The center will draw from health, engineering, agriculture and social sciences to advance pandemic science for emerging threats.

Preventing the next pandemic begins before diseases emerge. This pre-emergence phase is the focus of a new center funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and led by the University of California, Davis. 

Supported with $18 million over seven years, the U.S. National Science Foundation Center for Pandemic Insights (NSF CPI) includes 11 partnering institutions from across the United States. It aims to harness new technologies and develop sensing to detect, investigate, and ultimately prevent pandemics at their source.

Texas Tech University is one of the partner institutions. Tigga Kingston, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Arts & Sciences, will lead the university’s efforts in the ambitious initiative. Kingston is a world authority on bat ecology and has decades of experience leading projects on bat diversity, conservation and most recently One Health. Her primary contribution to the center will include providing expertise during program development, designing bat ecological research initiatives and training undergraduate students involved in the research.

“I’m excited. I’ve been studying how bat diversity and populations respond to environmental and human stressors for most of my career,” Kingston said. “The integrative, transdisciplinary effort of the center will develop innovative tools that will greatly advance our understanding of these responses, with significant outcomes for both biodiversity conservation and human health.”

Kingston will join meetings focused on center-scale operations as well as research-focused meetings designed to advance the center’s specific scientific goals. She will provide technical input focused on bat and wildlife ecology as well as biosafety practices critical for working with bats in field conditions. She will also support field activities and training by visiting field sites where work with bats is taking place.

Funded through NSF’s Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Preventions (PIPP) program, the center also leverages resources from a number of other partners.

Most pandemics are caused by emerging infectious diseases that originate in wildlife and are detected only after causing outbreaks in humans. The complex nature of infectious diseases limits the ability of scientists to conduct targeted surveillance and gather data at the speed or scale needed to detect pandemic threats. 

Meanwhile, preventing pandemics requires a deep understanding of viruses where they naturally occur. This includes knowledge of disease cycles in wild animal hosts and how these disease cycles interact with people on the landscape. Those interactions occur at the pre-emergence phase of pandemics.

The center’s scientists aim to:

• Study how epidemics cycle in nature, looking at animals that are the natural reservoirs for viruses. They will create models to understand how diseases may spill over before developing into pandemics.
• Create sensor networks that can detect disease cycles in nature.
• Fine-tune insights into pandemic risk using advanced computer programs that mix model predictions with sensor data.

Other partners include the University of Southern California, Northeastern University, Labyrinth Global Health, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, University of California-Los Angeles, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, University of Michigan, UC San Diego, and Colorado State University.