BILL & MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION
The Gates Foundation is funding Project Tycho through the Vaccine Modeling Initative (VMI) at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. The VMI aims to improve public health decisions through the use of data and modeling. The VMI supports the global scope of Project Tycho datasets including the inclusion of dengue datasets from the World Health Organization and eight countries in Southeast Asia as part of version 2.0. The VMI also supports Project Tycho research on transmission patterns of vector-borne diseases in Southeast Asia and Latin America, including a recent study published in PNAS that found a strong relationship between high temperature and synchrony of dengue outbreaks across eight different countries. The Gates Foundation also supported an international consultation in Kuala Lumpur in 2016 where over 40 policy makers and scientists from 10 countries in Southeast Asia joined in a discussion about the association between El Niño and dengue epidemics and the role of computational modeling and data sharing to improve epidemic forecasting.