The recipients of the 2024 Research Seed Awards - funds that are intended to advance competitive research proposals at Brown - were recently announced. Among the awardees was William C. Goedel, PhD, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health. Through his project, Unlocking Rhode Island’s Pandemic Past, he hopes to identify lessons from the pandemics of the past to inform our responses to the pandemics of future.

Professor Goedel, who joined the Pandemic Center team as an affiliate faculty member this semester, discussed his project, the importance of learning from the past to improve future health outcomes, and the relevance of today’s National Public Health Week theme - Healthy Neighborhoods.

Responses have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Can you describe Unlocking Rhode Island’s Pandemic Past?

The aim of the project is to take advantage of the advances in artificial intelligence to more quickly and efficiently transcribe a century's worth of vital statistics records. With this data, we would be able to identify patterns in deaths in Rhode Island due to infectious diseases and explore waves in mortality data. All of this knowledge, and the insights that it may be able to provide us, have been locked away in the archives. Hopefully, through this project, we’ll be able to uncover a lot of what happened in the past and make connections to what we see today and what we might see in the future. 

How does it work?

All of these vital statistics records are unavailable to the public for quite some time after they are recorded. In Rhode Island, death records become publicly available after 50 years while both birth and marriage records become available 100 years after being recorded. Rhode Island has taken a great step towards making these public records even more available to both researchers and communities by scanning them and making them available online through the State Archives. However, these records are just scanned images, so at present, we’re not able to use them for data analysis on any large scale. We are hoping to train AI systems to recognize patterns in handwritten language so that we can convert these handwritten records to fully digitized data systems that we can use for analysis.

What are some of the potential important takeaways that you are expecting to glean from this project? And how are you planning to use whatever insights you may learn?

One aspect of the project that I’m really excited about is looking at data surrounding the 1918 flu pandemic to get some of the local estimates of mortality in Rhode Island. Once we have this data fully digitized, we can then go in and ask questions about what was happening at the time and how the flu pandemic may have had lasting health impacts. In theory, we will be able to stitch a lot of these datasets together and track health and causes of deaths all over generations of Rhode Islanders. 

We largely want to be able to answer questions about the health consequences of large outbreaks, so that we can then begin to make predictions about what might happen in the next 50 years, following the outbreaks of H1N1, measles, and COVID-19. We also want to be able to look back to before we had many of the medical advances that we are currently benefiting from today. For example, how did earlier populations fare without tools like vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics, when all they had to rely on were interventions like masks and social distancing? We sometimes forget what people from previous generations suffered from – diseases like diphtheria and whooping cough – for instance. So we can use our findings as a communication tool to show the scope of what these infectious disease events used to look like. 

Pandemics don’t really end, we just tend to forget about them. We want to make sure that there is continued acknowledgement of these big waves of infectious diseases and their lasting impacts. 

One of the themes this year for National Public Health Week is Healthy Neighborhoods. Do you anticipate being able to track, geographically, the data that you're finding?

That’s another one of the aspects of the project that I’m most excited about. I’m hopeful that this work will serve as a platform for new collaborations with experts across fields like demography, education, economics, and environmental studies to understand how waves of infectious diseases have impacted whole communities over time. 

It’s important that we understand the history of our communities because nothing happens by accident. The decision-makers of the past made choices that impacted the health of our population and we can now make new decisions to mitigate the harms that may have come from the actions taken decades ago. For example, was there a factory in my neighborhood 20 or more years ago that poisoned the soil in the area? And is there one now? By understanding the way that things came to be, we can understand the way that they are now. Thank you for taking the time to interview me about this project! I’m really excited about it and can’t wait to follow-up with updates.

For more information on this project and other 2024 Research Seed Awardees, please visit the Office of the Vice President for Research’s website.