RCSA Responds to COVID-19 Pandemic
April 20, 2020 -- Research Corporation for Science Advancement is engaging its community of scientists to use their skills and knowledge to respond to the global crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. This will be done through two virtual events – one focused on solutions to current and future pandemics, and the other addressing the challenges of online teaching.
This week, about 120 members of the RCSA community – Cottrell Scholars, Scialog Fellows, and Scialog Facilitators – will be engaged in a series of online meetings as part of RCSA’s COVID-19 Initiative: Detecting and Mitigating Epidemics.
In facilitating the initiative, RCSA hopes to spark collaboration and creative thinking, and to provide immediate funding opportunities from RCSA (and possibly from partner organizations) for highly promising research projects directly addressing the current pandemic or future pandemics.
“With the pandemic causing the postponement of this spring’s in-person Scialog conferences, we saw the opportunity to pivot by engaging our communities of scientists in virtual meetings to address the public health crisis,” said RCSA President & CEO Daniel Linzer. “Many of these scientists are excited to put their expertise to work in attacking problems related to the pandemic, and by sharing their ideas with researchers from a range of disciplinary fields we hope that they develop novel and potentially high-impact approaches.”
The virtual meetings will begin with an introduction to the virology of SARS-CoV-2 by two Northwestern University professors in the Department of Molecular Biosciences, Robert Lamb and Curt Horvath. Participants will then meet in small breakout groups to explore research directions that hold promise of discovery. These discussions also have the potential to connect experts in a range of fields with ongoing initiatives to strengthen those teams.
Attendees will include scientists from chemistry, physics, optics, computer and data science, biomedicine, and engineering. Representatives from other science philanthropies will also sit in on the discussions.
“As a hybrid initiative including members of both our Scialog and Cottrell Scholars communities, these meetings have real potential for creative thinking and collaboration,” said Senior Program Director Richard Wiener. “We are eager to see the proposals that come from these discussions and to fast-track some funding to where it can do the most good.”
Beyond the pandemic initiative, RCSA has changed its planned July 2020 Cottrell Scholar Conference from an in-person event in Tucson to an interactive, online conference. The theme of the conference will now be the educational challenges faced by faculty at universities and colleges as they are forced to convert their classes to a virtual format with very little preparation time.
“We believe that the Cottrell Scholar community is uniquely poised to take a leadership role nationally in promoting effective online teaching and learning,” said Senior Program Director Silvia Ronco. “Their advice and materials will be extremely important to others next year and beyond.”
RCSA will fund up to four $25,000 Cottrell Scholar Collaborative projects proposed to address challenges in online education.
