The Viral Emergence Research Initiative (VERENA) is a global collaboration to advance viral prediction.

Our team includes ecologists, virologists, data scientists, and policy experts. We’ve focused on recruiting junior scientists with an interdisciplinary skillset, including labwork, bioinformatics, and statistical modeling.

Our team is named after St. Verena, the patron saint of lighthouses and a caretaker of the sick.

Dozens of scientific teams are developing models to predict which viruses could infect humans, which animals host them, and where they could emerge.

We’re joining these teams together, to try and explore new ground.