OnApril 3, 2020, as COVID-19 was already ravaging some U.S. communities, the National Science Foundation issued a call for non-medical, immediately implementable research to fight the disease as part of CARES, Congress' Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. Within a week, University of Virginia associate professor of chemical engineeringBryan Bergerand his longtime collaborator,Jeffery Klauda, responded. Berger and Klauda, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Maryland, proposed combining the power of mathematical modeling with high-throughput testing to fast-track answers crucial to understanding how SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, propagates within its human host. High-throughput research automates experiments to increase the number that can be performed and speed the time to discovery.