The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC DOHMH) is a world leader in the use of electronic data for disease surveillance. The syndromic surveillance systems maintained by the Bureau of Communicable Disease process nearly four million emergency department encounters, 1.5 million calls for emergency medical service ambulance dispatch, 14 million pharmacy transactions, and over one million school health nurse visits annually. Sloan provided early support in 2002 ($700,000) and 2003 ($697,000) to the New York Academy of Medicine to help the NYC Department of Health to develop and disseminate the SATSCAN syndromic surveillance software which was very successful. Since that time, new tools and methods applicable to syndromic surveillance have been developed elsewhere, and NYC DOHMH would like to put them into practice. Funds from this grant will allow NYC DOHMH to make their system "state of the art", share their improvements with other public health departments across the country, and expand the applicability of electronic data for disease surveillance by incorporating novel statistical approaches and additional data streams for outbreak and cluster detection. Over the next three years, the NYC DOHMH team will conduct three main activities. First, they will review the literature of recent research and syndromic applications in other local jurisdictions. Second, they will analyze and evaluate select statistical methodologies that can be applied to existing data to determine if they prove more useful and informative for disease surveillance. Third, they plan to apply selected methodologies to everyday practice and prepare a user's guide-a basic how-to guide-that includes their code and examples of data visualizations.

This grant supports a project by Michael Levy, Director of the Council on Foreign Relations' program on Energy Security and Climate Change, to institute a major research program on challenges facing the United States at the intersection of energy and national security and the policy options available for addressing them, with a particular focus on oil. Funds will support the work of a full-time fellow at the Council, one to two adjunct fellows, and several outside scholars commissioned to do analysis and research. Other funds will support a series of roundtables and workshops designed to facilitate information sharing among the community of researchers and to expose interested younger scholars to work in the field, and outreach efforts designed to educate journalists, government officials, industry stakeholders, and the public. The proposed research agenda will cover several areas, including: ? understanding the security consequences of oil production, consumption, and trade; ? analyzing U.S. policies that could promote reduced demand for oil, including in developing countries; ? understanding major oil producing countries, especially Iraq and Iran; and ? assessing policies that maintain or strengthen the functioning of oil markets and the geopolitics of natural gas. In total, this project promises to make a major contribution to the ongoing discussions of energy security in the United States and should raise the quality of this discussion significantly.