VSSL Joins New Interdisciplinary Covid-19 Vaccine Project

In collaboration with UW colleagues Dr. Gary Hsieh (Human Centered Design & Engineering) and Dr. Katharina Reinecke (Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering), VSSL member Joshua Liao was recently awarded a grant from the Vaccine Confidence Fund to study how to use social media and improve people's trust and confidence in COVID-19 vaccine research.

The Fund is a flagship program of the Alliance for Advancing Health Online, and seeks to "bring together members from the technology, health, global development and academic sectors to advance public understanding of how social media and other online platforms can be leveraged to increase vaccination confidence and vaccine uptake."

Per the Fund:

"Grantees from the Fund were selected from a pool of almost 300 applicants and cover research topics touching all regions of the world with a strong focus on historically excluded or marginalized communities and authentic community engagement."

This interdisciplinary work at UW brings together Drs. Hsieh, Reinecke, and Liao's collective expertise in human-computer interaction and behavioral science.

Their project will use principles from human-centered design and behavioral science to understand strategies for communicating science and metascience information, with a focus on engagement with individuals from historically marginalized communities, which will then be tested in a series of large-scale online studies.

Congrats to the project team!