Angel Desai has been awarded a PandemicTech Innovation Fellowship for 2020-2021 to work with ISID’s ProMED using digital epidemic surveillance data to produce AI-guided, actionable forecasts in real time in support of outbreak response and humanitarian health emergency activities across the globe. PandemicTech is a community of innovators based in Austin, Texas, dedicated to fighting pandemic infectious disease threats by bridging the gap between the infectious disease community and technology. With the support of this fellowship, Dr. Desai will work with the ProMED team, with colleagues at Imperial College London and at Harvard’s HealthMap to incorporate data from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic into the forecasting models. Dr. Desai is an infectious disease physician and researcher interested in leveraging informal surveillance methodologies to discern epidemiological trends on emerging diseases and outbreaks. She obtained her Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University in 2007 and M.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2013. She received her Master’s of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is an Emerging Leader in Biosecurity Initiative Fellow through the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an Emerging Leader in International Infectious Diseases through ISID.

The PandemicTech Innovation Fellowship 2020 is a US $100,000 initiative to identify and support the most promising global health security innovators leading the fight against pandemic infectious disease threats.  Launched in 2016, PandemicTech is a virtual technology incubator based in Austin, Texas, USA, that provides global health security innovators with the mentorship, expertise, and funding needed to bring their inventive ideas from concept to real-world execution.