Spring Speaker Series- Ellie Graeden Ph.D., Research Professor with the Georgetown University Center for Global Health Science and Security

Dr. Graeden spent the last decade establishing and leading a private company, Talus Analytics, in designing and building data products to solve challenging problems at the intersection of policy, science, and strategy. She now leads the health intelligence research pillar at the Center, including a team of data scientists, where she uses data architecture and engineering to address challenges in global data sharing for health response and investment.

Global health security sits at the intersection of scientific analysis, the policy and governance environments in which that analysis needs to be applied, and the operational activities required to get done what needs to be done. This work is informed and driven by data – quantitative and qualitative, numeric and textual, structured and unstructured. Building the data integration systems to support and inform that work requires a combination of data engineering, ontology and taxonomy development, and visual communications. Here, I present a series of case studies that describe this work in global health security. From predicting spillover of zoonotic disease to policy-as-data to describe the governance environment in which the outbreak unfolds to the vaccine deployments for vulnerable populations, we have designed and built data integration, analysis, and visualization platforms that have been used to prioritize investments in global health security based on spatial and population risk profiles to defining policy gaps for effective
response to large scale biological attacks to managing outbreak response in hospitals across the US during COVID-19. These case studies provide a narrative around how data from a wide array of domains can be structured, integrated, and used to implement global health. By addressing key issues around data privacy and security policy, we can make sure the data that are needed are available and useful to those who need it when they need it.