In January 2020, Johns Hopkins Associate Professor Lauren Gardner and a team of scientists and engineers created a global map that tracks the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths. The map – known as the Hopkins Dashboard – quickly became a trusted resource for citizens, media outlets, government leaders, and the business community across the planet; since March, Hopkins’ COVID sites have hosted more than 476 million visitors, and 1 bllion page views. But the early months of building a first-of-its-kind global health data analysis tool were spent hunting for reliable, trustworthy data, exposing worldwide inadequacies in data infrastructure. Dr. Gardner and other data scientists will describe how they built the dashboard during the first global pandemic of the digital age.