Advancing education and technology across CPI — highlights from our recent Center-wide working meeting

Last week, the NSF Center for Pandemic Insights (CPI) held a Center-wide education and technology working meeting, hosted at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. Representatives from CPI institutions across the country came together to share progress, align priorities, and deepen collaboration around understanding the pre-emergence phase of pandemics.

We opened with six research talks highlighting CPI’s latest scientific advances and technology developments. Teams also met to discuss new directions for education and community outreach. A major focus of the meeting was collaborative planning across CPI’s field sites. These discussions produced concrete next steps for deployments, from LiDAR scanning of complex cave systems to volatile organic compound (VOC) analyses across diverse species.

This meeting sparked incredible inspiration and momentum for our numerous ongoing research developments. Bringing our multidisciplinary teams together strengthened existing collaborations and sparked new ones, reinforcing how each CPI institution contributes to our mission of advancing scalable approaches to better characterize emerging infectious diseases.