April 8, 2020

Right-wing Terrorist Looking to “Weaponize” Pandemic

Minerva-funded researcher, Robert Pape is a political scientist and international security specialist at the University of Chicago. His Minerva-funded project, “Social and Neurological Construction of Martydom Project” looks at how militant propaganda videos inspire violence.

April 7, 2020

Doctors Making Life and Death Choices over Coronavirus Patients and Moral Injury

Recent articles by Minerva-funded researcher, Neil Shortland discuss the consequences that doctors may face after having to choose who among their COVID-19 patients live and who dies.

April 7, 2020

Using Facebook Data in the Fight against COVID-19

Daniel Larremore, a Minerva-funded researcher and several colleagues from Colorado joined a nationwide study that seeks to use social media data to better understand how coronavirus cases might grow and travel in the coming weeks.

April 6, 2020

Designing Face Shield for Frontline Responders

VBFF fellow Jennifer Lewis (c/o 2016) has been leading the Face Shield Working Group at Mass General Hospital / Brigham Women’s Hospital in Boston. She has been actively engaged in a clinically driven process following a rigorous design-build-test/validate process. Lewis and her team’s goal is to create face shields that satisfy the clinical needs of the frontline responders, some of which are unique to COVID 19.

April 3, 2020

How Terrorist Groups Will Try to Capitalize on the Coronavirus Crisis

Minerva-funded researcher, Mia Bloom conducts research on terrorism and political extremism. Her original Minerva-funded project, “Documenting the Virtual Caliphate” collected and archived thousands of pieces of ISIS propaganda, images, memes, and breaking news. In this recent article, she discusses how COVID-19 will inspire terrorist groups to capitalize on the raging pandemic, the public’s increased fears, and the lack of confidence in governments by engaging in future targeted attacks.

April 3, 2020

War-time Lessons for Industrial Mobilization in a time of Pandemic

Minerva-funded researcher, Stephen Biddle’s recent article, “War-time Lessons for Industrial Mobilization in a time of a Pandemic”, discusses COVID-19 as an emergency that can compare to a war-like crisis such as World War II. The

April 1, 2020

Preliminary COVID-19 Assay Development

VBFF Tim Manning Swager (c/o 2018) has developed assays for bacteria that are fast with record sensitivity. The paper is about to be accepted in PNAS and the method can be configured to create assays for the COVID-19 virus with appropriate recognition elements for the spike protein.

April 1, 2020

COVID-19 Rapid Response Team Focuses on 3 Initiatives

VBFF Fellow Ali Jadbabaie (c/o 2016) has designated part of his research group to heavily focus on Covid-19-related research.

March 31, 2020

COVID-19 and Social Media

On March 31, 2020, Minerva-funded researcher, Kathleen M. Carley (Carnegie Mellon University) hosted the “COVID-19 – The Social Media Discussion” online where she discussed a number of stories containing inaccurate or misleading information that have populated social media.

March 26, 2020

Predicting the Epidemic Trends of COVID-19

VBFF Fellow Ying-Cheng Lai (c/o 2016) has been working on predicting the epidemic trends of COVID-19. He recently published a paper entitled, “Quantitative assessment of the role of undocumented infection in the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic”.