统的负担外，季节性流感和冠状病毒病2019(新冠肺炎)等传染病还导致学校长时间反复停课，造成社区教育和生产力的巨大损失。迫切需要为学校和相互关联的社区建设抵御疾病的复原力。该项目充分利用了美国国家科学基金会的大创意“利用数据革命”，并提出了一种变革性的范式--“抗病学校社区”。智能技术将被创造出来，以重塑学校环境、居住者和微生物之间的相互作用，以控制病原体传播和降低感染风险。此外，利益攸关方将参与制定管理战略，使学校更健康、更智能、更安全、更可持续地促进教育和社区福祉。如果成功，该项目可以增强全国5500万K-12学生和700万成年人使用的13万所公立和私立学校抵御传染病的能力，减少学校关闭所造成的巨大社会成本，并显著改善公共卫生和经济繁荣。此外，该项目还将通过让社区利益相关者参与研究来提高公众的科学素养，并提高社区对预防疾病传播的有效做法的认识。这项规划拨款的最终目标是开发智能技术，以模拟和监测学校社区中环境-居住者-微生物群的相互作用，并为学校管理利用前所未有的信息，以降低传播传染病的风险。该项目将探索：1)基于微生物群定植和演替预测的抗病设计；2)基于监测环境、居住者和微生物群之间相互作用的抗病行动；以及3)基于智能和互联信息学的更有效的卫生实践和干预措施，以减少疾病传播。通过将微生物污染模式和传播途径与可量化的设计属性和可控的操作范式联系起来，本研究将为减少学校病原体暴露的参数设计和操作控制奠定计算基础。将确定不同利益攸关方之间的信息需求和有效的信息交流场所，为相关的决策和行动开发智能接口，以减少污染和传播风险。该项目还将带来一种新颖的社区参与模式，通过该模式，学生、教师、学校管理人员、家长、医疗保健提供者、科学家和工程师都将参与智能技术的开发和新知识的发现，以建立以公民为中心的生活实验室，用于创意生成、数据收集、原型验证和解决方案评估。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Schools are hubs connecting the constituent groups of communities. This very nature of schools combined with the high concentration of vulnerable populations make schools hotbeds for the transmission of pathogens. In addition to the staggering death toll and burden on healthcare systems, infectious diseases such as seasonal flu and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) also lead to prolonged and repeated school closures, causing massive loss of education and productivity in communities. There is an urgent and critical need to build resilience for schools and connected communities against diseases. This project leverages the NSF big idea “Harnessing the Data Revolution” and proposes a transformative paradigm “Disease-Resistant School Communities”. Intelligent technologies will be created to reinvent the interactions among school environments, occupants, and microbiomes to control pathogen transmissions and reduce infection risks. In addition, stakeholders will be engaged to develop management strategies to make schools healthier, smarter, safer, and more sustainable for education and community well-being. If successful, this project could enhance the resilience of the 130,000 public and private schools used by 55 million K-12 students and 7 million adults in the nation against infectious diseases, reduce the enormous societal costs that would result from school closures, and significantly improve public health and economic prosperity. In addition, this project will also improve public scientific literacy by engaging community stakeholders in research, and raise community awareness for effective practices to prevent disease transmission.The ultimate goal of this planning grant is to develop intelligent technologies to model and monitor the environment-occupant-microbiome interactions in school communities, and exploit the unprecedented information for school management to reduce the risks of spreading infectious diseases. This project will explore: 1) disease-resistant designs based on the prediction of microbiome colonization and succession; 2) disease-resistant operations based on the monitoring of interactions among environments, occupants, and microbiomes; and 3) more effective hygiene practices and interventions to reduce disease transmission based on smart and connected informatics. By linking the microbial contamination patterns and transmission pathways with quantifiable design attributes and controllable operation paradigms, this research will lay a computational foundation for parametric design and operation control for reduced exposure to pathogens in schools. The information needs and effective information communication venues among different stakeholders will be identified to develop smart interfaces for connected decisions and actions to reduce contamination and transmission risks. This project will also lead to a novel community engagement model, through which students, teachers, school administrators, parents, healthcare providers, scientists, and engineers are all involved in the development of intelligent technologies and discovery of new knowledge to establish citizen-centric living laboratories for idea generation, data collection, prototype validation, and solution evaluation.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.