image: Lancet Commission chair Eliah Aronoff-Spencer (front) of UC San Diego attends the UN Science Summit in the fall of 2024 with Lancet Commission co-chairs Richard Carpiano (center back) of UC Riverside and global public health consultant Lara Vojnov (back second right) and colleagues Wendy MacNaughton (left, panelist and New York Times bestselling illustrator and graphic journalist) and Julie Makani (Wellcome Trust research fellow and associate professor in the Department of Haematology and Blood Transfusion at the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences).
Credit: Photo courtesy of Eliah Aronoff-Spencer, UC San Diego
The prestigious medical journal The Lancet has convened a new commission charged with recommending how to build more resilient communities in the face of pandemics, climate change and other interconnected global challenges. Titled “The Lancet Commission on U.S. Societal Resilience in a Global Pandemic Age: Lessons for the Present from the Future,” the commission is chaired by Eliah Aronoff-Spencer, M.D., Ph.D., of UC San Diego and will operate over the next four years.
“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, professor of medicine and design in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at 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. “We also must go beyond technical solutions and find better ways of engaging and connecting people, harnessing community-powered innovation, ensuring that solutions are locally viable, and truly serve people’s needs while protecting our nation’s health security.”
The commission’s leadership includes Richard Carpiano, Ph.D., M.P.H., professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside, and Lara Vojnov, Ph.D., a global public health consultant, who serve as co-chairs.
“The idea is to go upstream and address fundamental societal and ecological issues—the major challenges confronting us in 2025,” said Carpiano. “Imagine standing by a raging river, seeing people swept away. 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 exactly what we aim to do.”
More than 20 commissioners from fields including medicine, environmental science, economics, policy, media and technology will contribute their expertise. The commission’s work will unfold in three major phases: Planning and community building, which will lay the foundation for the commission’s research, establishing objectives and forming collaborative teams. Fact-finding and landscape analysis, in which the team will examine case studies in the U.S. and internationally, engaging with stakeholders at every level—from local communities to global organizations such as the United Nations. Collaborative simulation and speculative design, in which the team will consider diverse threats and opportunities to produce a future-oriented report, followed by the creation of living strategic roadmaps with policy recommendations to guide communities toward resilience.
In addition, the commission and associated Resilient Collective (resilient.ucsd.edu) are collaborating with the United Nations Science Summit on developing a resilient community dimension framework for the post-sustainable development goal era. This partnership underscores the commission’s mission to shape practical strategies that foster health security, economic stability and social well-being worldwide.
With Aronoff-Spencer, Carpiano and Vojnov, the commission includes:
· Berit Anderson of Strategic News Service
· Reed Berkowitz of Curiouser LLC
· Rick Bright of Bright Global Health
· Renee DiResta of Stanford Internet Observatory
· Patricia Garcia of School of Public Health, Cayetano Heredia University (UPCH)
· Tina George Karippacheril of the World Bank Group
· M. Chris Gibbons of the Greystone Group, Inc.
· Richard Gold of McGill University Faculty of Law
· Shannon Hader of American University School of International Service
· Mark S. Handcock of UCLA Department of Statistics and Data Science
· Linda A. Hill of Harvard Business School
· Sean Hillier of York University School of Health Policy & Management
· Ilesh Jani of Mozambique Ministry of Health
· Paula Lantz of University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
· Bill Lober of University of Washington Department of Global Health
· Mohsen Malekinejad of UC San Francisco School of Medicine
· Jonna Mazet of UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine
· Camille Nebeker of UC San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science
· Anita Raj of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine
· Stuart “Stu” Sandin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego
· Robert “Chip” Schooley of UC San Diego School of Medicine
· Davey Smith of UC San Diego School of Medicine
· Steffanie Strathdee of UC San Diego School of Medicine
· Steve Wanyee of IntelliSOFT
The Lancet article announcing the commission is available online at “Announcing the Lancet Commission on US Societal Resilience in a Global Pandemic Age: Lessons for the Present from the Future.”