Six alumni, working across the sciences, found their roles changing last year as they pivoted to face the pandemic head-on. In fields ranging from medicine to public health to data science, they turned their attention to building models, scrutinizing antibodies, measuring inequities, and even safeguarding a presidential debate. And, of course, developing vaccines.


Trials and Terabytes

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Najat Khan ’06 looked around and saw nothing but unanswered questions. “We didn’t know anything,” she says. There were no scientific experts on the new coronavirus, or doctors with experience treating infected patients. 

She also saw that she was in a position to help resolve some of those questions. “If there’s anything that can fill the gaps in our knowledge and make the unpredictable predictable,” Khan says, “it is the use of data science.”

portrait of emily kahn with abstract geometric colorful blocks floating around
Illustration by Keith Negley

Khan is chief data science officer for Janssen Research & Development, part of the pharmaceutical arm of Johnson & Johnson. Before the pandemic, she was applying data science to projects all over the map, from neuroscience to cancer research. “It’s great fun,” she says.

But when Janssen began working on a vaccine, that project became her singular focus. “We wanted to make it as quickly as possible, as safely as possible, and the best vaccine that we could develop,” Khan says.

To help design the COVID-19 vaccine trial, Khan and her coworkers wanted the power to predict where and how the virus would spread, and who was most at risk. Working with collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they built a complex new model that was like nothing Khan had worked on before. Their model didn’t just take into account infections and deaths; it also included social and political factors. It predicted government policies and restrictions, from the national level down to the county level. It also predicted how well people would comply with those restrictions: Would they wear masks? Refrain from traveling? 

“These are terabytes of data that we are looking through,” Khan says. The problem was too big for traditional statistical methods. Instead, the team created a sophisticated machine-learning model that grew smarter as they fed it more data.

The model proved to be highly accurate, Khan says, anticipating outbreaks in the South and Midwest months ahead of time. This helped Janssen design its vaccine trial. The trial was event-based, which means a certain number of participants needed to get infected before scientists would have enough data to know how well the vaccine worked, compared to a placebo.

If Janssen had participants in areas where the virus was surging, they might reach that number of events — and be able to end the trial — sooner.

That’s exactly what happened, Khan says. Because the virus was spreading so rapidly among the populations they’d targeted, Janssen reached the necessary number of infections sooner than expected. It ended its trial after recruiting just 45,000 subjects, instead of the 60,000 researchers had planned on. This shortened the trial timeline by about a month, Khan says. Better yet, the results earned the vaccine an emergency use authorization (EUA) from the FDA.

Even after the success of the model, there’s always more to learn. Khan says she and her colleagues anticipated that new virus variants might arise, possibly more 

contagious or more deadly. But the degree to which that has happened is beyond what they expected, Khan says: “The pandemic is extremely dynamic.” The world is changing week by week, she adds, and her team is always working to answer new questions. 

What’s certain, though, is how useful data science can be in a fast-moving global crisis like this one. “We have to be able to integrate this in our ways of working, and ways of thinking, if we are going to stay ahead of a lot of these unexpected events,” Khan says. She’ll never run out of applications for her work.

“The question is, are we applying it in a way that is helping people and humanity? That’s all that matters.”

Khan was part of an alumni panel that discussed “The Search for a Treatment: A Conversation About COVID-19” in December 2020. The group of medical and legal professionals from the University community was convened by the Colgate Health and Wellness and STEM professional networks. For more information on Colgate professional networks, visit colgate.edu/cpn

Thank You for Making Nothing Happen

Ken Sands ’81 has a photo that seems like a relic of an earlier time. It’s from a meeting where he and coworkers were planning their response to the new coronavirus that had recently come to the United States. Although the subject was serious, “One of the people on our planning team put on a mask as a joke,” Sands says. “And we all took that person’s picture, like it was a crazy thing to be wearing this mask while wearing a suit.” It was early March 2020.

“Life has changed dramatically in a small amount of time. That’s for sure,” Sands says.

Today, he’s so used to wearing a mask that he often forgets he has it on. Office life looks different, and so does the inside of the hospitals that Sands oversees. As chief epidemiologist for HCA Healthcare — a company based in Nashville, Tenn., that operates 185 hospitals around the country — Sands’ job is to keep people safe inside those facilities. He works to minimize risks such as infections, falls, and medical errors. But 2020 brought a new danger to his doors.

portrait of ken with abstract geometric colorful blocks floating around
Illustration by Keith Negley

Sands first realized his job would change drastically when evidence emerged last winter that even people with no symptoms could carry and spread COVID-19. “It became very clear that this was going to be a worldwide event,” Sands says. By late February, “We were starting to prepare for an extraordinary experience.” 

