Wednesday 1st May 2022 marked the official launch of HARMONIZE, a Wellcome Trust funded project which aims to improve understanding of the relationship between climate change and infectious disease risk across the Latin America and Caribbean region.

HARMONIZE will gather, process and organise climate, environmental, socioeconomic and health data from multiple existing sources, along with new ground-truth data that are collected via low-cost weather sensors and drones. We will develop digital tools and pipelines that will enable users to harmonise, manipulate and visualise these datasets in support of public health research and decision-making. HARMONIZE will aid users in finding local links between environmental change and infectious disease risk using computational models and building robust early warning systems in resource-limited settings. Our main areas of focus are: growing cities (Brazil), small islands (Dominican Republic), highlands (Colombia) and the Amazon rainforest (Peru, Brazil).

On launch day, over 30 consortium members convened for the first virtual project meeting, attended by representatives from each of the 7 partner organisations: Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz), Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Universidad de los Andes (UniAndes), Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (UPCH), Dominican Republic National Office of Meteorology (ONAMET), and the Inter-American Institute (IAI). This was led by the HARMONIZE principal investigator, ICREA Professor Rachel Lowe (BSC). With 4 infrastructural packages, 11 deliverables and 12 milestones in HARMONIZE, the primary focus of the meeting was to establish individual and organisational responsibilities, communication channels, and collaborative working groups. From this, four working groups - Data, Infrastructure and Tools; Equipment and Field Work; Ethics; and User Experience and Engagement - were created to facilitate cohesion and collaboration across the partner organisations and to ensure the optimal use of resources.

Moving forward, meetings that convene the whole consortium and project leads will be held regularly throughout the 4-year project. In addition, a meeting will be hosted each year by a partner organisation in Colombia, Spain, Brazil or Peru, which will be open to both members and collaborators of HARMONIZE.

If you are interested in learning more about HARMONIZE or becoming a collaborator, please visit our Contact page to get in touch.

If you are interested in learning more about HARMONIZE or becoming a collaborator, please visit our Contact page to get in touch.