Really pleased to finally be able to tell everyone that there is a double success for SBIDER in the recently announced HPRUs (Health Protection Research Units).

Xavier Didelot (along with Noel McCarthy, Sophie Staniszewska, Matt Keeling, Elizabeth Wellington & Chris Quince from Warwick) have been awarded the HPRU in Genomics and Enabling Data.

Noel McCathy (agains with Xavier Didelot, Sophie Staniszewska & Matt Keeling from Warwick) is part of the team, led by Liverpool, that has been awarded the HPRU in Gastrointestinal Infections.

Both of these bring considerable prestige and impact to Warwick, together with the opportunity to work closely with Public Health England in these important health areas.

In early October, Edward Hill, Sophie Meakin and Benjamin Atkins, three young researchers from SBIDER and MathSys, travelled to Singapore to deliver a half-day satellite session at the Conference on Complex Systems (CCS 2019). The aim of the session, entitled ‘Challenges in Epidemiological Modelling’ (https://cem-ccs19.github.io/), was to stimulate discussion across disciplines regarding issues with data collection and curation, methodology and computation and the gap between research and policy, in both public and veterinary health scenarios. The session was a great success, with notable talks from Vittoria Colizza and Samuel Scarpino adding to an interesting and varied morning of talks. Given the positive feedback from all involved, they hope to deliver another edition of the satellite at CCS 2020. Ed, Sophie and Ben also all contributed talks in the ‘Diseases and Epidemiology’ parallel sessions during the main conference.

Erin Gorsich and her collaborators at Oregon State, Cardiff and Edinburgh Universities have been awarded an EEID NSF-BBSRC US UK collaborative grant to investigate how population connectivity drives exposure to parasites and immunity by comparing metapopulations of desert big horn sheep in southern California. This will be funded a two year PDRA at Warwick, as well as lab and field work at the other universities.