Members of the Operation Outbreak team traveled to Cape Town and Geneva this month to facilitate several collaborative biosecurity education initiatives as part of the nonprofit’s expanding portfolio in the biosecurity space.
While its tools were developed primarily for classroom use beginning in 2017, Operation Outbreak’s dynamic simulation outputs are increasingly being leveraged by biosecurity professionals in training and conference settings.
In early December, Operation Outbreak COO Kian Sani and Chief of Staff Sellers Hill traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, to facilitate a tabletop exercise on outbreak detection and response for 15 early-career scientists from the Global South.
The training, which combined traditional tabletop elements with dynamic epidemiological outputs generated by the Operation Outbreak app, took place on the final day of the Training Course in Pathogen Detection and Biosecurity — a program organized by the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology and the United Nations Biological Weapons Convention Implementation Support Unit and funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.
The exercise simulated a suspected deliberate exposure event and challenged participants to craft a response strategy as a real-time fictional outbreak unfolded in the room.
The following week, the team traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, to attend the Seventh Session of the UN Working Group on the Strengthening of the Biological Weapons Convention, an international gathering at the Palace of Nations dedicated to bolstering global biological security cooperation.
There, they delivered an overview of the organization’s work during an NGO roundtable session for recipients of the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs Young Women for Biosecurity Fellowship and the Nuclear Threat Initiative Next Generation Delegation.
They also appeared on a panel as part of a side event focused on biosecurity education entitled “Advances in Biosecurity Education and Capacity Building Through Simulation, Networking, Scenarios and Hands-On Training.”
Other session speakers included Oscar Meless, Dr. Alessandro Marcello, Dr. Lijun Shang and Daniel Feakes, chief of the UN BWC Implementation Support Unit. Whitney Bowman-Zatzkin, director of the Bioeconomy Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also spoke on the panel.
The panel event ran concurrently with a simulated measles outbreak through the Operation Outbreak app and included the participation of more than 75 diplomats and organizational representatives.
These engagements reflect Operation Outbreak’s growing role at the intersection of science education and biosecurity, where simulation-based learning is helping practitioners test response strategies, strengthen collaboration, and build preparedness for emerging biological threats.
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.