Project Tycho benefits from a world-class research environment in Pittsburgh. We are part of the Public Health Dynamics Laboratory of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. We benefit from collaborations across the University of Pittsburgh, and also with Carnegie Mellon University and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
University of Pittsburgh
Project Tycho is hosted at the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university was founded in 1787 and currently has 4,522 full time faculty, 25,209 undergraduate, and 7,441 graduate students. Project Tycho collaborates with faculty from across the university including the Department of Geology and Environmental Science, the School of Information Sciences, the Department of Statistics, the Department of History, and with the University Honoers College, the University Library, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Dr. Wilbert van Panhuis, a Project Tycho PI, is a member of the University Research Data Management Committee that aims to catalyze data management around the University.
The Graduate School of Public Health is one of six Schools of the Health Sciences and Project Tycho also works with faculty and students from the School of Medicine, the Department of Biomedical Informatics, the Center for Global Health, and the Center for Vaccine Research. In the Graduate School of Public Health, Project Tycho faculty, students, and staff are affiliated with the Departments of Epidemiology, Health Policy and Management, Biostatistics, Behavior and Community Health Sciences, and Infectious Diseases and Microbiology. Project Tycho is alsso part of the Public Health Dynamics Laboratory at the graduate school.
Public Health Dynamics Laboratory
The Public Health Dynamics Laboratory (PHDL) is an interdisciplinary center, directed by Dr. Mark Roberts, at the Graduate School of Public Health focused on the development of computational methods to improve the theory and the practice of global health. The PHDL includes over 40 faculty and staff, including epidemiologists, biostatisticians, behavioral scientists, public health policy experts and computational scientists to produce the next generation of analysis tools for the exploration of critical public health problems.
Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS) Center of Excellence
Project Tycho is a key component of the Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS) Pittsburgh Center of Excellence, funded by the US National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The Pitt MIDAS Center aims to improve public health decision making through information systems and computational models and includes the agent-based simulation platform FRED (Framework for Reproduction of Epidemiological Dynamics) and the Delphi Epidemic Forecasting team at Carnegie Mellon University.
Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI)
in the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine aims to apply informatics to improve biomedical research, clinical care, and global health using innovative methods that include genomic and proteomic data mining, natural language processing, machine learning, and biosurveillance. The Project Tycho team works closely with the Informatics Services Group (ISG) of the MIDAS network and the Apollo project, both housed in DBMI and headed by Dr. Michael Wagner. In partnership with Dr. Wagner and his team, we are improving machine-interpretability of global health data. We are also improving data integration, re-use, and FAIR compliance through development of the MIDAS Digital Commons and are investigating the possibility to automate the composition of epidemic models from available data, funded through a K01 grant from the Department of Computer Science is using public health surveillance data to improve forecasting of disease epidemics with his Delphi research group. FUNNEL algorithm that was published jointly with the Project Tycho team. We also collaborate with Dr. Kevin Zollman in the Department of Philosophy on developing a computational model of disease reporting based on game theory, using an agent-based representation of an incentive network. Dr. Jeremy Avigad, also in Philosophy, is working together with Project Tycho investigators to explore the use of logic-based algorithms for automated global health data integration. One of the CMU doctoral students in Machine Learning, William Herlands, is using Project Tycho data to study Gaussian change surfaces to automatically detect change points in time series data. One of the master students in the Statistics Department under supervision of Dr. Ryan Tybshirani, completed an advanced data analysis class in collaboration with Project Tycho.