Image credit: Themba Hadebe / AP.

Open science means vaccine equity.

An open letter to WHO Member States,
signed by 290 scientists in 36 countries.

In 2019, two postdocs at Georgetown University set out to connect researchers around the world who were working on a common problem: forecasting viral emergence.

Today, Verena is a network of over 40 scientists led by 16 investigators in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, and supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under a Biology Integration Institute grant.

Our research has been cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the 2023 Economic Report of the President, and has been covered on PBS News Hour and in The New York Times and The Atlantic.

Predicting and preventing

the next pandemic

We’re training the next generation of biologists to think across scales and disciplines.

All of our research is preprinted, and all of our publications are available without a paywall.

We’re building a global atlas of animal immunology — and using AI to understand the rules that govern viral emergence.

We build open databases that document host-virus interactions in nature and in the laboratory.

We’re working together to make open, equitable science the norm in infectious disease research.

We provide fellowships, small grants, and networking opportunities for researchers working on emerging infectious diseases.