Professor Xavier Didelot is a member of a team of Warwick researchers awarded a £1m grant from the Wellcome Trust to work with East African countries in their emergency preparations for COVID-19 as the pandemic spreads across Africa.

https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/warwick_researchers_to/

Congratulations to Tom Berrett on being awarded the Royal Statistical Society Research Prize . The citation notes his outstanding contributions to understanding and developing nearest neighbour methods for classification, entropy and related functional estimation, and his highly original work on independence and conditional independence testing. Tom will join the Department of Statistics in July.
https://www.statslife.org.uk/news/4453-announcing-our-honours-recipients-for-2020

The £4 million grant from NIHR is part of an announced £58.7 million research investment to protect the public from health threats such as antimicrobial resistance, air pollution and infectious diseases. The HPRU in Genomics and Enabling Data will ensure that cutting edge genomic methods are being used to protect public health.

In partnership with researchers from Public Health England, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge, Professor Didelot will lead a team of researchers from the School of Life Sciences, Mathematics Institute, Department of Statistics and Warwick Medical School. The research aims to reduce the burden of infectious diseases, investigate the likely effects of control strategies, and make sure that healthcare resources, especially antibiotics, are used optimally. Over the next five years, scientific researchers from all four institutions will use their expertise to look at the genomes of infectious diseases with one collective data bank to improve English public health.

Professor Didelot comments:

“It is a great pleasure and privilege to have been selected to lead this Health Protection Research Unit. I am looking forward to working closely with all partners at the University of Warwick, Public Health England, the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
This grant from NIHR means that over the next five years we will work together to develop the use of new genomic methods to protect and improve the nation's public health, including looking at the detection and spread of diseases, or tackling antibiotic resistance.”