Career Re-Entry Fellowship

Immunometabolic cross-talk in the inflamed diabetic heart Diabetic cardiomyopathy (dbCM) is a complication of type II diabetes (T2D), characterised by systemic inflammation, impaired cardiac function and disrupted metabolism. However, the impact of systemic inflammation on the development of the myocardial inflammation and cardiac metabolic derangement that lead to dbCM remain unknown. This study will address how chronic adaptive inflammation driven by systemic metabolic stress in T2D causes cardiac dysfunction. Specifically, I hypothesise that it is caused by inflammation due to T-cell infiltration and not by direct metabolic perturbations that can lead to impaired energetics (reduced PCr/ATP ratio). Specifically, the aim is to use integrated experimental approach combining metabolic analysis with T-cell phenotypic profiling in murine and human T2D to address three research challenges:

A. Does infiltration of cardiotropic T-cells impair cardiac substrate plasticity and energetics in dbCM?

B. Do myocardial succinate efflux and signalling via SUCNR1 promote cardiac Teff and/or Treg activation by modifying T-cell metabolism and do they enhance pro-inflammatory T-cell differentiation?

C. Does stimulation of GCK-mediated glycolysis increase regulatory T-cell migration to the heart causing a switch in the nature of immune response from pro-inflammatory to immunosuppressive? Does the resultant reduction in myocardial exposure to pro-inflammatory cytokines improve cardiac function and mitochondrial performance?

Grants awarded from 1 October 2005 to 30 June 2021

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)


Innovator Award

Oral Ketamine Capsules - A new potential treatment for Depression. A pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic assessment of Ketamine and Metabolites in a dose-escalating, placebo-controlled clinical trial in healthy subjects. Neurocentrx has developed oral capsule formulations of Ketamine, aiming to be new treatments for Depression. Ketamine is a synthetic drug created in the 1960’s. It is on the "essential medicine" list of the World Health Organisation (WHO), approved and licensed by health regulators worldwide as an injectable anaesthetic. More recently, and at sub-anaesthetic doses, clinical trials have shown that some patients with depression have a rapid response to injectable ketamine (hours or days). Most other anti-depressant medicines take many weeks to work. No oral ketamine products are currently available as a licensed medicine worldwide. Our project will assess oral capsules in healthy people in a clinical trial. We will assess absorption and excretion with increasing doses of drug and measure any side-effects. These data will be essential to accurately plan trials in depression patients where we will then look for benefits. Oral capsules could be used at home, and are hoped to be a cheaper treatment option, with fewer side-effects for patients. The summary above may be amended from time to time by mutual agreement of the Parties. For this clause agreement by email will be sufficient to render a valid amendment to the summary).


Innovator Award

The evaluation of novel GBS conjugates prepared from GBS capsular polysaccharides and GBS conserved surface proteins’ Group B Streptococcus (GBS) bacterial infection is a major health concern and a leading cause of sepsis and meningitis in infants, particularly in Africa. A promising prevention for GBS infection in newborns is maternal immunization with a GBS vaccine. Currently no vaccine for GBS is available. Several conjugate GBS vaccines using GBS surface-expressed polysaccharides linked to carrier proteins are under development. We are proposing a novel vaccine design using GBS polysaccharides conjugated to GBS conserved surface proteins which induce immune responses in infected individuals, making them potential candidates as carrier proteins for novel GBS vaccines. It combines two virulence factors of GBS with the potential to provide not only enhanced overall protection compared to traditional conjugate vaccines but also to potentially provide protection against those serotypes not included in the vaccine. It could lead to the development of an affordable and cost-effective vaccine that protects against all GBS serotypes.


Innovator Award

Preclinical Toxicology Testing and IND application for a Novel Cholera Conjugate Vaccine Cholera is a disease of inequity that continues to disproportionately affect the world’s poorest and
most vulnerable people. An oral cholera vaccine (OCV) is available and in use around the world,
but it has lower efficacy in young children than in adults and a relatively short duration of protection
necessitating re-vaccination every few years. We are developing a new conjugate vaccine that
offers the promise of improved efficacy in all age groups, including those less than 5 years, and an
extended duration of protection, thus reducing the requirements for repetitive vaccination to sustain
population immunity. It can be implemented in place of OCV or as a complementary tool to prevent
or limit outbreaks in high risk settings, and build enduring population immunity that will costeffectively
control cholera over the decades required to build definitive public health capacities in at
risk countries.


Therapeutics Accelerator

Dr Richard Fitzgerald, Prof Gareth Griffiths, Prof Sir Munir Pirmohamed, Dr Mohammed Lamorde, Prof Catherine Orrell, Prof David Lalloo, Dr Shevin Jacob, Dr Thomas Fletcher, Prof Andrew Owen, Prof Francois Venter, Prof Thomas Jaki, Dr Bella Starling, Prof William Greenhalf, Sir Michael Jacobs

AGILE: Seamless Phase I/IIa Platform for the Rapid Evaluation of Candidates for COVID-19 treatment  Conventional evaluation of new medicines is not fast enough for a pandemic. Our aim is to accelerate this process, rapidly identifying which drugs are safe and potentially effective treatments for COVID-19. AGILE is an innovative, multi-arm, multi-dose, multi-stage Phase I/IIa Bayesian adaptive platform protocol to evaluate experimental COVID-19 therapies, and to funnel plausible candidates into large Phase IIb/III trials such as RECOVERY and SOLIDARITY. We will efficiently eliminate candidates with little or no prospect of clinical success.

