John J Dennehy

The ultimate goal of our work is to develop practices capable of limiting virus transmission and meeting the current worldwide challenge to public health. We will develop and experimentally test a mathematical model (the EIMM) that incorporates the built environment as a consideration in SARS-CoV-2 transmission. The EIMM promises greater insight into how the spatial and temporal context of shared spaces affects virus survival and transmission. The primary output of our research will be the development of a clear set of guidelines analogous to fire and building codes (The COVID Code) to govern how public and private institutions should reopen public spaces following the COVID-19 shutdown. It is expected that these guidelines will be applicable to offices, classrooms, restaurants, entertainment venues, and places where people work and socialize. These guidelines will not be specific to COVID-19, but rather can be modified to meet the demands presented by future epidemics. These guidelines will be broadly disseminated to public and private institutions via presentations, publications, and a website clearinghouse. The mathematical modeling code will be made freely available in an online repository (GitHub) so those future researchers can elaborate on it and/or employ it for new applications. Additionally, this research will train undergraduate and graduate students from our respective institutions through participation in the implementation of modeling, design of experiments/controls, execution and troubleshooting of experiments, collection, and data analysis, participation in lab meetings to discuss results and future directions, presentations at local and national meetings, and drafting manuscripts for publication.