WIDER News
NTD modelling consortium publishes
The NTD modelling consortium, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, publishes its initial findings into the control of 9 Neglected Tropical Diseases. These papers focus on the WHO goals of erradication by 2020, and highlight the successes being made in combatting these diseases but also the work that remains if targets are to be met.
The work is published in Parasites and Vectors, and includes 15 scientific papers.
Warwick assist EFSA in small hive beetle outbreak
Modellers from the WIDER group at Warwick have been assisting EFSA (the European Food Safety Authority) with their work on studying the small hive beetle outbreak, which began in Italy in September 2014 with an eradication program currently in place.
Kat wins (again) !
I'm very pleased to announce that Kat Rock has just won funding from JSPS to spend time with Hiroshi Nishiurah in Tokyo. Hopefully this will help to strengthen collaboration between the two groups.
Honeybee trip to Brussels
A group of researchers from Warwick, under the Warwick Global Research Priority of Food, recently visited Brussels to meet with industry, conservation and policy groups, to discuss their work into honeybee health and disease.
BBSRC award £601,861 to study Footrot in sheep
Professor Laura Green and Dr Kevin Purdy and Professor Matthew Keeling from WIDER, the School of Life Sciences and the Mathematics Institute have been awarded £601,861 to study the issue of Footrot in sheep. The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council's (BBSRC) Animal Health Research Club (ARC) announced the award on Friday 27th March 2015 as part of a range of new research projects to improve the health of livestock.
Warwick wins AMR grant from EPSRC
Warwick researchers, led by Matt Keeling from WIDER have just won a prestigious EPSRC grant "Bridging the Gaps Between the Engineering and Physical Sciences and Antimicrobial Resistance". This is a cross campus application with staff from Chemistry, Physics, Maths, Engineering, Life Sciences and Medicine.
Our primary objective is to develop the University of Warwick's potential to be a centre for world-leading research in Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). This will be achieved by bringing together cutting-edge researchers from EPS disciplines (Engineering, Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics) with proven expertise in AMR from Medical and Life Sciences.
In turn this primary aim will be enabled by a range of secondary objectives:
1) To stimulate new avenues of research by bringing predictive and quantitative modelling approaches to the considerable challenges posed by AMR, including understanding mechanisms of bacterial control, identification of new drug targets and optimal control in health-care settings.
2) To enable new interdisciplinary collaborations between EPS disciplines and Medical / Life Sciences, both within Warwick and with other world-leading Universities. This in turn will generate new funding applications and thereby open avenues for further long-term collaborations.
3) To promote the sciences necessary to combat AMR to the next generation of EPS scientists at all career stages, from senior academics to post-doctoral researchers and PhD students.
4) To provide the flexibility in terms of personnel and pump priming to fund speculative cross-disciplinary research between investigators that are internationally-leading in their respective fields.
5) To fully engage outside of the usual academic community with industry and public-health organisations through multiple formats of meetings and workshops.