Pandemic Center

Mark Lurie, an infectious disease epidemiologist, is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the International Health Institute at the Brown University School of Public Health.

Lurie's most recent project, Mobility Analysis for Pandemic Prevention Strategies (MAPPS), established a new center at Brown University to predict and prevent the next pandemic by better understanding all aspects of human migration and social interaction. MAPPS aims to catalog existing information about mobility and social interaction, generate new knowledge on how and where people move, developing and testing wearable or cell-phone based devices to measure social interaction and geographical footprints. The data generated by the project will lead to a better understanding of the dynamics of disease transmission, knowledge which will support the Pandemic Center’s aims to mitigate future pandemics by identifying behaviors that facilitate disease spread while also highlighting ways to minimize restrictions on human mobility.