Arif Sadri, assistant professor at FIU’s Moss Department of Construction Management, has been awarded a $50,000 grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to research the viability of commercializing a new tool designed to capture spatio-temporal variations in social media content traffic related to major public health topics, like the COVID-19 pandemic.
This latest award complements Sadri’s recent NSF Rapid Response Research Grant, which supports his ongoing research on how society responds to major public health announcements as communicated and/or miscommunicated through social media. Sadri seeks to better understand the unique challenges faced by government agencies when disseminating such impactful health information to the public. Sadri’s research also looks at how the sharing of misinformation and opposing facts can be minimized, while ensuring that health information delivered via social media by government agencies remains accurate and consistent.
Sadri is using data collected from Twitter as proof-of-concept of how the public perceives critical health information, starting with data collected back when the pandemic first emergered to current efforts to return the country back to normalcy.
To learn more about Dr. Sadri and his research, visit https://sites.google.com/site/arifmsadri/.