He and his colleagues began a frantic game of catch-up with the new virus. At first, it was hard to even identify all the hospitalized patients who were sick with COVID-19. Doctors were still learning about different ways the illness could appear: not just fever and cough, but loss of smell, for example. The team had to create new protocols for protecting health care workers who were treating COVID-19 patients, even as those patients were coming through the doors.

To date, HCA Healthcare has managed tens of thousands of COVID-19 patients, and Sands feels confident that the protocols in place are keeping patients, staff, and visitors safe. Researchers have also learned more about measures that can help protect the public, like those masks that looked so strange in March. 

Not that everyone follows such guidelines. At the September presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio, members of the Trump family refused to wear masks. When HCA Healthcare became the safety sponsor for the next presidential debate in Nashville, Sands and his team were determined to see their rules followed.

Sands led the creation of debate protocols that included rules for testing, masking, seating, and ventilation. Ultimately, he says, the event went off smoothly. The audience kept their masks on (even the Trumps). 

“We demonstrated that it is possible to hold a large public event that has an important public service aspect, as long as things are done safely,” Sands says.

Someday after the pandemic ends, these guidelines will be unnecessary again. But Sands hopes some lessons from this time will linger, such as attention to the safety of health care workers, whose work is risky even in normal times. 

“My job is largely to keep things from happening,” Sands says. On a normal day, when the protocols that he’s helped put in place are working well, “People typically don’t call you up and say, ‘Hey, I noticed nobody got influenza in any of your hospitals yesterday. Thank you for making nothing happen!’”

Public health faces the same challenge, Sands says. It can be easy to underfund and overlook when things feel safe. But he hopes governments will invest more in research that will help us prevent or respond to future pandemics. 

“Hopefully this experience will change the degree to which these programs are viewed as being essential, as opposed to being optional,” Sands says. 

Finding a Way to Help

The dive into COVID-19 research began over breakfast for Emma Krasovich ’15.

It was March 13, 2020, the day after UC Berkeley had asked staff to stay home and work remotely if they could. Krasovich and her colleagues from the university’s Global Policy Lab were holding their biweekly breakfast virtually. The group of about 15 usually uses the time to hear about each other’s projects, which are across different areas, including climate change, development, and health. But this time, through their computer screens, they talked about the virus. They wondered whether, with all their different areas of expertise, they might be able to help. “Can we do something quickly? Can we make a difference in some way?” recalls Krasovich, who earned a master’s in public health ​after Colgate. “We decided yes, let’s do it. And everyone in the lab dropped all their other projects.”

photo of Emma Krasovich with colorful geometric shapes floating around

Across the country, another recent graduate, Wil Lieberman-Cribbin ’14, was working after finishing his own public health degree. Neither expected that just a few years after going into the field, they’d find themselves in a global public health crisis of historic magnitude, with the opportunity to do research that might help.

Lieberman-Cribbin was a clinical research coordinator at the Institute for Translational Epidemiology, part of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. In the spring of 2020, finding themselves at the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic, Lieberman-Cribbin and his colleagues turned their attention to COVID-19 testing. “We had a sense that testing was not rolled out well or organized at all,” Lieberman-Cribbin says. “We wanted to quantify these feelings.”

Using publicly available data, the team compared testing across different zip codes in New York. They found that testing was higher in areas with more white residents. But these areas, as well as areas with higher socioeconomic status, had lower rates of positive tests. In other words, the neighborhoods with the most infected people — where tests were most needed — were getting tested less. The finding was published last June in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine

photo of Wil Lieberman-Cribbin  with colorful geometric shapes floating around

Back in Berkeley, Krasovich and her colleagues had decided to study how policies such as lockdowns, closures, and travel bans were affecting disease spread. They gathered information on more than 1,700 such policies from six countries. (Most data points came from the United States, Krasovich notes, where restrictions differed from one city to the next.)

There were relatively few U.S. cases when the team started. But, Krasovich says, “Every day that we worked, we were seeing that number go up. So, there was this huge sense of urgency.” They collected their data and finished their analysis in just eight days.

The analysis suggested that these anti-contagion policies had significantly slowed the spread of COVID-19, preventing or delaying tens of millions of cases. Their paper was published in Nature in June. It also appeared in Altmetric’s list of the 100 “most discussed” articles of 2020.

