​ Dr. Wen, the principal investigator of the iGEAR project, was invited to the Shackleton Research Report Meeting held by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Taiwan on January 16-17 in Jiao-Shi, Yilan City. As iGEAR is categorized into the Breakthrough Project under the Shackleton Program, this project is expected to provide substantial social impacts and academic contributions. Considering the global expansion of dengue risk, while Taiwan is located on the borderline between tropical and subtropical climate zone and is also one of the major international transport hubs in East Asia, Dr. Wen addressed the niche of Taiwan to be a critical point for monitoring the international spread of vector-borne diseases. To build up a global-scale early warning framework that requires multi-disciplinary techniques and analyses, Dr. Wen also introduced the international collaboration research team of iGEAR in the Shackleton Meeting, as shown in the Figure below, demonstrating a cross-region (Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Taiwan) and cross-disciplinary collaborative framework that includes researchers specializing in public health, epidemiology, biostatistics, geoscience and data sciences.

​ Furthermore, in Dr. Wen’s presentation, he gave a live demo of the iGEAR dashboard, which collects and visualizes global epidemic information, from the reported cases to the environmental risk factors that are related to mosquito-borne diseases. He also introduced our preliminary studies of the time-series models for predicting epidemic trends and the risk of imported cases. In 2019 and 2020, Dr. Wen had several research publications on topics of understanding disease outbreak, modeling spatial expansion, detecting epidemic cluster and remote sensing water extraction in SCI and SSCI international journals. Currently, the iGEAR project team has developed a global epidemic surveilling system (iGEAR dashboard) and an epidemic profiling software that has supported the Epidemic Intelligence Center (EIC) of Taiwan’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) and National Health Research Institute (NHRI) in the prevention and control of dengue in Kaohsiung City in 2019. In our next step, Dr. Wen is ambitious to lead the iGEAR research team to building up a more comprehensive global epidemic surveilling and analytic framework, and promote both academic and practical epidemic control collaborations with Southeast Asia countries. We expect that, in the end, the iGEAR project may better define the role of public health of Taiwan for global epidemic monitoring and control, and demonstrate a more effective and accurate coping strategy for the international epidemic spread.

For more details of Dr. Wen’s presentation in the meeting, please visit the following Youtube link: iGEAR Progress Report (Shackleton Meeting)