The national strategy for biosurveillance calls for a coordinated approach for threats to public health and safety. This coordinated approach brings together federal, state and local governments; private sector, nongovernmental organizations; and international partners to enhance existing biosurveillance capabilities and develop new ones that provide decision makers and responders with the essential information to manage these threats. This strategy recognizes that a well-integrated national biosurveillance enterprise can save lives by providing essential information for better decision making at all levels.
Thursday, June 25
7:25 am Registration & Morning Coffee
8:25 Chairperson’s Opening Remarks
Major General (retired) John Doesburg, International Security and Analysis Programs, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (retired)
8:30 KEYNOTE PRESENTATION:
Department of Defense Advanced Technology Demonstrations in Biosurveillance
| Peter Emanuel, Ph.D., ECBC BioSciences Division Chief & JPEO-CBD JUPITR ATD Lead, Aberdeen Proving Grounds Early detection of disease outbreaks and WMD attacks is vital to minimizing casualties and restoring operations. All-hazards biosurveillance must involve affordable field detection and robust on-site analysis that integrates the data and shares it in real-time across wide areas. This talk will discuss the DoD's execution of a multi-year field demonstration in South Korea that has examined how to field a large scale system. | |
9:15 KEYNOTE PRESENTATION:
Advances in National Biosurveillance – Integrating New Analytic Capabilities for Improved Early Warning and Situational Awareness
| Steve Bennett, Ph.D., Executive Director, National Biosurveillance Integration Center, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Infectious disease outbreaks, such as the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa, or the emergence of new diseases such as SARS, MERS-Coronavirus, or new strains of avian influenza, all present difficult challenges in using traditional epidemiological approaches to the early warning problem. This talk will present a motivation for why the early warning problem is both important and difficult, and will present recent advances in the integration of different analytic capabilities as an important way forward. | |
10:00 Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
10:45 The Biosurveillance Vision for JPEO
Nicole Rosenzwieg, Director, Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical & Biological Defense, U.S. Department of Defense
The Joint Program Executive Office (JPEO) is working globally to improve the biosurveillance capacity for the Department of Defense. By systematically deploying the GBTI suite of hardware to improve detection capacity while connecting these labs to a networked analytics and communication hub, JPEO provides worldwide users with timely, actionable, and operationally valuable information enabling a more effective response to a health crisis anywhere in the world.
11:15 Third Generation Sequencing for Rapid Biosurveillance
Dave Ussery, Ph.D., Director, Comparative Genomics, Biosciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
The best unique identifier for an organism is its DNA sequence. Small USB sticks that can sequence using microfluidics and nanopore technology allow for portable monitoring, with only a small computer necessary to provide the power and to interpret the DNA sequence reads. This emerging technology will enable rapid detection of viruses, bacteria and other organisms from an environmental sample.
11:45 Integrative Biosurveillance in High Burden of Disease Populations
Harshini Mukundan, Ph.D, Principal Investigator, Chemistry Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Our team is working on the development of a predictive epidemiological model for surveillance of multiple pathogens while accounting for co-morbidities. Our ambitious efforts to integrate clinical, geographical and meta-data with novel diagnostics and pathogen characterization data to derive specific information that guides situational awareness will be presented.
12:15 pm Luncheon Presentation (Sponsorship Opportunity Available) or Enjoy Lunch on Your Own
1:00 Dessert Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
1:40 Chairperson’s Remarks
Major General (retired) John Doesburg, International Security and Analysis Programs, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (retired)
1:45 Biosurveillance Comparative Analysis - Lessons Learned
Robert Hooks, Division Director of CBRNE Technologies, TASC, Inc.
Utilizing the experiences of the 2009 H1N1 event, MERS-COV event, and the ongoing Ebola experience, this talk will provide a comparative review of the similar challenges and unique differences seen in managing the federal response to these events and effectively coordinating with international and local officials. Challenges in biosurveillance integration, rapid information sharing to support decision-making, governance challenges, and incorporating meaningful technology solutions during a crisis will be described.
2:15 The Economic and Social Impact of Emerging and Re-Emerging Infectious Disease: Mitigation through Education, Detection, Research, and Response
David L Hirschberg, Ph.D., Lecturer and Scientist, Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the Institute of Global Engagement, University of Washington, Tacoma
Emerging infectious diseases include new or unrecognized diseases, those that are spreading to new geographic areas and hosts, as well as those that are re-emerging. In this talk, I will separate data from hysteria and discuss ideas that could lead to better policy decisions for world agencies, international businesses, local governments, and individuals when faced with an emerging infection.