Krasovich was excited about the publication, but disappointed as 2020 went on to see governments and individuals abandoning the policies that could slow disease spread. “We all had this sense that research can change the way people think about a problem,” she says. “In short, it was beyond frustrating. And kind of disheartening.” Still, she says, she tries to stay hopeful. As her own study showed, the actions that people did take have saved lives, and further research can continue to guide those actions.

Lieberman-Cribbin was also discouraged by what he saw in New York. The testing rollout early in the pandemic was “embarrassing,” he says. His research also highlighted how the people in the city most vulnerable to COVID-19 weren’t getting support, whether in the form of more accessible testing or economic resources that would let them stay home from work, for example.

“There has to be a reassessment of who is essential to our society,” Lieberman-Cribbin says. He’s now a PhD student in the Environmental Health Sciences program at Columbia University, where he’s looking at disparities in COVID-19 antibody testing. 

Krasovich has returned to her usual research on sustainable development. But she’s glad she got to participate in the mad-dash coronavirus paper. 

“It was definitely a crazy experience and something that I don’t think most people get to do,” she says. Others in her lab are still working on COVID-19 research — which she gets to hear about every two weeks, over a bagel.

Lessons in the Blood

In the spring of 2020, reports arose of a new danger related to COVID-19. Although the virus generally didn’t sicken children as often or as badly as adults, a small number of kids were developing a serious condition that seemed to follow an earlier COVID-19 infection. 

“It can be scary for doctors and patients and families,” says pediatric physician Anne Rowley ’78, “because you’ve got a child who seemed to have recovered from COVID — if they even knew they had it.” Then, suddenly, the child is sick with symptoms such as fever, rash, red eyes, and heart trouble. The child may even end up in intensive care. 

Doctors dubbed the new condition multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C, and compared it to Kawasaki disease, a mysterious illness with similar symptoms that mostly affects children.

photo of Anne Rowley with colorful geometric shapes floating around

Rowley is a professor of pediatrics and microbiology and immunology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and a physician at Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Her specialty is Kawasaki disease, and when the new illness emerged, she began investigating that too. Her research is revealing how children’s immune systems react to the new coronavirus — and how important it is for scientists to challenge their own assumptions.

One aspect of the disease doctors have discovered is that even if MIS-C patients need help in the hospital, they almost always get better. “In general, children recover completely, so far as we can tell,” she says.

Researchers think MIS-C might stem from a delayed overreaction by the immune system to the coronavirus infection, Rowley says. They don’t know why it mainly affects kids, but they’ve been trying to learn more about how a child’s immune response to the virus differs from an adult’s. To do that, Rowley and her colleagues are taking antibody-producing cells from the blood of kids who’ve had COVID-19. By studying the genetic sequence of those cells, they can figure out which parts of the virus the antibodies are targeting. 

The new vaccines target the so-called “spike protein,” which gives the coronavirus its signature knobby crown. But it’s possible that children’s immune systems tend to focus on different proteins within the virus, Rowley says. If so, that focus could be what helps protect most kids from worse illness when they do get infected. 

Eventually, what researchers learn about children’s response to the coronavirus might lead to new treatments or targets for vaccines, Rowley says. “Maybe we want to mimic some of the things that are going on in children for adults.”

Researchers have also learned that MIS-C is different from Kawasaki disease in important ways. While Kawasaki disease targets the coronary arteries, which feed blood to the heart, MIS-C affects the heart muscle itself. Even though the two illnesses looked similar at first, “I think pretty much everybody accepts now that these are two separate disorders,” Rowley says.

It’s just one of the ways that the virus has kept doctors and scientists constantly adapting to new information and letting go of their assumptions, Rowley says. “It’s been a lesson in humility.” 

On Our Way

With about 10,000 employees in China in early 2020, Pfizer was closely watching the situation in Wuhan. “It was becoming increasingly clear that this virus was not going to be contained, that it was going to spread,” David Moules ’82 says. “And that for Pfizer and other companies in the biopharmaceutical sector, we were the ones that were going to need to come up with a solution.”

Moules leads a group at Pfizer called U.S. Payer & Channel Access, which in short ensures that the company’s products are in the right place when people need them. His team was busy from the start of the pandemic. Even without treatments specific to the new virus, Moules says, about 75 Pfizer medicines saw sudden surges in demand. Many of those drugs were critical for treating COVID-19 patients in the ICU, including patients on ventilators. Demand for some of those drugs went up as much as eight times, he says. 

