Co-Designing Capabilities for a Robust Pandemic Response

These workshops convened public health decision-makers, modelers, and researchers to envision a future with improved pandemic response, demonstrate means for co-producing research plans to pursue that vision, and inform the design of specific information products using Robust Decision Making methods that could support robust public health decisions in such a future. At the start of this project, we conducted a backcasting exercise with our public health partners, asking them to imagine that it is 2035 and that their agency has successfully managed a pandemic. We also asked them to describe the information and decision-support tools that helped them achieve this happy result. The project team extracted from these stories a list of research priorities. We then conducted a decision-framing workshop focusing on a subset of these priorities, a specific pandemic response decision, and the information our partners would want to address the challenge. The project team then conducted a pilot analysis based on this decision framing and presented proof-of-concept visualizations of the results. We then gathered stakeholders’ opinions about the perceived utility of the analysis and discussed future research agendas.

For more information please visit the workshop summary report.