2:45 Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
3:15 Becoming ADEPT: Accelerating the Description of Emerging Pathogen Threats
Gustavo Palacios, Director, Genomic Center, United States Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID)
High-throughput sequencing technologies have become a common component in nearly all aspects of viral research, including molecular epidemiology, drug and vaccine development, surveillance and diagnostics. The presentation will address becoming ADEPT by accelerating the description of emerging pathogen threats.
3:45 PANEL DISCUSSION: Biosurveillance Integration - Challenges and Opportunities for Integrated Management of Threats to Public Health & Safety
Moderator: David L Hirschberg, Ph.D., Lecturer and Scientist, Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the Institute of Global Engagement, University of Washington, Tacoma
Panelists: Nicole Rosenzwieg, Director, Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical & Biological Defense, U.S. Department of Defense; Gustavo Palacios, Director, Genomic Center, United States Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID)
A well-integrated national biosurveillance enterprise can save lives by providing essential information for better decision making at all levels. This panel will explore how technological advances can be implemented to further address the biosurveillance core functions of aberration detection, risk anticipation, threat identification and characterization and information integration, analysis and sharing.
4:45 End of Day
Friday, June 26
8:00 am Morning Coffee
8:25 Chairperson’s Opening Remarks
Major General (retired) John Doesburg, International Security and Analysis Programs, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (retired)
8:30 FEATURED PRESENTATION:
DTRA’s Biosurveillance Ecosystem
Richard Schoske, Ph.D., Chief of the Diagnostic Detection and Threat Surveillance Division, Chemical and Biological Technologies Department, DTRA
The Joint Science and Technology Office (JSTO) at DTRA is developing an innovative Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE) that will dramatically accelerate our “detect-identify-respond” capabilities. The BSVE is a rapidly emerging set of integrated/interoperable tools and data analytics being developed to address user-defined capability need areas and to support real-time biosurveillance for early warning and course of action analysis for warfighters and first responders facing biological threats.
9:15 FEATURED PRESENTATION:
U.S. Government’s Perspective on Innovative Strategies for Improving Biosurveillance
Susan Coller Monarez, Ph.D., Director for Medical Preparedness Policy, National Security Council Staff, Executive Office of the President of the United States
The National Strategy for Biosurveillance builds on the capabilities already in place to ensure everything possible is done to identify and understand threats as early as possible. This presentation will address the U.S. Government’s perspective on taking that directive and working to further innovation for improving biosurveillance.
10:00 Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
10:15 Point-of-Need Metagenomic Sequence Analysis: Self-Contained NGS Analyses when Cloud Access Is Not an Option
Tom Slezak, Ph.D., Program Leader Informatics, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The LLNL Pathogen Bioinformatics team has previously developed and delivered to a Federal sponsor two versions of a transportable stand-alone NGS analysis system for microbial forensics (MTCP: Microbial Threat Characterization Pipeline). We will discuss our experience in running analyses on these platforms and the benefits and disadvantages of local NGS analyses.
10:45 Community Health Resilience Toolset: An All-Hazards Web-Based Approach to Enhance a Community’s Ability to Prepare, Respond and Recover from Manmade or Naturally Occurring Biological Events.
Jeffrey Stiefel, Ph.D., Executive Coordinator, Climate Change and Health Resilience, U.S. Department of Homeland Security
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Health Affairs has developed a web-based Community Health Resilience Toolset to strengthen/enhance health resilience across the Nation. It combines a Community Health Resilience Planning Guide and Toolkit to assist communities in initiating, maintaining and improving health resilience during steady-state and disaster operations.
11:15 Investigative Bioforensics via Heterogeneous Data Integration
Bobbie-Jo Webb-Robertson, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist and Applied Statistics Team Lead, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
In this work we present a Bayesian statistical network to fuse different types of analytical measurements that predict the production environment of a microorganism of interest under investigation with automated test processing of scientific publications to identify institutions with a history of growing the microbe under similar conditions.
11:45 pm Closing Remarks and End of Conference
For more details on the conference, please contact the conference organizing committee:
John Doesburg
International Security & Analysis Programs
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ORNL (retired)
Phone: (+1) 865-574-2701
Email: doesburgj@ornl.gov
Craig Wohlers
General Manager
Knowledge Foundation
Phone: (+1) 781-972-6260
Email: cwohlers@knowledgefoundation.com
For partnering & sponsorship information, contact:
Sherry Johnson
Manager, Business Development
Knowledge Foundation, a division of CHI
Phone: (+1) 781-972-1359
Email: sjohnson@healthtech.com