NSF APPEX serves as a hub for multidisciplinary research to address the complexities of pandemic risk and response. We focus on the “what”, “how”, and “why” of expansion of disease outbreaks from local, isolated cases of infection into truly global threats. 

Our mission includes gathering and supporting new multidisciplinary science Working Groups that are innovating solutions in pandemic science over a natural lifetime of the project (from birth of a new group to sunsetting a group that has achieved everything it can). 

We are excited to announce our first semi-annual competition for new Seed Ideas for Working Groups - hearing from you what new and exciting thing APPEX should be working on next and recruiting new participants to form Working Groups around these seed ideas. This can be something you want to do yourself with our help or an idea you’ve always thought “someone should do”, even if you don’t want that someone to be you.

If you have an exciting idea for how to study pandemic expansion, we want to work with you!

In this call, you will find details on:

• Who can propose a Seed Idea?
• What is the proposal process?
• Where can I propose my Seed Idea to get started?
• What resources does APPEX provide to Selected Working Groups?
• What are the responsibilities of Selected Working Group Members?
• Where can I see what types of project teams APPEX is already supporting?

We are excited to issue this first call and can’t wait to see what you propose!

Who can propose a Seed Idea?

Anyone interested in serious Pandemic Science can propose a Seed Idea. Proposers could be students, professors, members of the general public, employees at government agencies or labs, policy makers, researchers at other Pandemic Science-focused Centers (such as Phase 2 Prediction in Pandemic Preparedness (PIPP) Centers and CDC Outbreak Analytics and Disease Modeling Network (OADMN) centers), and can be based within the US or anywhere in the world.

What is the Process for Proposing a Seed Idea?

APPEX uses the Give and Take Matrix to process Seed Ideas through a multidisciplinary framework. “Give” refers to an idea or a skill set one can give to a particular pandemic related problem; “Take” refers to what one needs (a discipline or resource) to address a particular pandemic related problem. Mismatches in the matrix of givers and takers suggests a gap in collective understanding and therefore indicates fertile opportunities for collaborative discovery. (To learn more about a generic Give and Take Matrix, you can CLICK HERE, but note that our process is about ideas rather than team roles)

Give and Take in Practice for APPEX Seed Idea Proposals: The person proposing the Seed Idea is the one who “Takes” by writing down a list of disciplines or discipline-based contributions they think are needed to tackle the question. (Proposers can have a person already in mind to contribute this to the team, or can just explain what disciplinary contributions they need, and why they think they need them, and APPEX can help find people interested in filling those roles.) Folks who “Give” are then all the other people who read the initially proposed idea and think “Ooh, you know what else would help address this question? If you also had someone to do this thing”. That can be someone who does that thing, or just someone who recognizes how including that perspective, expertise, skillset, or dataset could really help make the work better.

How it works and how to participate:

Step #1 - To Give an idea please follow this link where you will be invited to:

1. Describe your idea
2. Describe the “Take” by naming disciplinary and or stakeholder expertise that you think would be needed to create solutions for the pandemic related problem you have given. If you have someone in mind who could fill that role, so much the better! You can check in with the person or nominate them and we will reach out to them - self-nominations are fantastic! (You should also feel free to browse among the listed APPEX membership but nominations don’t have to be affiliated in any way.)
3. Offer any other resources or information for others to consider, such as articles, websites, videos, web posts, podcasts in considering your idea.
4. Identify deliverables for the idea which can be products such as academic publications, generation of novel hypotheses or tools, policy/white papers shared to the public, patents, grants secured, requests for input from stakeholders, etc
5. Check back regularly to see what others suggest about your idea during the peer contribution process.

Step #2 - 

1. The “peer contribution” process involves engagement in the Give and Take Matrix process by viewing and considering the seed ideas and “giving”  what they can to stated ‘Takes” identified for the idea, including ideas for deliverables
   1. Anyone at all can contribute to this conversation, whether or not they want to be involved in the proposed Working Group itself
   2. Proposers are encouraged to have back-and-forth conversations with individuals as part of this phase

Step #3 -

1. The proposer of the Seed Idea refines the idea based on the peer contribution and articulates a vision for the Working Group in a short form (of the same format as the initial proposal, but now also including a proposed list of disciplines and members).

Step #4 - 

1. The APPEX selection committee reviews the seed ideas and associated matrices and establishes working groups based on the following criteria:
   1. Novelty and challenge
   2. Sufficient interest/commitment from individuals across a diversity of disciplines
   3. Sufficient number of participants who are both Giving and Taking
   4. Potential for both basic scientific advancement and real-world impact and translation

Step #5 -

1. The Working Group convenes (virtually) and rhapsodises about the seed idea. The final decision about the work of the group may or may not be tightly tied to the original seed idea after serious conversation together.
2. After 3 months the working group will be invited to engage in a self-assessment to determine if any adjustments in the working group could be made for team satisfaction and target success.
   1. These adjustments can include consultation with a Consilience Facilitator or Project Manager, discussion with a Research Programmer, and any other expertise in APPEX membership and networks that may be helpful for team success.
3. Also after 3 months, the group will be invited to have a consultation with the Policy and Translation team to discuss any potential trajectories towards impact/policy

(Ongoing Evaluation and Group Life Cycle) -

1. At 6 months (and every 6 months thereafter) the team reflects both through quantitative anonymous voting as well as discussions with members of the EC if the working group should continue for another 6 months.

Resources for Selected Working Groups

Here are some of the resources we provide to our working groups. In addition, each group will be different and we look forward to group requests for individualized support to enable progress and success. To this end, we have some (very modest) funds set aside to address such requests. We will work with each team to try to provide what they need!

