Welcome to the Mobility Analysis for Pandemic Prevention Strategies (MAPPS) project at Brown University.
Thank you to all who participated in the Fall 2023 MAPPING@Brown research study.
Data collection has concluded, and enrollment is now closed.
We look forward to sharing preliminary findings in the coming months.
MAPPS is funded by a Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention (PIPP) Phase I development grant awarded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Our work focuses on how social mixing and human mobility impact pathogen spread.
Infectious diseases naturally follow the movement of people, and each infection in an epidemic is fundamentally the result of an interaction between individuals in the space they occupy. A more refined understanding of these dynamics can help to mitigate future pandemics, allowing us to target behaviors that facilitate disease spread while minimizing restrictions on human mobility.
Award number: 2154941
[thrusts]
MAPPS has four focus areas, or thrusts.
Click on the titles to learn more.
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We are cataloguing existing mobility and social mixing data sets and optimizing data processing approaches to serve the needs of infectious disease modelers, researchers, and decision-makers.
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We are developing new ways to accurately measure mobility, social mixing, and biometrics using a combination of data collection modalities.
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We are creating flexible computer simulations that can model the spread of infectious pathogens and the impact of public health interventions.
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We are developing ethical frameworks to ensure high standards of consent, privacy, and confidentiality in our work.
MAPPING@Brown
MAPPING@Brown is a proof-of-concept study that operationalizes our learning across the four thrusts - data, device, modeling, and ethics - and is aimed at measuring co-location and social networks at Brown University.
Learn more.
Workshops
MAPPS organizes interdisciplinary workshops aimed at advancing science and ethics and stimulating interdisciplinary contact and team building in the pandemic prevention space. Workshops feature state-of-the-science lectures from subject experts as well as interactive breakout sessions.
Read a summary of our most recent workshop “Privacy and Ethics in Pandemic Data Collection and Processing.” This event was co-hosted by MAPPS and the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) in Providence, RI in January 2023.
[events]
Seminar Series
Our ethos of interdisciplinary and multi-institutional collaboration is furthered through the MAPPS Seminar Series. In this forum we welcome researchers and scientists to present their work in areas such as mobility and network data collection, privacy preservation, digital ethics, and epidemic simulation.
On April 28, 2023, MAPPS hosted a seminar by Bryn Loftness, a PhD student in Complex Systems and Data Science at the University of Vermont. Bryn presented her work pruning Wi-Fi network data at Colorado Mesa University to identify likely COVID-19 transmission pathways. Watch the full talk, titled Spatiotemporal Network Data for Social Connections in a University Setting: Implications for Infectious Disease Mitigation.
Community Engagement
MAPPING@Brown community engagement activities in Fall 2023 included community advisory board (CAB) meetings, informational sessions featuring MAPPS science and technical leads, and student-led recruitment events. Read Corrie Pikul’s News from Brown article to learn more about our community engagement approach.