DURHAM, NC — On October 22 and 23, the Operation Outbreak team joined Bridging the Gap, a conference organized by the North Carolina Association for Biomedical Research that brings together educators, business leaders, government officials, and others invested in K-16 STEM education across North Carolina.
Operation Outbreak Co-Founder and Director of Innovation and Training Dr. Todd Brown delivered an opening keynote where he described the origins and philosophy of Operation Outbreak’s experiential learning mission and invited the conference’s more than 100 attendees to join a live outbreak simulation.
A fictional influenza pathogen spread through the group using Bluetooth proximity on participants’ personal devices. As people networked and moved between sessions, they tracked their health status and made real-time decisions. Test proactively? Wear a mask? Vaccinate?
The platform keeps all user data pseudonymous, and after the simulation, the Outbreak Visualizer was used to show what had happened.
The data told a clear story: one superspreader had interacted with 79 people and was responsible for 14 transmissions while unvaccinated. Another participant interacted with 70 people and, being vaccinated for 97% of the simulation, didn’t transmit to anyone. That sparked some good-natured contact tracing as attendees worked to track down the source of their transmission. That’s what the Visualizer is built to do: make invisible data like pathogen transmission something participants can see and learn from.
Spending time at Bridging the Gap makes clear that North Carolina’s STEM educators are not waiting for someone else to close the gap. The most engaged classrooms are giving students real-world experience and practical application of what they’re learning. Across the state, educators are working across subjects and collaborating with colleagues to connect classroom content to real career pathways.
The conference engagement marked the most recent step in a broader effort by Operation Outbreak and NCABR to expand access to outbreak education throughout North Carolina. This year, Dr. Brown has also led trainings for dozens of educators at Wake Forest University and Appalachian State University.
The work is part of a year-long initiative supported by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to expand outbreak education and preparedness across North Carolina—Operation Outbreak’s deepest investment in a single region to date. In partnership with NCABR, the initiative is building educators’ capacity to bring outbreak simulations into their classrooms, reducing barriers to adoption, and creating new opportunities for students across the state to engage with epidemiology, public health, and STEM careers through experiential learning.
The initiative will also explore new ways to deliver Operation Outbreak programming at scale, including a train-the-trainer model for educators, resources and micro-credentials to support classroom implementation, and convenings that can bring students from multiple schools together for large-scale outbreak simulations. Together, these efforts are designed to build a sustainable statewide network for immersive outbreak, civic, and career education.
Media Contact:
Sellers Hill
+1 (857) 858-5798
sellers@operationoutbreak.org
www.operationoutbreak.org
About Operation Outbreak, Inc.
Operation Outbreak is a nonprofit organization that uses experiential learning and outbreak simulations to build practical outbreak preparedness skills among students, professionals, and policymakers worldwide.