CIHR awards $666,667 to the Fields Institute in partnership with AARMS, CRM and PIMS

The Fields Institute, in partnership with AARMSCRM, and PIMS, and with the collaboration of PHACVIDO-Intervac, and NRC will receive $666,667 for COVID-19-related research. Fields Institute Director Kumar Murty is the principal investigator on the grant funded through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Canadian 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Rapid Research Funding Opportunity.

Funding decisions were announced March 19 as part of Canada’s emergency efforts to rapidly detect, manage, and reduce the transmission of COVID-19. The grant is the result of an emergency Rapid Response Taskforce workshop held at the Fields Institute on February 14 and 15, 2020.

“The additional teams of researchers receiving funding today will help Canada quickly generate the evidence we need to contribute to the global understanding of the COVID-19 illness.” said The Honourable Patty Hajdu, Minister of Health, in a news release issued by CIHR on March 19, 2020. “Their essential work will contribute to the development of effective vaccines, diagnostics, treatments, and public health responses.”

The project will bring together Canadian mathematics institutes, national and international co-investigators, collaborators, and team members, to mobilize a network of infectious disease modellers who will assess transmission riskpredict outbreak trajectories, and evaluate the effectiveness of COVID-19 countermeasures. Six of the 14 co-investigators are faculty at Fields Institute Principal Sponsoring Universities*.

The Directors of AARMS, CRM, PIMS, and Fields are committed to using this grant as a starting point for establishing a continuing national network to study the mathematics of public health and disease modelling.

The two-year grant is one of 96 funded in a concerted effort to understand and control COVID-19. It brings together an international team of experts from the following organizations: