This Thursday at Change UW CSE Professor Richard Anderson will talk about Software and Global Health: Assessing vaccine cold chains from national equipment inventories. Immunization is recognized as one of the most successful public health interventions ever devised. A critical component of immunization programs is the vaccine cold chain – the cold storage to keep vaccines safe from manufacture to eventual delivery to a child. Countries face challenges in managing their cold chains in ensuring sufficient storage capacity, optimizing allocation of equipment to control energy costs, and planning for the introduction of new and more expensive vaccines. The Cold Chain Equipment Manager (CCEM) project at PATH aims to support these processes through the development of cold chain planning and inventory tools. This talk describes the process of introducing the CCEM software to four countries in Africa and the results of using CCEM to analyze the country cold chain inventories. We will examine the roles of multiple stakeholders in adoption and use of the system. Main challenges include creating a system and work process that allows the equipment inventory to be kept up to date, and making information from the inventory accessible so that it can be used by decision makers. These will be addressed in future work through the development of web based tools with improved analysis and visualization capabilities and simplification of the modeling mechanism that the tool uses. Richard Anderson is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He graduated with a B.A. in Mathematics from Reed College in 1981, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1985. In 1986 he joined the University of Washington after a one-year Postdoc at the Mathematical Science Research Institute in Berkeley, CA. He has held visiting positions with the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India and with the Learning Sciences and Technology group at Microsoft Research. For the last two years he has been collaborating with PATH, a Seattle based public health NGO, applying computing technology to a range of problems in global health. *What:* Richard Anderson on Software and Global Health: Assessing vaccine cold chains from national equipment inventories. *When:* Thursday, January 5th at noon *Where:* Paul Allen Center, Room 203