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The consortium, Strengthening Infectious Disease Detection Systems (STRIDES), includes 15 health organizations operating in more than 50 countries from across the globe, of which the U is the only academic partner in the U.S. As a whole, the STRIDES consortium—led by FHI360—aims to prevent and reduce the severity of serious disease threats worldwide, including epidemics and pandemics.
“The STRIDES project gives the University of Utah the opportunity to help transform the way countries can effectively respond to emerging epidemiological threats,” says Juan Carlos Negrette, the director of the Office of Global Health at the U, which is coordinating the U’s participation in the consortium. “Our role will have a real impact on people’s lives all over the world.”
The group will work at national levels to improve disease detection, optimize data collection and analysis to inform prevention actions, and help provide focused disease monitoring during outbreaks. These advancements are critical to help prevent new and emerging infectious disease threats from spreading widely and rapidly.
Funding received will support researchers in family and preventive medicine, biomedical informatics, human genetics, pathology, and at ARUP as they develop specific research projects to address the goals of the initiative. Research projects will fall within the following areas:
- Making better laboratory tests for accurate disease diagnosis and detection.
- Spotting and characterizing new pathogens as they emerge, evolve, and spread over time. Advanced genome-analysis tools will power these efforts, which are essential to understanding and preventing disease spread.
- Detecting infection at the community level, before outbreaks spread, by developing and implementing wastewater monitoring systems for pathogens.
- Helping people rapidly interpret and respond to disease trends by creating dashboard- and bulletin-type tools that can quickly integrate disease data in understandable ways.
Ramkiran Gouripeddi, MBBS, assistant professor of biomedical informatics, adds that the collaboration is an important avenue for the U’s specialties to make a difference to health worldwide. “STRIDES provides an opportunity for the University of Utah to translate its research output from various domains—including public health, pathology, genomics, and informatics, among others—in an interconnected manner,” Gouripeddi says. “This allows us to address various global challenges at scale, holistically, in a One Health paradigm.”
“We are excited to bring the cutting-edge scholarship that is developed and practiced at the University of Utah to the project,” says Scott Benson, MD, PhD, associate professor of public health and the project lead at the U. “The knowledge, experience, and skills our team brings to the table demonstrate what the university does best. We develop innovative solutions to complex problems, then apply those solutions to health systems for the benefit of communities around the world. As a member of the FHI360 STRIDES consortium, we look forward to expanding the impact of the fantastic work done here at the U to improve the lives of people in diverse parts of the globe.
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Other University of Utah Health researchers involved in this project include:
Edgar Hernandez, PhD, research assistant professor of biomedical informatics
Kathy Sward, PhD, professor of biomedical informatics and nursing
Joselin Hernandez Ruiz, PhD, research associate in human genetics
Windy Tanner, PhD, associate professor of family and preventive medicine
Ben Bradley, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pathology and medical director for High Consequence Pathogen Response at ARUP
Mark Fisher, PhD, assistant professor of pathology and medical director of the Bacteriology, Antimicrobials, Parasitology, and Infectious Disease Rapid Testing laboratories at ARUP
