TJU Alumnus behind World Known Real-time Tracking Map for COVID-19

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out all around the world. It spreads very fast, and has infected more than three millions people and claimed over two hundred thousand lives till now. The tracking of the disease has become quite an important concern for the countries to take measures and make policy decisions. Thus the COVID-19 Real-time Tracking Map from Johns Hopkins University's online dashboard becomes the focus of the world. PhD Candidate Du Hongru, who graduated from Tianjin University’s school of Chemical Engineering and Technology in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree, now is working on this tracking map to report to the world.

Launched on January 22, this real-time tracking map is created and maintained by Lauren Gardner, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Civil and Systems Engineering, together with her two Chinese doctoral students, Dong Ensheng and Du Hongru.

Du’s main work is to write code for automatic updates to speed up efficiency and compare the data they collected with the numbers released by the World Health Organization (WHO), ensuring data consistency and accuracy. There are huge challenges since these data sources are all in different formats and often different languages. Du and his team members need to gather each data source, organize and adjust them into the format they need, then upload it to the dashboard.

With extraordinary efforts, the team has maintained the updating of the COVID-19 tracking map, the most cited source of pandemic data for government officials, public health scholars and mainstream media in many countries. Now the tracking map can automatically update the data. In the future they plan to focus on the modelling of the data to make risk assessments of the pandemic and predict its development.

Recalling his life in Tianjin University, Du Hongru said, “Tianjin University fosters an air where all students are motivated to study hard and become better self. I still bear in mind the university motto -- to seek truth from facts. It always remind me to do things in a down-to-earth way. It’s like a kind of legacy that is passed on to every student. Those four years at TJU are most precious memories to me and it has helped me get better prepared to work on the cutting-edge technology and in a time of crisis like this, do my share of contributions to the world.”

Du Hongru is a Ph.D. student at the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) and a member of Infectious Disease Dynamic Group at JHU Bloomberg School of Public Health. He received his MS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and BS/BE in Material Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and Technology from the University of Edinburgh and Tianjin University respectively. His research interests are network modeling, machine learning, and optimizations. His current works have focused on mathematical modeling for COVID-19, understanding Zika transmission patterns in Puerto Rico, and Flu transmission patterns in the United States. He helped the development of the JHU CSSE COVID-19 Dashboard (https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6) and had an article published on the Lancet Infectious Diseases (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30120-1/fulltext). By April 29, 2020, this article has 319 citations.

By Wang Manling from the School of Chemical Engineering and Technology

Editor: Eva Yin