Richard Carpiano
UC Riverside professor Richard Carpiano will co-chair an international commission convened by the medical journal The Lancet to make communities worldwide more resilient to global health threats in the face of pandemics, climate change, and other challenges.
“The idea is to go upstream to get at fundamental societal and ecological issues—the substantial challenges that are facing us in 2025,” said Carpiano, a public health expert with UCR’s School of Public Policy.
Called the Lancet Commission on U.S. Societal Resilience in a Global Pandemic Age: Lessons for the Present from the Future, the group will explore the principles, policies, and innovations needed to bolster community and societal preparedness for current and future global health threats. The commission seeks to shift the focus from pandemic-specific preparedness to broader societal resilience, addressing the underlying vulnerabilities and systemic issues that worsen crises. Taking a community-centered approach, it aims to advance local solutions while fostering global collaboration.
“The idea is to anticipate problems and get ahead of them, rather than continuing the reactive ways we’ve approached crises,” Carpiano said. “During COVID, we saw it’s a long way from the lab to people’s arms. Resilience is about addressing those gaps—logistics, education, culture, and policy—so communities are ready for anything.”
The commission will meet over the next four years, with its work taking place in phases. After planning and preparation, commissioners will focus on fact-finding and analysis through case studies. Next, forecasting exercises addressing threats and opportunities will lead to a speculative-future landscape report. Finally, the team will produce a strategic roadmap, including policy recommendations, to help navigate this landscape through resilient communities.
Of the more than 25 commissioners, eight are from UC campuses, including co-chair Eliah Aronoff-Spencer, an assistant professor of infectious diseases and global public health at the UC San Diego School of Medicine.
“We want to harness the cutting-edge capabilities emerging today, such as transformational point-of-care technologies, agentic BioAI, and mobile networks that organize community-based response teams. In addition, we want to find new ways of engaging people to ensure these solutions truly serve local needs,” Aronoff-Spencer said.
The other UC commissioners are Jonna Mazet of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine; Camille Nebeker of the UC San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science’ Stuart “Stu” Sandin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego” Robert “Chip” Schooley of the UC San Diego School of Medicine; Davey Smith of the UC San Diego School of Medicine; and Steffanie Strathdee of the UC San Diego School of Medicine.
“Imagine you’re standing by a raging river, and you see people drowning and getting swept away,” Carpiano said. “We can keep reaching in and pulling people out, or we can go upstream and see what it really is that’s putting everybody at risk. That’s what we are trying to do here.”
Header photo: Cars wait in line at a drive up COVID-19 testing site in Dallas, Texas, in June of 2020. (Photo by Montinique Monroe/Getty Images)