Happy New Year! With the start of 2025, we thought we’d change things up in the MIDAS weekly email, with the addition of an occasional update message from the Coordination Center Team.
Our group at the University of Pittsburgh was recently renewed by NIGMS to continue operations of the Coordination Center through mid-2029, with the addition of collaborators from the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins University and Cornell. We have ambitious plans for the next few years, including (but not limited to) expanding the volume and range of offerings on our data catalog (currently over 1,600 items), creating new opportunities for community engagement and conducting novel infectious disease modeling research. We’re planning to use this space to provide updates on these efforts as they get off the ground.
We also recently hosted the MIDAS 2024 annual meeting in Silver Spring, MD. Over 130 attendees, including a large contingent of early-career researchers, learned from more than 70 presentations and posters. For our soon-to-begin planning of the 2025 meeting, we will be mixing things up a bit, adding an external planning committee. If you’re interested in helping shape the program or structure of the MIDAS 2025 meeting, please let us know — trainees are welcome and encouraged to participate.
Zooming out a bit, we’re always interested in hearing your thoughts on how we can best support the infectious disease modeling community. If there are data sets that you need, research collaborations you’d like to build, concerns that would benefit from community discussion, or any other suggestions that you might have, please get in touch. You can always submit something in our suggestion box or email us — we’ll see it in either case. We’re always happy to hear from you.
—Harry Hochheiser on behalf of the MIDAS Coordination Center Team
