Lauren Gardner Recognized for Developing AI Systems to Discover and Track Potential Pandemics

Lauren Gardner, the Alton and Sandra Cleveland Professor in the department of civil and systems engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has received the Future Insight Prize from Merck, a Germany-based multinational science, pharmaceutical, and technology company. She was honored for her work in developing AI systems that can be used to discover and track future pandemics.

In January 2020, Dr. Gardner was essential in creating a web-based COVID-19 dashboard at Johns Hopkins that was used as a global resource for tracking the pandemic. She has also created a modeling system to predict the most likely United States counties that could experience a measles outbreak.

In addition to her primary teaching position at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Gardner holds a joint faculty appointment with the department of epidemiology in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She also serves as director of the Center for Systems Science and Engineering. Prior to her career at Johns Hopkins, she served as a senior lecturer in civil engineering at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Dr. Gardner is a three-time graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where she received her bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering, a master’s degree in civil engineering, and a Ph.D. in transportation engineering.