Human-centered design can help San Diego address the COVID-19 pandemic and put our city on course to be more sustainable, too. That’s the basic premise of the 2020 edition of the city-wide design challenge from UC San Diego’s Design Lab called “Design for San Diego,” or D4SD for short.
Biological Sciences Assistant Professor Justin Meyer oversees a laboratory that specializes in the evolution of viruses and the natural processes that hasten their spread. He grows viruses in petri dishes and studies them as they evolve in real time, every so often watching them mutate onto new species.
To better understand early signs of coronavirus and the virus' spread, physicians around the country and data scientists at UC San Diego are working together to use a wearable device to monitor more than 12,000 people, including thousands of healthcare workers. The effort is already underway at hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area and at the University of West Virginia.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Gov. Newsom’s stay-at-home order, the UC San Diego campus community must now depend on technology more than ever to teach, learn and work. For the university’s Career Center and Alumni offices, the call for social distancing meant transforming the third edition of their successful Take a Triton to Work (TATTW) program into a fully online experience for the first time.
Even as the coronavirus pandemic has mushroomed throughout communities, so too have the offers of support and resources.
As anxiety and tension become daily emotions in the midst of dire news reports and a mandate to stay-at-home, La Jolla resident Dene Oliver said he is “…feeling sad, and yet hopeful and optimistic at the same time.” His hope and optimism are focused on the University of California San Diego, one of the nation’s leading research institutions.
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