# Who we are  

The Consortium of Infectious Disease Modeling Hubs brings together groups that have worked on developing and running modeling hubs in different outbreak prediction settings, in collaboration with national and international health agencies, such as the US and European Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The initial modeling hubs were developed with a focus on providing nowcasts, forecasts, or scenario projections of outbreaks. While the infrastructure we developed to support these efforts are readily generalizable to other applications, we note that these motivating examples were for applications that focused on (a) predictive modeling and (b) outbreak settings.

Building off of systems designed for influenza forecasting challenges led by the US CDC, the [Reich Lab at UMass-Amherst](https://reichlab.io/), in collaboration with the [US CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/), developed the [US COVID-19 Forecast Hub](https://covid19forecasthub.org/) in early 2020 to support COVID-19 forecasting efforts. This infrastructure was later adapted for use by several other modeling hubs:

 - [German/Poland COVID-19 Forecast Hub](https://github.com/KITmetricslab/covid19-forecast-hub-de)
 - [US COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub](https://github.com/midas-network/covid19-scenario-modeling-hub)
 - [European COVID-19 Forecast Hub](https://github.com/covid19-forecast-hub-europe/covid19-forecast-hub-europe)
 - [German Hospitalization Nowcast Hub](https://github.com/KITmetricslab/hospitalization-nowcast-hub)
 - [US Influenza FluSight 2022 Challenge](https://github.com/cdcepi/Flusight-forecast-data)

## Funding supporting this work
 - University of Massachusetts as Influenza Forecasting CoE, with COVID supplements since 2020: 
   Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Award #U01IP001122, September 2019 - August 2024
 - Sole-source contract to support hub infrastructure: 
   Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Contract #75D30122C12920, August 2022 - August 2023
 - Sole-source contract to support hub infrastructure development:
   Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Contract #75D30121P10027, February 2021 - February 2022
 - Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS) funding for personnel since June 2022: 
   National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) grant #U24GM132013.
 - Center for Implementation in Outbreak Analytics and Disease Modeling: Multi-Scale Outbreak Decision-Support Tools funding since September       2023: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Subaward #UTAUS-SUB00001195 

## Hubverse retreat
Our second annual “hubverse retreat” was held June 3-7, 2024 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This year’s retreat focused on the future of hubs in the cloud, dashboarding, and the archiving of hub data using hubverse standards.

```{figure} ../images/hubverse-retreat.png
---
figclass: margin-caption
alt: hubverse retreat photo
name: hubverse-retreat
---
Back row (L-R): Becky Sweger, Nick Reich, Kimberlyn Roosa, Martha Zorn, Matt Cornell\
Front row (L-R): Evan Ray, Melissa Kerr, Rebecca Borchering, Emily Howerton, Lucie Contamin, Anna Krystalli
```