Lauren Gardner

Lauren Gardner is the Alton and Sandra Cleveland Professor in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and holds a joint appointment in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is the creator of the interactive web-based dashboard used by public health authorities, researchers, and the general public around the globe to track the COVID-19 Pandemic. The dashboard debuted on January 22, 2020, and since has recorded more than 200 billion feature requests, which are the number of interactions visitors have with the underlying data available on the site. One of six Johns Hopkins experts who briefed congressional staff about the novel coronavirus outbreak during a Capitol Hill event in early March 2020, Gardner was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020 for “democratizing data” and filling “a void of public health leadership” during the pandemic. Gardner is a specialist in modeling Infectious Disease Risk. Her work focuses holistically on Virus Diffusion as a function of climate, land use, human behavior, mobility and other contributing risk factors.