Events

Time: 6:30-7:40 p.m. (India) | 1:00-2:10 p.m. (GMT) | 9:00-10:10 a.m. (New York)

As the world continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, the most important question for us all remains, how can we end this crisis and ensure that we can prevent the next one? Join Columbia Global Centers | Mumbai and the Mailman School of Public Health for the Third Distinguished Yusuf Hamied Lecture with Professor Ian Lipkin, world-renowned virologist and leading expert on the COVID-19 pandemic, as he talks about the GIDEoN program and the emerging threat of viruses to our way of life.

GIDEoN is the Global Infectious Disease Epidemiology Network, which is a public health startup for early detection and containment of pandemic risk. The GIDEoN program has three main objectives: (1) develop a model realizing and extending the goals of the International Health Regulations established by the WHO in 2005 by providing inexpensive, rapid tools for diagnosis discovery, and surveillance of infectious diseases, (2) identify and prioritize infectious agents based on pandemic risk, (3) share data in a manner that not only prevents biopiracy, but also provides the foundation for producing immunological drugs and vaccines to prevent and treat infection. GIDEoN builds on an infrastructure developed over decades of research and service by integrating the resources and insights of well-established subject matter experts as well as academic and public health institutions to address the urgent challenge of emerging infectious diseases. GIDEoN sites outside of the United States include regions where pandemic threats emerge and re-emerge due to anthropogenic factors such as climate change, deforestation, displacement of wildlife, bushmeat hunting and consumption, wet markets, urbanization and migration, and incursion into wildlife habitats. The work within GIDEoN is critical, as emerging viruses are a threat to food security, loss of life, and global economic damage as a result of travel and trade interruption.

About the Speaker

Dr. W. Ian Lipkin is the John Snow Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Center for Solutions for ME/CFS, the Director for the Center for Research in Diagnostics and Discovery, and the Director for the Center of Infection and Immunity with the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. He is internationally recognized for his contributions to global public health through the innovative methods he has developed for infectious diseases diagnosis, surveillance, and discovery. Most notably, he had the first use of subtractive cloning in microbial discovery, the first use of next generation sequencing for investigating outbreaks, and developed gene capture technologies as well as multiplexed serological assays to detect vector-borne diseases. Dr. Lipkin has been at the forefront of outbreak response to many of the world’s recent outbreaks, including West Nile Virus in NYC (1999), SARS in China (2003), MERS in Saudi Arabia (2012-16), Zika in the US (2016), encephalitis in India (2017), and COVID-19 (2020). He promotes public health awareness via print and broadcast media and has also served as the scientific advisor for the Soderbergh film “Contagion”.