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March 12, 2021

Why Data is the Ultimate Weapon in Fighting Infectious Diseases

Matt Derda

This week marked one year since the Covid-19 pandemic shut down most of the world. This global pandemic has turned everything upside down and every single person has been impacted in some form. With any virus outbreak there are major challenges with protecting public health and safety, but there are also significant issues related to data collection and analysis that makes fighting it even more challenging.

This year Trifacta and Google Cloud, along with other industry leaders, will host the Wrangle Summit 2021, virtually of course. This is the first conference dedicated exclusively to data engineering. Drawing on cross-disciplinary principles in software engineering, data science, and business leadership, the event, this event showcases the best and brightest in the modern data engineering community.

One of the highlights of the upcoming Wrangle Summit is the session Why Data is the Ultimate Weapon in Fighting Infectious Diseases. This will be a lighting talk featuring three experts from CDC, Infectious Diseases Data Observatory, and Genomics England who are using data to help combat COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.

Ells Campbell is Computational Biologist at the CDC. Residing in the Laboratory Branch of the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, he leads development of an outbreak response tool called MicrobeTrace. To support COVID-19 response, Ells assists epidemiologists around the country in cleaning, visualizing, and exploring contact network data collected during contact tracing interviews.

Kalynn Kennon joined IDDO in August 2016. As Head of Data Engineering, she is responsible for the development of data standards, the robustness of the curation process, assuring the quality of the data, and the efficiency of the data curation team.

Andrew Coe is a data solutions professional with over 10 years’ experience with data engineering, business intelligence, solution architecture and management. He has worked extensively in the healthcare sector and is currently focused on data pipeline engineering for the Covid-19 Genomic Research Environment.

Register for free for the Wrangle Summit to attend this session.

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