The Prasanna School of Public Health (PSPH), MAHE, organised a Guest Lecture and Interactive Session on “Public Health in the Post-COVID Era: From Data to Decision Making” on 15 October 2026.

The speaker was Prof. Lauren Gardner, Alton and Sandra Cleveland Professor in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, with a joint appointment in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Director of the Center for Systems Science and Engineering. She is known for modelling how infectious diseases such as dengue and Zika spread, and for leading the team that created the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard, which earned her the Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award.

Prof. Gardner traced how the dashboard was built and how it evolved, from manual data collection and curation to an automated pipeline with error recovery and anomaly detection. She also described the challenges the team faced, including discrepancies between authoritative sources, differences in reporting frequency and timing across locations, and ambiguity in how parameters were defined.

The interactive segment that followed gave our scholars, students and faculty a valuable opportunity to discuss their research directly with Prof. Gardner and learn from her experience in applying data to public health decisions.

We thank Prof. Gardner for her time and insights.