CONNECT 2021

Adding Faculty CAS hires six with diverse expertise in pandemic research O ne of the most important functions of a land-grant institution such as Oklahoma State University is to conduct research that benefits everyone. For example, our faculty are studying the COVID-19 pandemic with two main goals. First, they are looking for ways to accelerate the end of this pandemic. And second, their work can help to mitigate the effects of the next pandemic —whatever it is and whenever it happens. This work is boosted by the new Stillwater- based Oklahoma Pandemic Center for Innovation and Excellence. According to its website, the OPCIE “was established in October 2020 by Gov. Kevin Stitt to better protect Oklahomans from future pandemics. The loss of Oklahoma lives and economic devastation caused by COVID-19 brought to the forefront the importance of investing in our state’s public health infrastructure, testing capability, research endeavors and commercial partnerships. The OPCIE builds partnerships between public and private entities to bridge the gap between laboratory and clinical practices and creates improved public health responses, incorporating the unique needs of Oklahoma’s rural, urban and tribal communities.” This effort is further enhanced by the addition of six CAS faculty hires over the next year, each with a relevant area of research expertise. “I am very pleased with the outstanding scholars we are adding to the CAS faculty for this effort,” said Dean Glen Krutz. “Our goal is to cultivate an interdisciplinary research community dedicated to critical questions related to infectious disease and endemic/pandemic studies. I’m confident we have found a great group to boost that, and they will collaborate well with the faculty we already have doing great work in such an important area.” The first three hires began this fall. They are Tao Hu, Juwon Hwang and Rebecca Kaplan. Tao Hu joined the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard, where he was a post-doctoral fellow. He utilizes geospatial big data and spatial statistical models to study public health, social inequality, and human activities, including estimating racial segregation of minority groups and disparities in testing site access, exploring human mobility trends across different land uses during the pandemic, and revealing national public opinions via big social media data. He conducted research on public health before COVID- 19 was first discovered in his hometown of Wuhan, China. He was already working at Harvard at that time. But the interest in his work has certainly increased during the pandemic. “The past two years, I have been working on a spatial-temporal data-sharing ​and management platform that helps researchers to access open data, facilitate collaborative ​reproducible, replicable, and generalizable research,” Tao said. “It is very helpful for researchers across the globe to have free access to pandemic- and health-related data. STORY JACOB LONGAN | PHOTOS COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES Tao Hu “It is very helpful for researchers across the globe to have access to pandemic- and health-related data.” TAO HU OSU COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SC I ENCES 3