Category : Faculty

The Mittal Institute’s recent panel webinar, “Educational Responses to COVID-19 in South Asia,” was moderated by Zainab Qureshi, LEAPS Director at Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD), Harvard Kennedy School. Together, the panelists discussed how COVID-19 has shut down traditional education programs throughout South Asia, from primary education to higher education. They highlighted the unique challenges the region is facing in the education sector, such as access to technology and the potential long-term effects of distance learning. 

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has saturated our society with massive amounts of data, from location data that measures social distancing efforts to apps, graphs, and charts modeling future trends or helping you assess your symptoms, all accessible at the click of a button. A recent article published in the Harvard Business Review, “Which Covid-19 Data Can You Trust?,” delves into the various technological solutions that have emerged in the face of the pandemic and the potential they pose to provide unreliable information to the populace and policymakers. More than ever, it has become essential to increase engagement between subject-matter experts and decision-makers to manage the reliability of COVID-19-related data moving forward.

The Mittal Institute’s latest panel webinar, “The Science Behind COVID-19,” was moderated by Dr. Jennifer Leaning, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Together, the panelists provided a deeper understanding of the science behind the COVID-19 virus, exploring the place of science in the COVID-19 response, and new methods of tracking transmission of the virus throughout South Asia through the use of mobile network data.