Defining Core Competencies and Training Priorities for Infectious Disease Dynamics as a Discipline

Infectious disease dynamics is a growing, interdisciplinary field that aims to advance the understanding of how infectious diseases spread and how to control them. Most trainees enter the field through established disciplines and assemble ad hoc training and experience in infectious disease dynamics. As such, expectations for doctoral training remain largely implicit and highly variable across institutions. Other fields have formalized training expectations though defined training competencies, which promote transparency and alignment across institutions without prescribing specific approaches to training or research. In this paper, we set out to define the core competencies that characterize doctoral-level expertise in infectious disease dynamics. We assembled a team of seven people at the University of Utah and drafted a competency set. We then validated the competency set with experts in the field using an e-Delphi process. We did not restrict participation by location, job title, or sector. We set an a priori threshold for consensus to 70% and sent out two rounds of surveys to experts, asking them to rank the competencies by order of importance. Our team initially generated a list of 13 proposed Cross-cutting, 24 Applied Modeling, 17 Data Science, and 16 Theory competencies. After completing two rounds of validation, we validated two tracks comprised of 7 Cross-cutting, 10 Applied Modeling, and 12 Theory competencies. This study represents the first structured effort to define doctoral-level competencies in infectious disease that can help guide curriculum development, comprehensive exam preparation, and trainee evaluation, while also supporting alignment between academic training and workforce needs.