Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Grants and Funding: Extramural Programs (EP)

EP Home   |  Grant Programs   |  Awards   |  Deadlines & Forms   |  Help   |  EP Site Map

Dr. Kenneth Mandl – PECASE Recipient 2004

Disease Surveillance in Real Time: Geotemporal Methods (R01-LM-007677)

Project Information

In 2004, Kenneth Mandl, M.D., M.P.H., a pioneer in consumer informatics and population health monitoring, received a PECASE award for his ground-breaking work in automated biosurveillance systems designed to monitor bioterrorist attacks as well as disease outbreaks in real time. The then Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School’s goal was to develop information technology that could process a live stream of real-time surveillance information extracted from existing hospital information systems. Dr. Mandl, who is also a physician-researcher, succeeded in developing a system that is now part of daily emergency department operations at Children’s Hospital Boston and also utilized at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

Quotes

What do you think the impact of this award has had on your research career?

Receiving the PECASE was a wonderful gift from both the National Library of Medicine and the President. The funding accompanying the award ensured continuity in my research trajectory and enabled me to extend the scope and duration of the NIH's first R01 grant on biosurveillance. It also gave me the recognition and confidence I needed to pursue new and challenging questions in the field and to attract students and postdocs which are the lifeblood of any lab.

Photo of Dr. Kenneth Mandl

Dr. Kenneth Mandl

What is your best career advice to young investigators?

It is important to recognize the value of mentorship during early faculty development. Young investigators should attach themselves firmly to a mentor with closely aligned research interests, seniority in the field, and a strong funding track record. This mentor-mentee relationship can be highly enabling well into the junior faculty years, and often beyond.

Publications

Publications related to this grant and listed in PubMed include:

Beitel AJ, Olson KL, Reis BY, Mandl KD. Use of emergency department chief complaint and diagnostic codes for identifying respiratory illness in a pediatric population. Pediatr Emerg Care. 2004 Jun;20(6):355-60. PubMed PMID: 15179142.

Bonetti M, Pagano M. The interpoint distance distribution as a descriptor of point patterns, with an application to spatial disease clustering. Stat Med. 2005 Mar 15;24(5):753-73. PubMed PMID: 15523703.

Brownstein JS, Kleinman KP, Mandl KD. Identifying pediatric age groups for influenza vaccination using a real-time regional surveillance system. Am J Epidemiol. 2005 Oct 1;162(7):686-93. Epub 2005 Aug 17. PubMed PMID: 16107568; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC1266301.

Brownstein JS, Mandl KD. Pediatric population size is associated with geographic patterns of acute respiratory infections among adults. Ann Emerg Med. 2008 Jul;52 (1):63-8. Epub 2008 Mar 28. PubMed PMID: 18374453; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2597284.

Brownstein JS, Sordo M, Kohane IS, Mandl KD. The tell-tale heart: population-based surveillance reveals an association of rofecoxib and celecoxib with myocardial infarction. PLoS One. 2007 Sep 5;2(9):e840. PubMed PMID: 17786211; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC1950690.

Brownstein JS, Wolfe CJ, Mandl KD. Empirical evidence for the effect of airline travel on inter-regional influenza spread in the United States. PLoS Med. 2006 Sep;3(10):e401. PubMed PMID: 16968115; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC1564183.

Cassa CA, Iancu K, Olson KL, Mandl KD. A software tool for creating simulated outbreaks to benchmark surveillance systems. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2005 Jul 14;5:22. PubMed PMID: 16018815; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC1182374.

Cassa CA, Wieland SC, Mandl KD. Re-identification of home addresses from spatial locations anonymized by Gaussian skew. Int J Health Geogr. 2008 Aug 12;7:45. PubMed PMID: 18700031; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2526988.

Fine AM, Brownstein JS, Nigrovic LE, Kimia AA, Olson KL, Thompson AD, Mandl KD. Integrating spatial epidemiology into a decision model for evaluation of facial palsy in children. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2011 Jan;165(1):61-7. PubMed PMID: 21199982.

Fine AM, Nigrovic LE, Reis BY, Cook EF, Mandl KD. Linking surveillance to action: incorporation of real-time regional data into a medical decision rule. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2007 Mar-Apr;14(2):206-11. Epub 2007 Jan 9. PubMed PMID: 17213492; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2213475.

Fine AM, Reis BY, Nigrovic LE, Goldmann DA, Laporte TN, Olson KL, Mandl KD. Use of population health data to refine diagnostic decision-making for pertussis. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2010 Jan-Feb;17(1):85-90. PubMed PMID: 20064807; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2995623.

Fine AM, Wong JB, Fraser HS, Fleisher GR, Mandl KD. Is it influenza or anthrax? A decision analytic approach to the treatment of patients with influenza-like illnesses. Ann Emerg Med. 2004 Mar;43(3):318-28. PubMed PMID: 14985657.

