Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center wins Research!America award

A major research and science organization on Tuesday awarded the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center a public health honor for providing reliable real time data and analysis to help inform national and international responses to COVID-19.

Research!America named the CRC as a recipient of its "Meeting The Moment For Public Health" award. In a statement, the organization that advocates for increased funding for research and science called the CRC "the leading, authoritative source for global COVID-19 epidemiological data for public health policymakers and major news outlets around the world."

"The Coronavirus Resource Center's work has been crucial in informing modeling efforts and control measures," the group said. "By democratizing critical information the team at Johns Hopkins has greatly expanded the usability and application of data."

The CRC has been a continuously updated source of COVID-19 data and expert guidance since the pandemic began. Experts aggregate and analyze the best data available on COVID-19—including cases, testing, and contact tracing—to help the public, policymakers, and healthcare professionals worldwide respond to the pandemic. Professors, students, researchers, and scientists from the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Center for Systems Science and Engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering, the Centers for Civic Impact, the Applied Physics Lab, Johns Hopkins Medicine, and other divisions have worked together to operate the CRC, which is made possible through support from Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

"This women-led, diverse, interdisciplinary team has come together over the past year out of our shared desire to democratize the best public health data available, to help the public and policymakers alike respond to the pandemic," said Lainie Rutkow, a professor in the Bloomberg School of Public Health and senior adviser to President Ronald J. Daniels. "We're honored to receive this award, and bringing the evidence-based research and expertise of Johns Hopkins to bear on this global crisis is a responsibility we are proud to fulfill."

The CRC was created to meet the demand for data about the novel coronavirus, said Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security who leads the CRC's Testing Insights Initiative and is an associate professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "We launched this effort because we knew access to timely and accurate data would be essential for governments, organizations, and individuals to understand how to respond to Covid-19," Nuzzo said. "As the pandemic stretches on into its second year, emerging variant strains of the virus have raised the stakes even higher for controlling the spread of COVID-19. The work of sharing sound, real-time data is more urgent than ever."

The award and others will be presented during Research!America's April 14 virtual Advocacy Awards ceremony. Individuals and other projects are being recognized for displaying "extraordinary ingenuity, expertise, and resolve to the COVID-19 response," according to the group's statement.