Lauren Gardner

About

Lauren Gardner is the Alton and Sandra Cleveland Professor in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where she also holds a joint appointment in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is a member of the Data Science and AI Institute. Gardner specializes in modeling infectious disease risk, focusing on virus diffusion as a function of climate, land use, human behavior, mobility, and other contributing risk factors. She leads COVID-19 modeling efforts in partnership with U.S. cities to develop customized models for estimating local COVID-19 risk and optimizing resource allocation for surveillance and targeted testing. Her group contributes weekly COVID-19 case and death predictions to the CDC’s ensemble forecast through the COVID-19 Forecast Hub.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Econometrics
• Business
• Artificial Intelligence
• Economics
• Geography
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Association between mobility patterns and COVID-19 transmission in the USA: a mathematical modelling study

  The Lancet Infectious Diseases · 2020 · 923 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Evaluation of individual and ensemble probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the United States

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 311 citations

  Short-term probabilistic forecasts of the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States have served as a visible and important communication channel between the scientific modeling community and both the general public and decision-makers. Forecasting models provide specific, quantitative, and evaluable predictions that inform short-term decisions such as healthcare staffing needs, school closures, and allocation of medical supplies. Starting in April 2020, the US COVID-19 Forecast Hu…

  DOI

• The Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering COVID-19 Dashboard: data collection process, challenges faced, and lessons learned

  The Lancet Infectious Diseases · 2022 · 284 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• The United States COVID-19 Forecast Hub dataset

  Scientific Data · 2022 · 126 citations

  Academic researchers, government agencies, industry groups, and individuals have produced forecasts at an unprecedented scale during the COVID-19 pandemic. To leverage these forecasts, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) partnered with an academic research lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to create the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub. Launched in April 2020, the Forecast Hub is a dataset with point and probabilistic forecasts of incident cases, incident hosp…

  DOI

• Evaluation of individual and ensemble probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the US

  medRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2021 · 77 citations

  Abstract Short-term probabilistic forecasts of the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States have served as a visible and important communication channel between the scientific modeling community and both the general public and decision-makers. Forecasting models provide specific, quantitative, and evaluable predictions that inform short-term decisions such as healthcare staffing needs, school closures, and allocation of medical supplies. Starting in April 2020, the US COVID-19 Fo…

  DOI

Recent grants

• RAISE: IHBEM: Modeling Dynamic Disease-Behavior Feedbacks for Improved Epidemic Prediction and Response

  NSF · $1000k · 2022–2026

• RAPID: Development of an Interactive Web-based Dashboard to Track COVID-19 in Real-time

  NSF · $200k · 2020–2022

• RAPID: Real-time Forecasting of COVID-19 risk in the USA

  NSF · $200k · 2021–2022

Frequent coauthors

• S. Travis Waller

  44 shared

• Raja Jurdak

  36 shared

• Moritz U. G. Kraemer

  University of Oxford

  31 shared

• Jessica Liebig

  Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

  24 shared

• Ahmad El Shoghri

  CSIRO Health and Biosecurity

  20 shared

• Hamada S. Badr

  Johns Hopkins University

  20 shared

• Sahotra Sarkar

  Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

  17 shared

• Benjamin F. Zaitchik

  Planetary Science Institute

  17 shared

Awards & honors

• 2024 Merck Future Insight Prize
• 2022 Lasker~Bloomberg Public Service Award
• WITI's Women in Technology Hall of Fame (2024)
• BBC’s 100 Women List 2020: Women who led change
• Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business (2020)

Similar researchers at Johns Hopkins University

• Somnath Ghoshh-62
• Michael Shieldsh-45
• James Guesth-37