LONDON, ONT. -- It's called CanCOVID and it’s a new network that is bringing some of Canada's top experts in science, policy and health together to facilitate the nation’s COVID-19 research efforts.

Canada’s Chief Science Officer Mona Nemer mandated the creation of CanCOVID to optimize Canada’s research response to the COVID-19 public health crisis.

Two Western researchers are among the four-person steering team, leading the implementation of the CanCOVID platform. They are Sarah Gallagher, a Western physics and astronomy professor and Canadian Space Agency science advisor and computer science professor Mark Daley.

Gallaher says CanCOVID has two sets of goals. “One is to connect researchers together across the country so that we can bring all these talented people together to solve problems efficiently without leaving big gaps,” she says.

“The other goal is to tie all these expertise, bring it together and organize it so that we can communicate with the government in order that they can use the tools and outputs of the research community to drive their decisions.”

Gallagher says the project aims to make it easier for researchers working on different angles of the same problem to find each other using ‘Slack’ - an online messaging platform that organizes real-time group discussion into team-specific and topic-specific channels.

“You can think of it basically (as) a whole bunch of chat rooms, where each chat room is related to a specific research theme, and that is a place where researchers can communicate with each other, share ideas, post new results. If they see an article that's important they can post a link to it,” says Gallagher.

The network is designed to support collaboration, coordination and communication between scientists, clinical collaborators, funding agencies, government policy makers, and healthcare practitioners.

Given how quickly the COVID-19 research knowledge base is evolving, researchers may not realize that someone else in another city - maybe with a different set of skills - already has half the solution to their problem.

The CanCOVID network is by invitation and is restricted to verified members of the COVID-19 expert research and response community.

Ultimately, CanCOVID’s mission is to enable the agile, evidence-based decision making needed to help steer Canada safely through the COVID-19 pandemic.

The network launched two weeks ago and already has more than 1,400 members.