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

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.