MIDAS members and collaborators meet once per year at the annual MIDAS meeting. The MIDAS meeting is not a closed meeting, but open to anybody interested. There is no registration fee for the MIDAS meeting, to enable many students, postdocs, and members from low-resource settings to participate. The MCC organizes the annual meeting together with an organizing committee.
The MCC supports MIDAS outreach and training by organizing training workshops or by providing scholarships for MIDAS students to participate in training workshops organized by collaborators. The MCC improves the visibility of MIDAS through online promotion of MIDAS activities (website, social media, newsletter), and through informational booths and materials at conferences, such as the Epidemics Conference. If you have ideas for outreach and training activities relevant to MIDAS, email them to questions@midasnetwork.us.
A scholarship for a MIDAS student to attend the 2019 Clinic on the Meaningful Modeling of Epidemiological Data (MMED) organized by the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis (SACEMA). MMED 2019 was held on May 27 – June 7, 2019 at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Muizenberg, South Africa.
Booth and MIDAS information materials at the 7th International Conference on Infectious Disease Dynamics (“Epidemics7”), on December 3-6, 2019, in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. MCC staff at the booth distributed MIDAS materials to Epidemics participants and signed up new members.
Eighth Annual Conference to Increase Diversity in Mathematical Modeling and Public Health in collaboration with the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics (CCDD) at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, December 9-10, 2019, in Boston, MA. The Diversity Conference aims to improve diversity in MIDAS and infectious disease modeling and creates an opportunity for undergraduate students from underrepresented groups to learn more about infectious disease modeling.
Infectious disease modeling depends on computational resources. The MCC provides cloud-based high-performance computing (HPC) services to MIDAS members at no charge, funded by the US National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). The MCC has partnered with NIH Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) Initiative and Google Cloud Platform to provide discounted computing services to MIDAS. Centralized cloud-based HPC services enable a cost-effective, pay-as-you-go solution to MIDAS computing needs, where the administrative functions are efficiently centralized. Each MIDAS member using HPC gets a personal account for their computing needs, administered and paid for through the central pool of MCC-based MIDAS resources. Members interested in using HPC services can submit a request here.
MIDAS is characterized by interdisciplinary collaboration which depends on strong communication channels and practices. MIDAS researchers often collaborate with public health practitioners, such as outbreak response agencies, or agencies interested in infectious disease forecasting. Collaboration with public health enables translation of MIDAS research into public health practice and societal impact. The MCC supports communication between MIDAS members by maintaining updated contact information on the MIDAS website, mailing lists, and by organizing various training and networking events for the community. The MCC also maintains regular contact with health agencies and connects agencies to MIDAS members and vice versa as needed. In addition, the MCC is working with interested MIDAS members and collaborators to establish a communication protocol for streamlining existing and new collaborations with government agencies interested in using MIDAS models.
MIDAS Coordination Center
University of Pittsburgh
A737 Public Health
130 DeSoto Street
Pittsburgh PA 15261
United States
Tel: +1 412-624-7693
Email: questions@midasnetwork.us
MIDAS Coordination Center
Thank you to NIGMS Grant U24GM132013 for supporting the work at the Coordination Center.
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