In April, another new demand came from the Navy hospital ship Comfort. It had arrived in New York Harbor with the intent of housing non-COVID patients. But the plan changed and the ship started receiving COVID patients — and needed medicines to treat them. “We had to jump into action pretty quickly after hours when we got those requests,” Moules says.

photo of David Moules with colorful geometric shapes floating around

The most famous product Pfizer is delivering now, of course, is its COVID-19 vaccine, the first one to win an EUA from the Food and Drug Administration in December 2020. 

The project was in the works by mid-March. Pfizer had already partnered with the German company BioNTech and decided to move forward together with developing a vaccine against the new coronavirus. Scientists would use mRNA technology that they’d been researching for influenza.

“It’s remarkable to see the speed from the time that the virus’ genetic sequence was first understood to getting an EUA in December,” Moules says. “Frankly, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Even before the vaccine was approved, Pfizer took a gamble by beginning to manufacture it in large quantities. Moules’ team had to help plan the logistics of getting vials of vaccine all around the country — and even to the U.S. territories, as Pfizer’s government contract stipulated — while keeping it extremely cold.

Pfizer needed to work with a company called McKesson, which the U.S. government had contracted to supply kits that go along with the vaccines. The kits include items like needles, surgical masks, and vaccination record cards. 

The McKesson kits would have to arrive at sites first, followed by the boxes of vaccine vials in dry ice. For shipments flying to the island territories, the logistics were even trickier. In November, before the vaccine had the green light from the FDA, Moules’ team began working on test runs. They shipped empty boxes to dozens of sites around the country to make sure there were no glitches in the process. 

These days, the boxes are full. “I can’t tell you the number of pictures I’ve received from colleagues, friends, family members getting their COVID vaccine,” Moules says. The events of the
past year have brought his company’s purpose to life like nothing else could. 

“When this problem hit, governments around the world turned to this industry to basically solve this problem,” Moules says. “And I believe that we’re well on our way to doing it.”

The Story of Our Lives

Peter Reiss ’93 has been filming news and documentaries for decades, but he’s never before conducted an interview like the one he did with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci.

Dr. Anthony Fauci being interviewed on a set with a microphone cantilevered above his head
Dr. Anthony Fauci

The night before the interview, Reiss’ film crew went into a hotel suite near the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and set up their camera, lights, and other equipment. Then they left. In the morning, Fauci entered the hotel suite, took off his mask, and sat down. From a second hotel room, the film crew activated the camera remotely. Reiss appeared on a video screen and began asking Fauci questions. “It is a regular interview — it’s just that no one else is in the room,” Reiss says.

Filming this way let Reiss ensure the production of his new documentary was as safe as possible. Other interviews happened outdoors with minimal crew members, who were masked, distanced, and recently tested. All the precautions “made it incredibly difficult,” Reiss says. But it was the only way to tell the story he wanted to tell: how researchers were creating the vaccines that will help end the pandemic.

Reiss began his career producing programming for television channels. In 2013, he launched his own production company called The Woodshed. Although he’s covered all kinds of topics, Reiss is especially interested in science. While following the news this summer about the race to develop COVID-19 vaccines, he approached the Discovery Channel about making a film on the subject. 

The result, The Vaccine: Conquering COVID, aired Feb. 18. “I feel like this is the story of our lives,” Reiss says. “One way or another, it’s hard to imagine a story that’s affected more people on this planet.”

While documenting the vaccine race, he witnessed surprising and moving scenes. He watched members of the Colorado National Guard, for instance, racing against a three-minute timer to transfer about 200 vials of vaccine from their dry ice packaging into a freezer. If they missed any vials, they’d have to put the vaccine in the garbage (they didn’t). 

The interview with Fauci also took the crew aback. “We were all shocked at how open he was about talking about death threats against him and his family,” Reiss says. “He speaks very clearly and forcefully and openly about that, and I don’t think any of us were expecting that.”

But it was also essential to the story Reiss wanted to tell that he speak with everyday people — such as Jennifer Haller, a Moderna phase 1 trial volunteer who got the first COVID-19 vaccine shot in the United States. Haller was injected with the very same vaccine that people were lining up for in February, as Reiss’ film was about to come out. “It’s pretty amazing,” he says.

Even though developing safe and effective vaccines in record time was an incredible scientific achievement, Reiss says, “none of that matters if regular, everyday people on the street aren’t willing to go into the hospital and roll up their sleeves.”