Drs. Paul Hergenrother & Rebecca Lee Smith - COVID-19 Testing & Tracing

Dr. Paul Hergenrother, PhD is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), whose organic chemistry lab characterizes natural products to identify novel cellular targets and formulate treatments for cancer & drug-resistant bacteria. He along with Dr. Martin Burke and other UIUC staff led the effort undertaken at UIUC to develop a COVID-19 saliva test, which was implemented campus-wide to facilitate in-person education and garnered national attention in mid-August 2020 (NPR, Science). Dr. Rebecca Lee Smith, PhD is an Associate Professor of Pathobiology at the UIUC, whose epidemiology lab develops statistical models of disease transmission to control viral spread in real-time. Her work has played an essential role in contact tracing throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and yielded a 0.5-0.7% on-campus infection rate, with zero students hospitalized as of November 2020. In this episode, we discuss the roles they played in constructing UIUC’s SHIELD program and how they managed to scale the operation across the state of Illinois. We also talk about many of the critical features of the program that could be generally applied to testing & tracing programs nationwide and better prepare us for future infectious disease outbreaks. Hosted by Cynthia Steinhardt and Joe Varriale.