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

事实证明，新冠肺炎疫情对中国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手段来保持学生在攻读学位方面的进步。这个早期概念的探索性研究资助(AGERGE)项目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、教职员工，同时使更广泛的大学社区，包括为校园服务的邻近企业，尽可能安全地免受疾病爆发。这项研究将在与公共卫生相关的操作风险管理和决策领域产生新的知识，并将协助大学管理人员和公共卫生官员评估风险管理战略，以在新冠肺炎大流行期间安全运营。这一热切的奖项支持专门为大学人口统计和运营量身定做的全面、数据启用的疾病传播模型的研究。这项研究将产生(1)专门考虑参与者行为和大学及其周围社区人口统计数据的新颖操作风险管理公式，(2)对大学社区教育交付的不同战略选择进行调查，以及(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。

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.