Question: Are you working on any ways to possibly stop a future pandemic if it were to happen again?

Nicole Wheeler answered on 16 Jun 2020:

Hi Eva, great question! I’m working on disease surveillance systems, which can give us an early warning if there’s a spike in disease cases or a new pathogen jumps into humans. My project is focussed on antibiotic-resistant bacteria since these have been a growing problem and this problem may become worse following COVID, because doctors are using a lot of antibiotics to make sure COVID patients don’t get sick with other infections while they’re in the hospital. The tools I’m building can (and hopefully will) be adapted for other diseases though. The surveillance system works by collecting data on people’s travel, health records and doctors’ prescribing, farming practices and use of antibiotics on farms, pathogens and antibiotics in wastewater and the environment, and DNA from bacterial in hospitals, communities, farms and the environment. It pulls all this data together and uses it to model and predict rates of disease and antibiotic resistance into the future, and predicts which changes in laws and human behaviour would have the biggest impact to fight the spread of disease and resistance.