While the search for a vaccine to defeat the deadly Ebola disease continues, some non-medical students and faculty are joining the battle through data.
A team of students and volunteers led by a UNC-Chapel Hill journalism professor is rendering aid specifically to Liberia with a new website designed to better coordinate the battle.
Ebola in Liberia went online earlier this week.
“This project has been rewarding in so many ways,” said Steven King, an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “Frustrating, but rewarding, knowing that we’re hopefully helping to ease a pretty scary situation in Liberia and knowing that our students can affect this kind of change through this kind of work.”
King and a team of volunteers created the website after a request from Lewis Brown, minister of information for Liberia.
Relief workers hope the data will help them make better-informed decisions about how to contain the Ebola outbreak.
The site contains graphics and a color-coded map as well as other information.
The team included students from the journalism school as well as the School of Information and the computer science department plus recent journalism school graduates.
