The Institute for Resilient Environmental and Energy System’s Latin American Sustainability Initiative (LASI) hosted its first winter workshop in Feb. 2023 that focused on strengthening capacity building and cooperation between the University of Oklahoma and the Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa (UNSA) in Peru.
“It is exciting to bring together the leaders of one of our OU-UNSA projects focused on the creation of the Center for Monitoring and Control of Public Health in Arequipa, to be led by our Peruvian colleagues with guidance of OU experts,” Victor Maqque, Ph.D., managing director of LASI and affiliate faculty in the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, said. “This week of discussion, hands-on training and envisioning the role and challenges of the center is a significant step toward strengthening the sustainability of our OU-UNSA partnership.”
The week-long technical workshop hosted Jesus Silva, Ph.D., principal investigator, and Victor Cabrera, Ph.D., co-investigator, along with 14 UNSA faculty and students who participated online. In-person and online sessions included training on data visualization through data scraping, processing, and modeling; structure and capabilities of the PanViz visualization platform; predictive modeling; optimization modeling; theory of SEIR models; and SEIR model development in Excel sheets.
Sessions were led by OU faculty, including Charles Nicholson, Ph.D., Talayeh Razzagi, Ph.D., and Andrés Gonzáles, Ph.D., from the Gallogly College of Engineering, Charlie Kenney, Ph.D., from the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, Aaron Wendelboe, Ph.D., from the Hudson College of Public Health, David Ebert, Ph.D., Gopichandh Danala, Ph.D., and Mousa Hamad, Ph.D., from the Data Institute for Societal Challenges, and Hank Jenkins-Smith, Ph.D., from the Institute for Public Policy and Analysis and principal investigator of the OU team.
Through this partnership, LASI is also providing information and support for UNSA to develop an international review board to follow international research standards on human subject and cultural competency research.
