EAGER: Protecting University Communities from COVID-19 with Model-based Risk Management

事实证明，新冠肺炎大流行对美国的高等教育界造成了极大的破坏，因为大学正在努力寻找安全有效的方法来保持学生在学业上的进步。这个探索性研究（EAGER）项目的早期概念拨款将调查替代交付机制的风险管理，这些机制将使大学能够安全地重新开放，适当地吸引学生、教师和工作人员，同时保持更广泛的大学社区，包括为校园服务的邻近企业，尽可能免受疾病爆发的影响。该研究将产生与公共卫生相关的操作风险管理和决策领域的新知识，并将协助大学管理人员和公共卫生官员评估风险管理策略，以便在COVID-19大流行期间安全运行。该奖项支持针对大学人口统计和运营情况量身定制的全面的、基于数据的疾病传播模型研究。该研究将产生(1)新的操作风险管理公式，具体考虑参与者行为和大学及周围社区的人口统计数据；(2)对大学社区教育交付的不同战略选择进行调查；(3)将疾病传播的经验和概念模型与该环境中的动态数据相结合的方法。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be highly disruptive to the nation's higher education community, as universities struggle with safe and effective means to maintain students' progress toward their degrees. This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project will investigate risk-management of alternative delivery mechanisms that will enable universities to safely reopen, appropriately engaging students, faculty, and staff, while keeping the broader university community, including the neighboring businesses that serve the campus, as safe as possible from disease outbreaks. The research will generate new knowledge in the area of operational risk management and decision making related to public health and will assist university administrators and public health officials in evaluating risk management strategies to operate safely during the COVID-19 pandemic. This EAGER award supports research on a comprehensive, data-enabled disease spread model tailored specifically to university demographics and operations. The research will yield (1) novel operational risk management formulations that specifically take participant behavior and university and surrounding community demographics into account, (2) investigations into different strategic options for educational delivery in a university community, and (3) methods to integrate empirical and conceptual models of disease spread with dynamic data in this environment.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.