From May 8th to June 19th, 2020, over 250 innovators from 21 different countries worked together to develop syndromic surveillance systems that help us better understand the current pandemic and prevent future outbreaks. The New York Academy of Sciences invited solvers from around the world to participate in the challenge for a chance to win a $5,000 USD grand prize. The winning solution, SYNSYS: Tracking COVID-19 created by Esha Datanwala, is a syndromic surveillance system that uses online data to predict outbreaks. Learn more about the winning solution and the solver who designed it.
In the last two decades three new Corinaviruses have jumped from animals to humans – called the spillover effect– causing serious illness and fatalities. Scientists and researchers in various sectors are racing to develop treatments and a vaccine while also investigating fundamental questions about the virus such as the seasonality, full range of symptoms, true fatality rate, viral latency, dose response curve of the viral load, long-term immunity, mutation rate etc.
The lack of Syndromic Surveillance for Coronavirus has grossly exposed the global and local preparedness for pandemics making us vulnerable as well as putting extreme stress on our government, healthcare facilities, medical supply demands and economies.
Challenge
Using available data from the COVID-19 pandemic and/or past outbreaks of SARS and MERS (see below for some suggestions), design an innovative syndromic surveillance system that addresses the need for improved surveillance networks to better understand the threat of future waves of COVID-19 and/or future Coronavirus outbreaks.
Winners
SYNSYS is a syndromic surveillance system designed for the public & private healthcare sectors. This system uses public domain mined data from Google Trends, various social media sites, census data, and satellite data to predict outbreaks, both before they happen and while they’re happening.
The New York Academy of Sciences has been promoting women and girls in science since at least 1877. Those efforts continue today.
Published February 10, 2024
By Nick Fetty
Erminnie Smith
As the world celebrates the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on February 11, The New York Academy of Sciences is proud to reflect on its efforts of making the sciences more accessible for all.
The Academy began admitting women as members in 1877, more than four decades before passage of the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote. Erminnie Adele (Platt) Smith, an ethnologist and geologist, was the Academy’s first female member in 1877.
With funding from the Smithsonian Institution, Smith established herself as a credible anthropologist through her work that examined American Indian ethnology. She published her research findings in Myths of the Iroquois in 1883. Smith founded and served as the inaugural president for the Aesthetic Society, a Jersey City-based organization that promoted “cultivation and education…in literature, science, and art.”
Women Scientists of the 20th Century
Eunice Thomas Miner
Moving into the 20th century, the Academy saw more of its women members making significant scientific contributions in their respective fields. Nobel Laureates Gertrude B. Elion and Barbara McClintock are honorary Academy members from this era.
Eunice Thomas Miner’s impact on the Academy was immense from the moment she became involved in 1932. At that time the Academy’s membership was a mere 300 and its finances were in a state of flux. Miner worked her way up to serve as the Academy’s Executive Director. By the time of her retirement, membership had grown to more than 26,000 worldwide. Miner also played a significant role in procuring the Ziegler-Woolworth Mansion (2 E. 63rd Street), which served as the Academy’s home from 1950 to 2006.
Margaret Mead
The Academy promoted the research of Margaret Mead, who holds the distinction of being one of the 20th century’s most prominent anthropologists. Her fieldwork in Bali utilized both photography and film, which was unprecedented for its time. Mead always had a concern about the place of science in society, contributing to the Academy’s mission of advancing science for the public good.
Women Take the Lead
After becoming the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States, Marie Maynard Daly led innovative research connecting heart attacks and cholesterol. Daly served as a member of the Academy’s Board of Governors in the 1970s, helping to guide the Academy at a time when men outnumbered women nearly 10 to 1 in STEM fields.
Marie Maynard Daly
Charlotte Friend established herself as pioneer in cancer research decades before becoming substantially involved with the Academy. Alongside fellow female scientist, Cecily Selby, the duo was among the first to link viruses and cancer. She briefly served as Chair of the Fellowship and Honorary Life Membership committee for the Academy, before becoming the Academy’s first female president in 1978.
Under Friend’s leadership. the Academy hosted the Women in Science and Engineering Conference in 1972. Organized on the heels of the affirmative action ruling, the conference focused on women pursuing studies and careers in STEM fields, which remains an emphasis at the Academy today.
Continuing a Proud Legacy
Brooke Grindlinger, PhD, the Academy’s Chief Scientific Officer, recently wrote in the Washington Post about parallels between the popular 2023 Barbie movie and gender equity.
Charlotte Friend
“As a former Barbie doll aficionado, I see a future in which the screen portrayal of diverse women in STEM careers is the norm, breaking free from stereotypical depictions,” wrote Dr. Grindlinger. “STEM characters in ‘Barbie’ could catalyze a transformative shift, urging society to embrace a reality in which life imitates art.”
The Academy continues to promote girls and women in its current programming. Sixty percent of Junior Academy program participants identify as young women, and 60 percent of Team Leads within the program identify as young women. Surveys conducted by the Academy have found a nearly 50/50 split of female-identifying and male-identifying attendees during Academy-sponsored conferences.
This year’s observance of International Day of Women and Girls in Science serves as a potent reminder of the Academy’s ongoing commitment to its founding principles to enhance access to science for all.
