LEADERS THE WORLD NEEDS
Brian Dixon ’01
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s students at DePauw, neither Brian Dixon ’01 nor Brian Gau ’96 anticipated working in the consequential jobs they hold now. And they certainly didn’t expect to be entangled in the most monumental global health crisis in a century. But these scientists, with their dissimilar expertise and disparate roles, are both deeply involved in the battle against COVID-19. As the director of public health informatics at the Regenstrief Institute and the Indiana University Richard M. Fairbank School of Public Health, Dixon developed the first comprehensive informational dashboard in the country and provides data about trends to Indiana political and public health leaders as they seek to manage the COVID crisis. He was summoned to the Statehouse by Gov. Eric Holcomb and is a frequent source to Indiana news media. His wife, Kathryn Longer Dixon ’03, told him, “‘you’re a big deal now.’ I was like, ‘I guess I kind of am.’ I was not expecting that to happen.” As a principal scientist and a protein mass spectrometrist at Pfizer Inc., Gau worked on the COVID-19 vaccine
48 I DEPAUW MAGAZINE SPRING 2021
approved by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use. “I had dreams,” Gau said, “but not this big.” n
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ixon has worked almost 20 years at Regenstrief, which functions as a think tank for public health leaders and “increasingly play(s) a critical role in providing both data and data analysis for our partners.” When Regenstrief launched its dashboard, “no one else was doing that,” he said. “( Johns) Hopkins had their dashboard first, but they were showing globally where cases were, but not hospitalizations and what populations and subpopulations were being impacted most by this virus. “It’s the first one of its kind, especially at the state level, and it’s really the first of its kind to look at data from multiple hospitals, multiple health care systems, across a community.” The dashboard became the envy of other states, and a number of leaders contacted Dixon in the hope of replicating it. One even tried to hire him to build that state’s dashboard, but he said, “I’ve got
Photo: Reigenstrief
DePauw-trained scientists enmeshed in fight against COVID-19
enough on my plate.” Indiana news media took notice too, and have regularly interviewed him for stories about the virus’s progression. As a result, Regenstrief has become a household name, Dixon said, and “people now know what we do and what we are.” He admits that such attention from the news media and the governor was nervewracking at first, but it’s a role that he savors for his institute. For the second time in the institute’s 50-year history, its value to the state is being noticed, he said. The first time was in 1972, when Regenstrief “put Indiana on the map as a leader in health information technology” when it developed the electronic medical record. He also admits that it can be frustrating when he offers his best advice to decisionmakers, only to have them reject it. “Of course, they have to deal with the politics,” he said. And COVID-19 and its attendant mask-wearing have been particularly political – more so than any other health issue since, perhaps, seat belt laws were enacted, Dixon said. “I just try to be there to provide the objective truth, provide scientific input into
