BALTIMORE — TIME has named a Johns Hopkins University professor to its 2020 list of the 100 most influential people in the world for developing a free website that allows anyone from around the world to track the COVID-19 pandemic in near-real time.
Lauren Gardner, a civil and systems engineering professor in the Whiting School of Engineering, led the team that built the dashboard in late January. Since then, the dashboard has evolved into the leading source of centralized data on the pandemic, allowing governments, the media and the public to visualize the spread.
“I am deeply honored and humbled to have been individually recognized for an effort that has required the hard work and dedication of so many, including the team at the Applied Physics Lab (APL), our students in the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE), our partners at ESRI, and multiple colleagues from across Johns Hopkins University, who have spent tireless weeks and months collecting, verifying, delivering and communicating on this critical data, in coordination with officials from around the nation and the world,” said Gardner, co-director of CSSE.