There is hardly a nation on Earth that experiences more earthquakes than Japan. The country’s response to a 7.6 magnitude earthquake on January 1, 2024, demonstrated that advance preparation and investment across government, research institutions, industry, and local communities are key to saving lives and preventing severe damage. What are disaster researchers learning from Japan’s culture of preparedness to better reduce risk in other regions and countries?
Japan was not always known for seismic preparedness. The country learned hard lessons in the aftermath of a 1995 earthquake that struck near Kobe, resulting in the deaths of more than 6,000 people and knock-on effects leaving 300,000 people homeless. In the years since, a shift towards preparation has played a key role in mitigating major disasters.
By attending this live panel discussion, you will:
Learn about the role of science and engineering in the Japanese earthquake preparedness and response model;
Hear about scientific contributions to preparation efforts in Japan and around the globe;
Gain insights into different approaches – what has been effective and what has not;
Learn how scientists and policymakers can work together to mitigate future disasters.
Join author Reid Hoffman and the Academy’s CEO Nicholas B. Dirks for a discussion about the potential of AI, especially the powerful Large Language Models like GPT-4, in shaping the future of education, business, and creativity—and Hoffman’s new book, Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI.
Through this interactive exploration, readers witness a compelling vision of the future, where AI becomes not a threat but a transformative partner, unlocking the full potential of humanity. Impromptu is an invitation to join the conversation on shaping our collaborative journey into an AI-powered destiny. Explore solutions, navigate uncertainties, and contribute to the evolving narrative of humanity’s partnership with GPT-4.
Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn, co-founder of Inflection AI, and a partner at Greylock. He currently serves on the boards of companies such as Aurora, Coda, Convoy, Entrepreneur First, Joby, Microsoft, Nauto, and Neeva. He also serves on nonprofit boards, such as Kiva, Endeavor, CZI Biohub, New America, Berggruen Institute, Opportunity@Work, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, the MacArthur Foundation’s Lever for Change, and The New York Academy of Sciences.
He is the host of the podcasts Masters of Scale and Possible. He is the co-author of four best-selling books: The Startup of You, The Alliance, Blitzscaling, and Masters of Scale. He earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar and a bachelor’s degree with distinction in symbolic systems from Stanford University.
The book details Nicholas B. Dirks’ years in leadership roles at Columbia and Berkeley during an era of vast changes in the culture of academia.
Published February 01, 2024
By Nick Fetty
Nicholas B. Dirks, President and CEO of The New York Academy of Sciences, reflects on the challenges he encountered and the lessons he learned during his long career in university leadership, from being chair of the Anthropology department at Columbia, to his time as EVP and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences also at Columbia, and then as chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, in a newly published book.
A distinguished historian and anthropologist and an accomplished academic administrator, Dirks offers a frank assessment of some of the challenges facing higher education. In a recent TIME Ideas column, Dirks wrote “There are far too many examples of the failure of universities over the past decade to defend academic freedom when it goes against conventional wisdom on campus.” The attempted canceling of provocative guest speakers such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Bill Maher, and Ann Coulter are several examples that occurred during Dirks’ stint as the leader of the Berkeley campus.
In addition to leading The New York Academy of Sciences, a position he has held since 2020, Dirks continues to serve as a professor of history in the Graduate School at UC Berkeley and is the Franz Boas Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Columbia. Dirks has published major works on the history of the state in early modern South Asia, the colonial history of the caste system, the significance of the Indian empire for modern Britain, on social and cultural theory, and on debates in historiography. He has been a lifelong advocate of the liberal arts, interdisciplinary studies, and India. In the face of multiple challenges and changes, however, Dirks asserts that universities must “reinvent themselves” to remain relevant.
“[W]e also need to really rethink some of the legitimate concerns people have about how we [in higher education] conduct ourselves at every level—cost, administrative bloat, disciplinary silos, relevance, enacting academic freedom and free speech—across the board,” Dirks said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed. “All of those things have to be done in order to regain [public] trust.”
And yet, his new book extends remarks he made some years ago, that “The time has come to defend the university vigorously, even as we insist on seeking to open it up further: to new ideas, to even more vigorous debate, to more students who have never had the opportunity for advanced education, to engagement with the world, and to the public more generally for whom the idea that college is a public good needs stressing and demonstrating today more than ever.”
Chile Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María Computer Science
In my work, it is difficult to access certain essential data. We need something like the ISR to help us with that, and for scientists to better learn from reach other regardless of their geographic location.
Brazil Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Mathematics
The ISR offers a way for scientists to come together and brainstorm on a model and the tools you will need. Like in our regular research, this is an opportunity for us to use our research tools and our knowledge — but to directly help society.
Turkey Hydropolitics Association (HPA) Ankara & Akdeniz University Climate Science
We are scientists. We have no nations. It is crucial for us to collaborate across international borders, through organizations like the International Science Reserve. My hope is that the global scientific community will be able to solve some issues that cannot be solved on a national level.
Trinidad and Tobago Department of Geography The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Behavioral Science
I observed how the 2007 earthquake off the coast of Martinique changed people’s perceptions in Barbados towards earthquakes. Then, I thought about natural disasters like hurricanes and wildfires that people know are coming and wanted to find out more about why populations act or do not act. By participating in the first ISR readiness exercise, I could see the usability of my work and its impact on a real-life situation — a phenomenal feeling.
I was impressed by the inclusive way that the ISR opened its first readiness exercise. The issue of air quality in public health, as part of crisis preparation, is very important and yet understudied in my country. I couldn’t pass up submitting a proposal.
