Tracking infectious diseases across humans, animals, and the environment—and understanding how they evolve—requires strong epidemiological intelligence (epi-intel). Integrating pathogen genomic data with high-quality contextual information provides high-resolution epi-intel and accelerates research. This approach was used widely during the COVID-19 pandemic, yielding an unprecedented volume of data and a rapid expansion of knowledge. In this talk, I’ll describe our methods for data harmonization and integration, as well as the analytics and visualization tools we built. Through real-world case studies, I’ll show how collaboration can create a more integrated, effective data ecosystem for infectious-disease research.

What you’ll learn in this session: 

• Understand what makes genomic epidemiology a powerful way to study infectious diseases
• Appreciate why sharing of infectious disease epidemiological data is challenging
• Appreciate how de-centralized but interoperable data ecosystem can address both FAIR and CARE Principles