At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, i coincidentally was working at IHME creating web tools and other software for disease modeling research. In the early days of the pandemic, one of the first outbreaks in the United States happened in Washington state, placing IHME at the forefront of a battle to model the outbreak of COVID-19 for months to come. What unfolded put disease modeling and mahcine learning on a national level. My team at IHME worked hard to develop accesible access points into the models that were being developed. The end result was a web tool that was used by millions of people to make decisions around the pandemic. The tool was used by the white house and other organizations to make decisions around the pandemic.

As a team at IHME we worked to quickly deploy a data visualization dashboard that showed outputs from our predictive model ensemble. The challenge of creating a tool that was both informative and easy to understand by a broad audience posed a serious challenge. At times the widespread use of the tool was overwhelming, but it was a great learning experience to see how the tool was used by the public and the government to make decisions around the pandemic. The end strategy around teh tool used it as an entry point to IHME while the publically soruced data let independent agencies and content makers use the data to their own use cases.