From the Desk of the MIDAS Director

From the Desk of the MIDAS Director: July 2026 Message

A few reminders and updates as we head toward mid-summer: 

The Coordination Center has two new-ish papers that might be of interest: 

• IDOBE: Infectious Disease Outbreak forecasting Benchmark Ecosystem (link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18521). Led by Coordination team members Srini Venkatramanan and colleagues from University of Virginia, this paper presents a collection of outbreaks extracted from multiple data repositories, along with baseline results.  

• A software platform for collaborative infectious disease modelling (link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44360-026-00145-7). An introduction to the work of the Hubverse (link: https://hubverse.io), this paper presents a suite of software in support of collaborative modeling hubs. Informed by our experience in providing infrastructure support for the Scenario Modeling Hub (link https://scenariomodelinghub.org), the MIDAS Coordination Center has been contributing to the Hubverse since its inception.  

Hot Topics Webinars: Our invitation for folks interested in presenting brief updates on works-in-progress did not receive much in the way of response. If you’re interested in sharing some new exciting work – even if preliminary – please get in touch. 

Travel Awards: Our travel grant program provides partial funding to trainees presenting their work at research conferences. Having received several requests and made some awards, we are trying to determine how best to make fair and effective use of the modest funds that are available. We’re interested in hearing your thoughts – should we fund small grants for more students, or larger grants to fewer? Please let us know what you think.  For more information on the program and to apply, see the description on the MIDAS site (link: https://midasnetwork.us/midas-travel-grant-scholarship/).  

Metadata: We are continuing to work on metadata standards for infectious disease datasets and modeling efforts. We welcome participation of any MIDAS members interested in FAIR-sharing, reproducible modeling, and metadata. 

As always, we’d love to hear from you about these or any other issues.  Please get in touch at questions@midasnetwork.us. 

From the Desk of the MIDAS Director: March 2026 Message

MIDAS Annual Meeting: The MIDAS 2025 annual meeting was held in early November in Bethesda, MD. Although a bit smaller than usual, we had a good showing of participation by early-career MIDAS members, an introduction to the NIAID-funded Multiscale Immune Systems Modeling project at Duke, and an update from the CDC’s Insight Net.

After consultation with the MIDAS Steering Committee and the NIGMS program officer, we have decided to move the annual meeting to the spring. This is a return to previous practice: after many years of spring meetings, and two years of virtual meetings (2020 and 2021), we moved the annual meeting to the fall in 2022, as this was the earliest time that we felt we could safely have an in-person meeting. Since we are only a few months out from the 2025 meeting, we will forego a meeting during 2026 and return with a meeting in spring 2027.

Contact Information: We would like to stay in touch, but we need your help. If your email address or any other details change, please send us an update. To do this, you can search for your entry on our member directory, open your page and click the Request email to Update Your Profile button. If your email has already changed, send us an email at questions@midasnetwork.us and we’ll make the changes.

Hot Topics: We have had a suggestion that MIDAS convene “hot topics” webinars. These webinars might involve a series of short talks on emerging research, particularly involving new techniques or modeling challenges. If you are interested in participating in or helping to organize these webinars, please get in touch.

Trainee Conference Travel Support: We are also working on support for trainees to present research at conferences. We have limited funds available to contribute to travel or registration expenses for presentations at research conferences.

Metadata: Coordination Center staff has been busy working on metadata standards for infectious disease modeling. We are hoping to develop some guidelines describing how infectious disease researchers might use structured metadata to help make data more FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable). As a first step, we have published a description of metadata practices we are using for our data catalog. We’d be happy to hear from MIDAS members who are interested in FAIR data, metadata and other related issues.

Educational Resources: We are also working on curating educational resources, with the goal of providing a catalog of classes, tutorials and other resources aimed at teaching infectious disease modeling techniques. This work is just getting off the ground — we hope to have something public later this year.

If there’s anything else that we in the Coordination Center can do to help with your work, please contact us: leave a message on our suggestion form or email us at questions@midasnetwork.us.

Thanks for your continued support.

From the Desk of the MIDAS Director: June 2025 Message

The MIDAS Coordination Center team continues to be engaged with a range of ongoing activities. On the research side, we are exploring ensembling methods, creating modeling benchmarks, and exploring the use of large language models to extract critical details from infectious disease reports and to summarize details of published modeling papers. Our ongoing data curation and harmonization efforts have added many resources to the MIDAS catalog, and we are working on increasing our coverage of educational resources and software tools. We continue to support the Scenario Modeling Hub, which just released results of its 19th round of COVID-19 projections.

In response to feedback from members, we’ve also taken some steps to build communities of interest. Earlier this month, the first meeting of the MIDAS public health interest group brought together modelers interested in building collaborations with local health agencies. A second meeting is in the works, and we’ll be reaching out to our contacts in the public health world soon as well.

We’re hoping to create other similar groups within the MIDAS community. We have a student network and a Latin American group, and we’re prepared to support many others. If you have an idea for a group, please let us know and we’ll help you get things rolling.

We’re also ready to support other forms of community activities. If you have ideas for workshops, educational offerings, modeling challenges, or anything else that might be of interest to MIDAS members, please let us know. We will try to do what we can to help you make it happen. Of course, we’re always interested in hearing suggestions or requests for data that you might find useful in support of your modeling work.

The common theme of all of these efforts is engagement and feedback. We look to MIDAS members to tell us what would be of most use to our community. Our wonderful Steering Committee provides invaluable perspective, but we still need to hear from you. Please drop us a line — let us know what we can do for you. We’d be happy to discuss, and we’ll do what we can to help.

One final note. We’re still working on planning for MIDAS 2025 in November. Details will be coming soon.

We hope to hear from you soon.

From the Desk of the MIDAS Director: March 2025 Message

As we move into spring, we have a few updates we’d like to share. The Coordination Center is busy with ongoing data curation and support of the Scenario Modeling Hub, as well as our research efforts on metadata models, benchmarks and ensembling techniques.

We’re also working on some community efforts that you might want to know about:

As we’ve heard from many MIDAS members who are interested in working more closely with public health professionals, we’re going to convene a public health interest group where members can discuss strategies and ideally interact with peers working in public health. Please be on the lookout for announcements about the formation of this new group.

The planning for the 2025 MIDAS annual meeting is underway. We’re hoping to have something in September or October, location to be determined. We’re also going to try something new this year — the formation of a scientific program committee. In previous years, all of the schedule planning has been done by the Coordination Center. As this is a community meeting, we’re hoping to bring a broader set of perspectives into the planning practice. If you’re interested in participating in the program committee, please get in touch. Trainees are most welcome to participate! We’d also be interested in hearing any thoughts you might have about timing or location of the meeting, as well as any suggestions for content.

We’re always happy to hear from you with any feedback, comments or questions — please contact questions@midasnetwork.us.

We’re looking forward to hearing from you.