In this video, John Kubale, Research Assistant Professor in ISR’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), explores the ways that researchers can leverage new sources of data to understand disease transmission, and the importance of preserving essential data.

I’m an infectious disease epidemiologist and as faculty in ICPSR, I am really focused on thinking about infectious disease epidemiology and the data systems that we rely on.

One project that I’ve been leading is a collaboration between myself and other faculty at ISR, along with faculty at the School of Public Health and the College of Engineering, specifically looking at wastewater surveillance. This was a really novel data stream and resource for public health responders during the COVID-19 pandemic. But if you look at this and how these data are collected, there’s a glaring omission in a population that’s often left out of this, and that’s rural populations, because they’re generally not on municipal wastewater systems. They’re not seeing the kind of benefit that we’ve been seeing from having this more advanced picture of different pathogens and how they’re circulating in a community at a given time.

I’ve been looking to see whether we can leverage data that we have on people’s mobile phones. Things like using census data or cell phone mobility data to see how people are actually moving in and out of places that we do have wastewater surveillance data from. Basically using those mobility data sets that have started to proliferate to better assess whether we can still get some benefit for those rural communities that may not be on the municipal wastewater system.

I think it’s also really important, and this has become particularly evident since late January of this year, that we also have to think about preserving data and also preserving access to those data. We’ve seen a number of very key and vital federal data sets that researchers, the public, and public health practitioners rely on, disappear. We’ve seen them become less accessible and potentially even be altered throughout the months of 2025. That’s something that I’ve been really actively involved in and figuring out how we at ICPSR, as a data archive, leverage our expertise in preserving and making data more widely accessible to ensure that these resources, these public goods, remain accessible for years to come.