Freifeld CC, Mandl KD, Reis BY, Brownstein JS. HealthMap: global infectious disease monitoring through automated classification and visualization of Internet media reports. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2008 Mar-Apr;15(2):150-7. Epub 2007 Dec 20. PubMed PMID: 18096908; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2274789.

Kimia A, Brownstein JS, Olson KL, Zak V, Bourgeois FT, Mandl KD. Lumbar puncture ordering and results in the pediatric population: a promising data source for surveillance systems. Acad Emerg Med. 2006 Jul;13(7):767-73. Epub 2006 May 11. PubMed PMID: 16690814.

Mandl KD, Overhage JM, Wagner MM, Lober WB, Sebastiani P, Mostashari F, Pavlin JA, Gesteland PH, Treadwell T, Koski E, Hutwagner L, Buckeridge DL, Aller RD, Grannis S. Implementing syndromic surveillance: a practical guide informed by the early experience. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2004 Mar-Apr;11(2):141-50. Epub 2003 Nov 21. PubMed PMID: 14633933; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC353021.

Mandl KD, Reis B, Cassa C. Measuring outbreak-detection performance by using controlled feature set simulations. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2004 Sep 24;53 Suppl:130-6. PubMed PMID: 15714642.

McMurry AJ, Gilbert CA, Reis BY, Chueh HC, Kohane IS, Mandl KD. A self-scaling, distributed information architecture for public health, research, and clinical care. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2007 Jul-Aug;14(4):527-33. Epub 2007 Apr 25. PubMed PMID: 17460129; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2244902.

Mohtashemi M, Szolovits P, Dunyak J, Mandl KD. A susceptible-infected model of early detection of respiratory infection outbreaks on a background of influenza. J Theor Biol. 2006 Aug 21;241(4):954-63. Epub 2006 Mar 23. PubMed PMID: 16556450.

Ozonoff A, Forsberg L, Bonetti M, Pagano M. Bivariate method for spatio-temporal syndromic surveillance. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2004 Sep 24;53 Suppl:59-66. PubMed PMID: 15714631.

Ozonoff A, Webster T, Vieira V, Weinberg J, Ozonoff D, Aschengrau A. Cluster detection methods applied to the Upper Cape Cod cancer data. Environ Health. 2005 Sep 15;4:19. PubMed PMID: 16164750; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC1242352.

Reis BY, Kirby C, Hadden LE, Olson K, McMurry AJ, Daniel JB, Mandl KD. AEGIS: a robust and scalable real-time public health surveillance system. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2007 Sep-Oct;14(5):581-8. Epub 2007 Jun 28. PubMed PMID: 17600100; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC1975800.

Reis BY, Kohane IS, Mandl KD. An epidemiological network model for disease outbreak detection. PLoS Med. 2007 Jun;4(6):e210. PubMed PMID: 17593895; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC1896205.

Reis BY, Kohane IS, Mandl KD. Longitudinal histories as predictors of future diagnoses of domestic abuse: modelling study. BMJ. 2009 Sep 29;339:b3677. doi: 10.1136/bmj.b3677. PubMed PMID: 19789406; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2755036.

Reis BY, Mandl KD. Integrating syndromic surveillance data across multiple locations: effects on outbreak detection performance. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2003:549-53. PubMed PMID: 14728233; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC1479922.

Reis BY, Mandl KD. Syndromic surveillance: the effects of syndrome grouping on model accuracy and outbreak detection. Ann Emerg Med. 2004 Sep;44(3):235-41. PubMed PMID: 15332065.

Reis BY, Mandl KD. Time series modeling for syndromic surveillance. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2003 Jan 23;3:2. Epub 2003 Jan 23. PubMed PMID: 12542838; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC149370.

Reis BY, Pagano M, Mandl KD. Using temporal context to improve biosurveillance. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2003 Feb 18;100(4):1961-5. Epub 2003 Feb 6. PubMed PMID: 12574522; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC149941.

Wieland SC, Brownstein JS, Berger B, Mandl KD. Automated real time constant-specificity surveillance for disease outbreaks. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2007 Jun 13;7:15. PubMed PMID: 17567912; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC1919360.

Wieland SC, Brownstein JS, Berger B, Mandl KD. Density-equalizing Euclidean minimum spanning trees for the detection of all disease cluster shapes. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 May 29;104(22):9404-9. Epub 2007 May 22. PubMed PMID: 17519338; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC1890507.

Wieland SC, Cassa CA, Mandl KD, Berger B. Revealing the spatial distribution of a disease while preserving privacy. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Nov 18;105 (46):17608-13. Epub 2008 Nov 17. PubMed PMID: 19015533; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2584758.

Last Reviewed: August 27, 2014