Schools are hubs connecting the constituent groups of communities. This very nature of schools combined with the high concentration of vulnerable populations make schools hotbeds for the transmission of pathogens. In addition to the staggering death toll and burden on healthcare systems, infectious diseases such as seasonal flu and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) also lead to prolonged and repeated school closures, causing massive loss of education and productivity in communities. There is an urgent and critical need to build resilience for schools and connected communities against diseases. This project leverages the NSF big idea “Harnessing the Data Revolution” and proposes a transformative paradigm “Disease-Resistant School Communities”. Intelligent technologies will be created to reinvent the interactions among school environments, occupants, and microbiomes to control pathogen transmissions and reduce infection risks. In addition, stakeholders will be engaged to develop management strategies to make schools healthier, smarter, safer, and more sustainable for education and community well-being. If successful, this project could enhance the resilience of the 130,000 public and private schools used by 55 million K-12 students and 7 million adults in the nation against infectious diseases, reduce the enormous societal costs that would result from school closures, and significantly improve public health and economic prosperity. In addition, this project will also improve public scientific literacy by engaging community stakeholders in research, and raise community awareness for effective practices to prevent disease transmission.

The ultimate goal of this planning grant is to develop intelligent technologies to model and monitor the environment-occupant-microbiome interactions in school communities, and exploit the unprecedented information for school management to reduce the risks of spreading infectious diseases. This project will explore: 1) disease-resistant designs based on the prediction of microbiome colonization and succession; 2) disease-resistant operations based on the monitoring of interactions among environments, occupants, and microbiomes; and 3) more effective hygiene practices and interventions to reduce disease transmission based on smart and connected informatics. By linking the microbial contamination patterns and transmission pathways with quantifiable design attributes and controllable operation paradigms, this research will lay a computational foundation for parametric design and operation control for reduced exposure to pathogens in schools. The information needs and effective information communication venues among different stakeholders will be identified to develop smart interfaces for connected decisions and actions to reduce contamination and transmission risks. This project will also lead to a novel community engagement model, through which students, teachers, school administrators, parents, healthcare providers, scientists, and engineers are all involved in the development of intelligent technologies and discovery of new knowledge to establish citizen-centric living laboratories for idea generation, data collection, prototype validation, and solution evaluation.