US professor Lauren Gardner has won a top science award for creating the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard, a project that tracked and mapped the outbreak of the virus across the world in the earliest days of the pandemic.Gardner, an associate professor of civil and systems engineering at Johns Hopkins University, was named the recipient of the 2022 Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award on Wednesday for creating the tracker, described by the US-based Lasker Foundation as a “trailblazing resource” that “lit a path toward informed policy guidelines and personal choices amidst a morass of misinformation” as the world grappled with the emerging disease.Gardner, who studies disease transmission modelling, had met with graduate student Ensheng Dong on January 21, 2020 – just weeks after the first coronavirus cases were detected in Wuhan, China. While the pair were meant to discuss vaccine hesitancy and measles, Dong mentioned he was also tracking emerging cases of COVID-19 infections in China.
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