As reported today on ITU’s frontpage, our newest NERDS faculty member, Jonas Juul, has just won a Novo Nordisk Foundation Data Science Investigator grant of DKK 6.5 million (~EUR 870,000) for a project to improve statistical methods for predicting outbreaks of infections. Congratulations Jonas, we are so happy for you and your great start at NERDS/ITU! 🥳

The project InForM: Inference, Forecasting, and Mitigation of future pandemics runs for five years. It is a collaboration between the IT University of Copenhagen, Statistics Denmark and The State Serum Institute, where Jonas has already collaborated successfully.

It consists of three different parts. The first part is about improving statistical methods that are used for predicting how diseases spread, the second part is looking into which methods for prevention and control of disease are more efficient in what situations, and the third part is about figuring out how COVID-19 spread during the pandemic. Read more in the ITU news.

Winning such a prestigious grant as an assistant Professor is in itself an achievement, but we as NERDS are even more so happy for finally convincing also Novo Nordisk Foundation as the last “missing” major Danish grant agency to fund us. We applaud Novo for their decision – Jonas’ excellent health-related know-how is turning into a boost for epidemiological research in Denmark.

Jonas’ InForM project will soon open calls for PhDs/Postdocs.. stay tuned!