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 address fundamental societal and ecological issues—the substantial challenges that are facing us in 2025,” said Carpiano, a public health expert and sociologist with UCR’s School of Public Policy.
“Imagine standing by a raging river, seeing people being swept away,” said Carpiano. “We can keep pulling them out one by one, or we can go upstream to address what’s putting them at risk in the first place. That’s what we are trying to do.”
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.
“How can we anticipate problems and get ahead of them, rather than continuing the reactive ways we’ve approached crises?” Carpiano said. "For example, during the COVID pandemic, we saw the challenges of getting new vaccines from the lab to people’s arms. Resilience is about addressing those gaps—logistics, education, culture, and policy—to make efforts more effective, efficient, and equitable.”
The commission’s leadership also includes corresponding author Eliah Aronoff-Spencer, professor of medicine and design in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, director of the Center for Health Design at the UC San Diego Design Lab, and UC San Diego Qualcomm Institute affiliate; and Lara Vojnov, Ph.D., a global public health consultant, who serve as co-chairs.
“We need to refocus on strengthening our society by understanding what makes communities resilient—from transformational technologies like AI and synthetic biology to local governance and stewardship,” said Aronoff-Spencer. “We also must go beyond technical solutions and find better ways of engaging and connecting people, ensuring that solutions are locally viable, and truly serve people’s needs while protecting our nation’s health security.”
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 representing a diversity of expertise, 10 are from UC campuses. The other UC commissioners are Mark S. Handcock of UCLA Department of Statistics and Data Science; Mohsen Malekinejad of UC San Francisco School of Medicine; 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.
