Our Work

Drugs, vaccines, and medical devices can improve our health and save lives, but there are many challenges to enabling access to safe and effective products for all who need them, as well as ensuring the availability of accurate, understandable information on benefits and risks needed to ensure trust. COMPASS is focused on addressing US and global public health needs such as fighting antibiotic resistance and other emerging infectious disease threats, including through safe and effective vaccines.

Ongoing Work

Expert Vaccine Analysis Team

Founded in 2019 as the COVID Vaccine Analysis Team (COVAT) to provide facts and independent analysis on the emerging COVID-19 pandemic, particularly on issues surrounding rapid development and testing of new vaccines, the group hosted more than 50 journalist briefings and Q&A sessions, connecting communicators with independent scientists, including former leading government and industry vaccine experts. In 2025, COVAT was reconstituted as the Expert Vaccine Analysis Team (EVAT) to meet an emerging set of urgent challenges: escalating vaccine misinformation, outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, and the erosion of trust in institutions and public health, accompanied by inconsistent, at times inaccurate, government messaging and information. Today, EVAT provides facts and rapid analysis on emerging vaccine and outbreak issues to journalists, science writers, and public health communicators, helping people make better informed decisions that keep them and their communities safer and healthier.

EVAT members include former FDA, CDC, and HHS leaders, academicians, and policy experts with extensive expertise in vaccine science, immunization, medicine, communications, and public health.

Prior Projects

National Capital ROAR Coalition

Antimicrobial resistance is one of our most pressing public health threats. In an increasingly interconnected world, resistant organisms flow continuously across borders and through communities. Individual hospitals cannot address this challenge alone. COMPASS founded and led the Region Organized Against Resistance (ROAR), a coalition of health care and public health organizations in the National Capital Region dedicated to combating antibiotic resistance through sharing data and best practices at a regional level.

Assessment of Antibiotic Stewardship Efforts in Long-term Care Facilities

Overuse and misuse of antibiotics in nursing homes is a major factor driving resistance and affecting patients. Up to 70% of nursing home residents receive one or more courses of antibiotics in a year, and studies suggest that 40–75% of these prescriptions are inappropriate or unneeded.

To learn more about what DC’s nursing homes were doing and what kind of support they might need to monitor and prevent antimicrobial resistance, COMPASS and the ROAR Coalition partnered with the District of Columbia Department of Health to assess infection prevention, control and antibiotic use practices in D.C.’s skilled nursing facilities. COMPASS developed a deep dive site visit tool covering perspectives, practices, and goals of infection prevention/control and antibiotic stewardship in long-term care and visited facilities to talk with staff members who do this work day-to-day.

This in depth and in-person approach allowed us to better understand the realities and challenges nursing homes face, and how to address them. As part of this effort, COMPASS worked with DC DOH and others to identify  resources for staff members to use as they developed facility level stewardship programs and other interventions to enhance infection prevention and control.

Antibiotic Resistance Global Mapping

Despite increasing surveillance efforts, there are major gaps in our understanding of antimicrobial resistance rates and trends worldwide, particularly in geographic areas with weak public health and medical infrastructures. Paradoxically, such areas are likely at especially high risk to engender and be impacted by resistance due to factors such as over-the-counter antibiotic use, gaps in sanitation and infection control, and limited resources to diagnose and treat resistant infections. Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), are among the most worrisome and difficult to treat resistant pathogens. COMPASS was supported by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance system in a multi-year effort to map the prevalence of CRE in Africa and Southeast Asia. This project comprehensively mined diverse sources for relevant data, including both surveillance and scientific literature and data not included in typical analyses, such as open-source data and information from laboratories and health care facilities. Results of the analyses and mapping of these data have been widely shared both in publications and in publicly available databases:

Malchione, M. D., Torres, L. M., Hartley, D. M., Koch, M., & Goodman, J. L. (2019). Carbapenem and colistin resistance in Enterobacteriaceae in Southeast Asia: Review and mapping of emerging and overlapping challenges. International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, 54(4), 381–399. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2019.07.019

Mitgang, E. A., Hartley, D. M., Malchione, M. D., Koch, M., & Goodman, J. L. (2018). Review and mapping of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae in Africa: Using diverse data to inform surveillance gaps. International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, 52(3), 372–384. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2018.05.019

Venne, D. M., Hartley, D. M., Malchione, M. D., Koch, M., Britto, A. Y., & Goodman, J. L. (2023). Review and analysis of the overlapping threats of carbapenem and polymyxin resistant E. coli and Klebsiella in Africa. Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control, 12(1), 29. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13756-023-01220-4

Furthermore, the project catalyzed the development of new methods and approaches for finding and using diverse data types and global and non-traditional data sources in understanding the spread of antimicrobial resistance, as well as more generally as shared in:

Venne, D. M., Hartley, D. M., Dorris, C. S., Torres, L. M., Malchione, M. D., Mitgang, E. A., & Goodman, J. L. (2025). Strategies for identifying and using diverse global health data: Perspectives from data searching and meta-analyses on antimicrobial resistance. Discover Public Health, 22(1), 853. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12982-025-01245-7