PIPP Phase II: Community Empowering Pandemic Prediction and Prevention from Atoms to Societies (COMPASS)

The Center for Community Empowering Pandemic Prediction and Prevention from Atoms to Societies (COMPASS) center is a partnership among Virginia Tech, Cornell University, Meharry Medical College, the University of Michigan, and the Wake Forest University School of Medicine that seeks to address the challenges and gaps in our understanding of how pathogens may cause pandemics. COMPASS researchers will develop computational and experimental methods relevant to pandemic prediction and prevention and strive to effectively communicate scientific findings to the public.

Computational models will seek to predict the barriers that prevent a pathogen from infecting a new host. In parallel, the center will seek to create new methods for designing tissue-mimetic organoids that will enable detailed investigations of how infections can harm organs while also facilitating the development of new drugs. Additional computational models developed in the center will have the ability to predict how well a pathogen survives in different environments, its potential to spread rapidly, and what disinfection strategies are most effective.

COMPASS activities will tie all scientific endeavors with efforts to effectively communicate pandemic science with non-scientists and policy makers. Development of bidirectional feedback loops between researchers and community members will underlie the research conducted in the center. The center’s inclusivity efforts will lead to increased participation by underrepresented groups in educational and training activities.

By bringing together a diverse set of participants to address a global challenge, the COMPASS Center hopes to achieve a higher level of public acceptance in the knowledge it gains and disseminates.

The COMPASS center seeks to forecast and control future pandemics by addressing the grand challenge of uncovering the genetic, molecular, cellular, and chemical rules of life underlying pathogen-host interactions through community-based and ethically grounded research. COMPASS researchers will create foundation machine learning models that address how a pathogen may lower host barriers to infect a cell, how it persists in the environment, and how drugs that have already been approved may be utilized to treat infections.

In parallel, COMPASS scientists will generate novel organoid systems to serve as robust platforms to study pathogen life cycles and to test therapies. The focus on ethically grounded research will result in COMPASS scientists who can effectively communicate complex research to non-technical audiences, work with vulnerable groups to identify key ethical and equity concerns of pandemic research and use community-academic feedback to uniquely reflect reciprocal knowledge exchange between researchers and the public.

The outcomes of COMPASS foundational research will inform a diverse set of use-inspired research projects across industry, federal agencies, and international organizations, resulting in a robust public-private ecosystem to provide solutions to diverse problems in pandemic science. The COMPASS Center will incorporate robust education and training plans to actively build the next generation of talent for a diverse workforce ready to deal with pandemic threats.

Through multiple innovative approaches, COMPASS will empower varying age groups of future professionals and the public in pandemic science.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.