tuberculosis

Tuberculosis Tracking App Earns Top Honors in Dean’s Innovation Challenge

Doctoral students Jiujia Zhang (ENG) and Lauren Linde (SPH) and SPH faculty members Leonardo Martinez and Meredith Brooks won the challenge with a scalable web-based app designed to optimize the placement of community-based TB screening units to maximize detection effectiveness.

A web-based application to increase efficiency of mobile tuberculosis screening programs in Lima, Peru has emerged from a field of four finalists as the first-prize winner in the inaugural Dean’s Innovation Challenge

CAMP-TB (Co-designing an App to Increase the Efficiency of Mobile Screening Programs for Tuberculosis) won the top honors after a six-month evaluation period that determined which project received the most visibility outside the University. The CAMP-TB team of Meredith Brooks, assistant professor of global health; Leonardo Martinez, assistant professor of epidemiology; Jiujia Zhang, a PhD student in electrical engineering at BU; and Lauren Linde, a PhD student in epidemiology at SPH, was recognized with a prize of $5,000 to be divided equally among the members.

CAMP-TB has been a deeply rewarding journey for her team, says Brooks, who emphasized the successful collaboration with Socios En Salud, one of the largest NGOs operating in the country. Their help was key in co-designing a scalable web-based App that bridges data-driven analytics with front-line tuberculosis screening, guided by implementation science to ensure real-world impact, Brooks says.

“By partnering with local stakeholders in Lima for iterative design and pilot testing, we’ve created a user-friendly tool endorsed for its ease and effectiveness, empowering communities to optimize mobile tuberculosis screening and reduce disease burden efficiently,” Brooks says.

This project’s success, including being adopted in the local setting and poised for broader expansion in Peru, “showcases how thoughtful, collaborative research can deliver equitable digital health solutions to transform tuberculosis detection globally,” Brooks says.

The CAMP-TB project draws on evidence gathered from the team’s prior research in Lima which showed that data-driven models like those used in the app could increase TB detection rates up to five-fold by optimizing placement of mobile x-ray units used to diagnose the disease.

As an engineering PhD student primarily focused on theoretical work in machine learning and optimization, Zhang says, “It’s deeply rewarding to see how those theories translate into practical solutions that support global health efforts. Collaborating with colleagues at SPH on CAMP-TB has highlighted the power of interdisciplinary work in improving access to efficient, life-saving screening tools.”

Linde, a PhD student in epidemiology, says that CAMP-TB provided an exciting opportunity as a pilot project to put their research findings into practice. “It was pretty amazing to see what originally started as more of a theoretical simulation project turn into a tangible web application, and to hear from colleagues on the ground about how it could be integrated into their daily workflow,” Linde says. “In conducting research as a PhD student, I find it’s often easy to feel like there is a large gulf between academia and day-to-day public health practice. This project was incredibly rewarding in demonstrating an example of how we can bridge that gap.”

The Dean’s Innovation Challenge was launched by Interim Dean Michael Stein in January 2025, who created it as an opportunity to both encourage novel collaborations across the school and to highlight the energy and creativity of SPH’s faculty, staff, and students.

Stein reviewed applications from 19 teams with substantial input from a committee consisting of members from the faculty, staff, and student senates. Team projects could either be an offshoot of existing work or a novel idea, and each team submitted a one-page project summary that outlined the team’s proposed activities, the anticipated benefits, a vision for disseminating findings, and a brief budget.

In addition to CAMP-TB, the other three finalists were:

Mitigating Misinformation Around Weight Loss Supplements

Monica Wang, associate professor of community health sciences; Matthew Motta, assistant professor of health law, policy and management; Selenne Alatorre, senior research project manager; and Willa Rose, an MPH student, who expanded upon their prior research at the intersection of mental health and social media. Their project, titled “Disrupting Weight Loss Supplement Misinformation: An Influencer-Led Intervention,” leveraged popular content creators to increase the quantity and accuracy of information on the risks associated with the largely unregulated, multi-billion dollar weight loss supplement industry.

Monitoring Public Health Emergencies

Huimin Cheng, assistant professor of biostatistics, and Vedika Srivastava, a research scientist in the Department of Biostatistics, used their award to develop a new digital platform that integrates multiple public data sources to enhance early detection and response to emerging health threats. Their project, titled “Real-Time Data-Driven Early Warning System for Public Health Emergencies,” scraped geotagged social media posts, social networks, online news, Google search trends, and open-source government data such as air- and water-quality indices to enable identification of concerning developments. The technology could prove invaluable in mitigating the effects of future pandemics, note Cheng and Srivastava. Information leading to timely warnings and interventions during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, may have saved lives.

Preventing Drug Overdoses Among Adolescents

Debbie Cheng, assistant dean of data science and professor of biostatistics; Kimberly Nelson, associate professor of community health sciences; Nina Cesare, research scientist at BEDAC; Sarah Bagley, associate professor of medicine and pediatrics at the Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine; Amy Yule, associate professor of psychiatry at Chobanian & Avedisian SOM; and Christina Freibott, a PhD student in health services and policy research at SPH, developed a project to harness the power of peer education to reduce risk-taking behavior among adolescents. The team collaborated with students from John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, a Boston public school in Roxbury, to execute the project, titled “Development of a Peer Overdose Intervention and Training Program for High School Students: An Equity-Centered Approach.”

Over the course of 10 in-person sessions, the researchers and students co-developed an inclusive, culturally sensitive curriculum for educating high school students on risk factors for drug overdose. After training youth leaders to administer the curriculum to their peers, the researchers and their student collaborators applied a novel tool for gauging age-appropriate measures of overdose knowledge and drug-related risk behaviors. If the program continues to prove effective, they hope to make the training guidelines available online for use by other schools and in future research.