Policy and translation training, guidance, and support

• Support to identify policy-relevant research directions 
• Training  and guidance to prepare researchers for effective policy engagement
• Support to collaborating team to create and implement policy engagement strategies when project maturity allows 

Post-Doctoral Support (forthcoming as we hire people into these positions)

• Contribute to experimental design and data analysis
• Lead specific research sub-projects
• Assist in grant proposal writing and publication preparation
• Mentor graduate students and undergraduate researchers

Technical Support

• Digital collaboration platform ClickUp support 
• Zoom AI transcription and use for team meeting notes
• Computational support for execution of any simulations/models produced by the working group

Team Consilience Support

• Team Charter Template
• Team Dictionary Template
• Consilience facilitation tool library
• Consilience facilitation and coaching at kick off and as needed

Other support

• Travel
• Materials

Responsibilities of Selected Working Group Members

All selected Working Groups will receive funds to meet (at least) once per year in-person at APPEX in Knoxville, TN and team members are expected to try their best to attend this annual meeting.

The Working Group team leader agrees to

• Convene monthly team meetings (APPEX provides administrative scheduling support for this)
• Lead the team through the development of a Team Charter (template provided) to facilitate communication and function
• Oversee the process of Identifying and setting team tasks 
• Monitor asynchronous task progress
• Submit a monthly form to track team progress

The Working Group team members agree to

• Attend and participate in monthly team meetings
• Use the workflow platform ClickUp (provided by APPEX) as a central repository for all team work products and resources
• Participate actively, both individually and collaboratively, in setting and meeting team goals
• Communicate actively within the group and as a member of the broader APPEX community

Every 6 months the team will be invited to consider its progress and satisfaction, potential role changes and needs, and identify barriers and opportunities that impact the team's success. APPEX leadership will work with the team to support appropriate steps made evident in the 6th month check in. (There will also be an optional 3 month self-assessment as well.)

Are there Existing Working Groups I can Look to for Inspiration?

This is our first call for new Working Groups, so we don’t have examples for you just yet BUT we do have two related things that might help. 

Our Phase 1 PIPP Institute: PREEMPT piloted our Give Take Protocol to form its teams. Here are two examples of teams from that earlier work:

Example 1: Project on Zoonotic Pathogens

Are there any combinations of (categories of) features of city landscapes (broadly defined across fields/ descriptors) so overpowering that no additional factors really have any influence on pathogen (re)emergence risks?

Zoonotic pathogens can threaten human well-being, especially in densely populated areas where humans and wildlife frequently come into contact. Observations of concordant global trends of greater pathogen prevalence and disease incidence with urbanization have generated concerns that the risk of pathogen transmission- and thus the likelihood for disease outbreaks- is increasing in part because cities are becoming larger and more populous worldwide. Yet the nature of pathogen transmission risk in urban and urbanizing landscapes remains unclear. Evidence of heterogeneous distributions of pathogens and hosts suggests that associated transmission risk is highly variable within cities. Thus the potential risk of pathogen spillover may also be heterogeneously distributed, with hotspots of outbreak risk localized across urban landscapes. Incidences of outbreaks and spread would constitute conditions where complex, socioecological tipping points have been surpassed. Concordant, geographically explicit comparisons of host and pathogen assemblages (i.e., meta-communities) could elevate understanding of outbreak risk, as pathogen pool diversity and human activities are key factors in predicting pathogen transmission. Combining field surveys with modeling to reveal the scale of host-pathogen-human associations also would help better define transmission risk and shed light on whether proactive measures (e.g., control of host populations, landscape management) can be taken to reduce spillover, and thus provide practical guidance for improving pathogen surveillance programs.

Example 2: Project on Disease Network Predictability

 Can we identify variable tipping points in disease spread intervention strategies conditional on the type, style, and extent of intervention in realistic networks with realistic behavioral feedback and pathogenic evolution?

• At what level of connectivity and redundancy in dynamic heterogeneous graphs does disease carrying capacity become predictable?
• Is there a point at which individual factor interventions (e.g., differences in pathogen etiology, host behavior, etc.) alter that threshold? 
• Diseases are flowing across the population all the time, but most of the time they are innocuous – either because they don’t travel far or because they don’t make you (too) sick. These continuous assaults only become a pandemic tipping point threat when three features coincide: (a) the connectivity of the underlying network is robust enough to allow widespread distribution at whatever (b) infectivity level the bug has, which is (c) itself dangerous.

We want to develop a model for the risk-space associated with these three thresholds. The idea is to build an epidemic simulation over complex realistic networks where we vary (a) the connectivity of the network, (b) the bug evolves on two dimensions: transmissibility and lethality, with the evolution being governed by selective pressures in the network.

The core question is to establish which sorts of control features push back the tipping point from some core baseline

Not only are we proud of those projects, if you look at the initial descriptions of what we planned to do and then compare that to each of the products listed on those team pages, you’ll get a sense of how the working group dynamic went from “seed idea to bring us together” to “oh,  but now that we’re all in the room with a common goal, it changed how we are thinking and we should do this related other thing first!”. That’s what we’re expecting to happen with our APPEX Working Groups too.

The NSF APPEX Center, in addition to forming new Working Groups around proposed Seed Ideas, has about 20 Core Research Project Teams that have formed with specific goals around some of our existing focal research themes that came out of the experiences we had during our Phase 1 Institute. APPEX is just getting started and so are these Core Project Teams, but you can check out some brief initial descriptions of what we’re doing in these teams here!