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

COVID-19大流行已被证明对美国高等教育界具有高度破坏性，因为大学正在努力寻找安全有效的手段来维持学生的学位进度。EARLY概念探索性研究补助金（EAGER）项目将调查替代交付机制的风险管理，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，尽可能安全地免受疾病爆发的影响。 该研究将在公共卫生相关的运营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策略，以便在COVID-19大流行期间安全运营。EAGER奖支持专门针对大学人口统计和运营的全面的数据支持的疾病传播模型的研究。 该研究将产生（1）新的运营风险管理公式，专门考虑参与者的行为和大学和周围社区的人口统计，（2）调查不同的战略选择，在大学社区的教育交付，以及（3）该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，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.