Some examples of the mandate of this central institute structure include building and maintaining strategic partnerships, coordination of the EIDM community and knowledge translation, data management and organization, and supporting rapid policy response through consensus building. This structure will also allow the EIDM community to fund exciting and competitive new programs, including embedded fellowships for senior and junior researchers to learn about new research fields, salary support for faculty to address policy needs, research chairs or tenure track hires, partnerships with government, policy, public health, and industry, as well as the development and delivery of training in a range of contexts.

Specifically, we propose to create a Public Health Modelling Institute. The Institute would have dedicated staff supporting six core functions:

1. The Institute would be a central coordinating resource, convening the EIDM community, organizing network-wide events, and promoting the ongoing work of the community by providing a searchable and interactive visualization of the individuals involved and their activities. Moreover, it would provide an opportunity for members of the community to be released from their regular positions to spend time exclusively involved in advancing the discipline.

2. The Institute would cultivate and maintain strategic relationships with partner organizations and agencies. This would include the key national agencies (Public Health Agency of Canada, Health Canada, Statistics Canada, National Microbiology Laboratory, National Research Council) and research-supporting bodies such as the four mathematics institutes, the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute, the Canadian Institute for Health Information, and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. Additionally, provincial public health institutions and health authorities, other national-scale pandemic-related groups (Canadian Immunization Research Network (CIRN), Centre for Research on Pandemic Preparedness and Health Emergencies, Coronavirus Variants Rapid Response Network (CoVaRR-Net), National Collaborating Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCCID), Covid-19 Immunity Task Force (CITF)), pandemic-focused institutes (Pacific Institute on Pathogens, Pandemics and Society (PIPPS), University of Toronto Institute for Pandemics, McMaster Global Nexus for Pandemics and Biological Threats (https://globalnexus.mcmaster.ca/), York Emergency Mitigation, Engagement, response, and Governance Institute (Y-EMERGE), Canadian Centre for Disease Modelling (CDM)) and local public health agencies would be engaged.

3. Knowledge translation (KT) from the Institute’s research would be supported by KT experts and coordinated centrally.

4. The Institute would participate in the ongoing conversations about the future of health and infectious disease data in Canada. It would bring the perspective of our scientific community to these conversations, conveying what data are available to our researchers and arising from our research and articulating the additional gains that would come from increased data availability.

5. The Institute would facilitate rapid policy response and requests for advice by convening the relevant parts of the community and providing a framework for building a broad consensus and identifying “serviceable truths”. It would have a mechanism to ensure that resources can be made available, that the expertise required can be easily identified and accessed at short notice. Furthermore, the institute would coordinate public communication, which enhances the impact of research, builds trust with the public, helps to combat misinformation, and inspires interest in applied and interdisciplinary science.

6. As an Institute, the necessary partnerships with Indigenous communities and other equity-focused groups would be cultivated by coordinating with partners working in this space including CoVaRR-Net’s Indigenous Engagement, Development, and Research Pillar 7 (CIEDAR) and Global One-health Network (G1HN).

The Institute would emphasize and prioritize interdisciplinary projects and programs. It would interface among biostatistics, data science, drug therapy, economics, epidemiology, evolution, genomics, health, immunology and virology, mathematics, and vaccine development. In integrating diverse sources of knowledge, and through building the partnerships we envision, the Institute would leverage large existing investments in genomic sequencing, serological studies, biomanufacturing and wastewater surveillance, among others. It would build on the strengths of the EIDM networks that have already been established and would particularly support work that builds the research-policy bridge. Similarly, the Institute’s research activities would link to growing industry-facing activities in biotechnology, biomanufacturing, and the financial industry.