Pandemics project prize categories
This post outlines the prize categories for the Project Phase of the May 2024 Biosecurity Fundamentals: Pandemics Course. To help you generate project ideas, we have suggested five categories to focus on:
- Simple explainers
- Novel research (qualitative)
- Novel research (quantitative)
- COVID-19 analysis
- Build a thing
In each category, we are offering a prize of £200 for the best project and £50 for the runner up.
These prizes are intended to celebrate great achievements, highlight exceptional work, and incentivise working on important parts of problems. We have provided more information about the project evaluation criteria here.
Simple explainers
Prizes: Winner £200//Runner up £50
What? A blogpost, interview, graphic[1] or video that clearly explains a concept or technology in biosecurity or pandemic preparedness.
Why? There is a lot of good research out there that is jargon-heavy and difficult to understand[2]. By distilling this information into a simple explainer, you will improve your own understanding of the topic, as well as helping others who want to learn about it.
Examples:
- My colleague Adam has written a blog post explaining the CRISPR-based diagnostic technologies SHERLOCK and DETECTR.[3]
- What was the RECOVERY trial, and how could we replicate this model for future pandemics?
Novel research (qualitative)
Prizes: Winner £200//Runner up £50
What? A blogpost or interview that aims to answer a novel question in biosecurity or pandemic preparedness.
Why? Pandemic preparedness is a very broad field, and there are many questions which haven’t even been asked, let alone answered. Remember, novel research doesn’t need to be groundbreaking! It could just come from asking a very specific question or using your existing experience from a different field.
Examples:
- What can we learn from financial regulations for DNA synthesis screening?
- LAMP was invented over 25 years ago, and supposedly has a range of advantages over PCR. Why is it so rarely used?
- Chris Rodriguez’s prizewinning project from the October 2023 Pandemics Course: Could we inject large language models with disinformation to stop them being used for biological terrorism?
Novel research (quantitative)
Prizes: Winner £200//Runner up £50
What? Epidemiological modelling, cost-benefit or some other kind of quantitative analysis that aims to answer a novel question in biosecurity or pandemic preparedness. We recommend only doing this type of project if you already have relevant experience for the type of quantitative analysis you are doing.
Why? Pandemic preparedness is a very broad field, and there are many questions which haven’t even been asked, let alone answered. Remember, novel research doesn’t need to be groundbreaking! It could just come from asking a very specific question or using your existing experience from a different field.
Examples:
- How many metagenomic sequencing “sentinel sites” would we need to detect ~all pandemic outbreaks globally within 48 hours?[4]
- A cost-benefit analysis of installing a Corsi-Rosenthal box in every office in [specific country].
COVID-19 analysis
Prizes: Winner £200//Runner up £50
What? A simple explainer or piece of novel research focussed on learning lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Why? We’ve had a warning shot of what a severe pandemic looks like in our globalised modern world, and how prepared we currently are to deal with it. There is a huge amount of data out there, and way more we should be learning from this.
Examples:
- Country-by-country comparison of government communication strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- How did different countries support wages during the COVID-19 pandemic? Similar to this explainer from Institute for Government.
- What can we learn from Operation Warp Speed and how could we apply this to other diseases? Similar to this article from Institute for Progress.
Build a thing
Prizes: Winner £200//Runner up £50
What? Build an interactive tool or physical product which is relevant for biosecurity or pandemic preparedness.
Why? Biosecurity needs more entrepreneurs! Prototyping and iterating a product is a great way to start developing this skill
Examples:
- Build your own Corsi-Rosenthal box and run tests on it, experimenting with different designs to see how they affect air quality.
- Build an interactive tool, similar to the Czech COVID simulator which helps people to learn about a specific aspect of pandemic preparedness.
Other exceptional projects
Prizes: We may offer discretionary prizes to projects that fall outside the previous five categories.
Why? Excellence often doesn’t fit into nice boxes. This prize recognises outstanding projects that don’t fit into the other prize categories we’ve defined. If you've got a great idea then go for it!
The guidelines above describe of how we currently intend to judge the projects, but the exact criteria may change. All prizes will be awarded at the discretion of the BlueDot Impact team. We reserve the right to not award a prize in a certain category if none of the submissions meet the requisite quality bar.
Footnotes
Biorender is a great tool for making biological visualisations.
You may have found this yourself with some of the resources in the course. As course designers, we frequently found it frustrating that there wasn’t anything better-written on a specific topic.
This took him roughly 4 hours (2 hours of research, 2 hours of writing). Although he is a speedy writer, we would expect you to produce at least double this output over the course of 20 hours in the Project Phase.
You could produce multiple explainers of this length, or one explainer that goes into more detail.
This project may benefit from a narrower scope initially, such as focussing on a specific city or country.