AGILE will recruit COVID-19 patients into very early phase clinical studies, including first-in-human. The innovative design allows us to move seamlessly from first-in-human use to finding the optimal dose for COVID-19 patients. The trial is pragmatic (requiring only small numbers of patients), adaptive (so that the right drug is tested in the right group of COVID-19 patients, either in the community or in hospital) and statistically efficient (so that several drugs can be tested in parallel, making best use of a small number of patients). Our primary focus is population-scalable antiviral drugs for early treatment of COVID-19, for which we will recruit primarily in the community. AGILE has full regulatory and ethics approvals in the UK.


Innovator Award

Development of a Universal Group A Streptococcus Glycoconjugate Vaccine The pathogenic bacterium Group A Streptococcus (GAS) causes a range of infections, ranging from mild tonsillitis to invasive necrotising fasciitis, sepsis and toxic shock syndrome. GAS also induces severe long-lasting autoimmune disease, including rheumatic heart disease. Annually, GAS infections kill  > 500,000 people worldwide. While antibiotics are considered a reliable first line of defence against GAS infections, globally emerging antimicrobial resistance is an enormous threat. The WHO has included GAS in its vaccine priority list to finally reduce the high mortality and morbidity. We will use our developed novel modular system to produce the first dual-acting and lowcost GAS vaccine candidates targeting all  > 150 GAS strains. Our approach provides the first robust and affordable solution to target and prevent GAS infections, urgently required for the global population and in particular the people in low-income countries.


Innovations AIGH Enterics Flagship

Science, Innovation and Translation Programme Advisory Group

Dr Michael Lebens, Dr Manuela Terrinoni, Dr Stefan Nordqvist

‘DuoChol: A low-cost, thermostable dry formulation whole-cell / B-subunit enterocoated capsule oral cholera vaccine.’ "The Project aims at completion of the preclinical development of a new, improved oral cholera vaccine (OCV), DuoChol. This is a proposed thermostable OCV consisting of a lyophilized mixture of formalin-killed V. cholerae O1 Ogawa and Inaba strain whole-cells and cholera toxin B-subunit (rCTB) formulated in an enterocoated capsule. The two strains are isogenic except for the single serotype determining wbeT gene, and this allows them to be co-cultured to high density, which together with inexpensive high-yield rCTB production ensures low-cost manufacturing. The Project will build a solid platform for the subsequent clinical development of DuoChol, whose affordable cost, practical formulation and higher efficacy compared with current OCVs will make this a very attractive OCV for use in national cholera control programs and ideal for use in cholera outbreaks where rapid deployment and maximal early efficacy is of the essence.


Strategic Support: Science

Predicting CBT response from fear conditioning Responses to psychological interventions for anxiety vary greatly. Clients and clinicians want better ways to predict outcomes. One contender is fear extinction, the process through which exposure, the "behavioural" part of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is thought to work. Whilst there are robust differences in fear extinction between individuals with anxiety disorders versus controls, evidence that extinction predicts CBT response is modest.

 We first became interested in fear extinction as a mechanistic tool to help understand how CBT works. In order to build algorithms from numerous potential predictors, including fear extinction, we needed to undertake fear conditioning at a scale. We developed a smartphone App FLARe, that remotely delivers a fear conditioning paradigm. Our validation studies showed that fear extinction data from our App mirror that from gold-standard in-lab delivery.

We now want to test the extent to which App-delivered fear extinction data predicts CBT response. We will assess young adults with high anxiety using our App before enrolling them in CBT. We will test the strength of correlation between fear extinction and treatment outcome. We will also explore the extent to which this association is stronger in specific sub-groups (e.g. those who completed more exposure homework during treatment).


Discretionary award – DRI

Prof Stephan Harbarth, Dr Catrin Moore, Dr Ly-Mee Yu, Prof Nicholas Feasey, Prof Ben Cooper, Prof Christiane Dolecek

Understanding the impact of COVID-19 on bacterial sepsis, antibiotic consumption and stewardship, and antimicrobial resistance This study aims to address the following questions through a global network of hospitals:

 Is there evidence for a reduction in the total number or rates (per 1,000 inpatients) of blood cultures taken over twelve months?
 Has there been changes in antimicrobial usage (quantitative and qualitative)?
 Are there major changes in antibiotic resistance profiles from major pathogens?
 Have there been changes in antimicrobial stewardship and why?
 What is the overall change in the management of these patients?
 What is the impact of COVID-19 on infection control practices during the pandemic?
 Is there any evidence of reduction in nosocomial infections and bacterial outbreaks during the COVID-19 pandemic?

We will collect clinical (patient-based [severe pneumonia, ARDS, sepsis patients], hospital and microbiological data from 11 countries (UK, Switzerland, Italy, Brazil, Nigeria, Malawi, Turkey, Iran, India, Bangladesh and South Korea).

Our primary outcome will be to determine if there has been a reduction in blood cultures taken. Secondary outcomes include whether 1. changes in antimicrobial usage 2. major changes in antibiotic resistance profiles from major pathogens in hospitals during COVID-19 and correlate resistance profiles with antibiotic usage. 3. changes in infection control practices and other aspects of sepsis management behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic.


Unit for Health Evidence and Policy

Discretionary Award - Policy

Unit for Health Evidence and Policy  This proposal outlines the establishment of a pilot Unit for Health Evidence and Policy within CDT-Africa, a World Bank African Centre for Excellence based at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. Building on strong operational research into Neglected Tropical Diseases, and existing relationships within Ethiopia’s Ministry of Health, the Unit for Health Policy and Evidence will identify challenges to research uptake, pilot and evaluate an approach to improving research uptake, and produce a framework to guide future research uptake in this setting and possibly more broadly.

The pilot Unit for Health Policy and Evidence will be a 12-month project, divided into two Periods. Period 1 will comprise stakeholder consultation through two Theory of Change workshops and other interviews as necessary. During Period 2, research uptake in an NTD area defined in Period 1 will be evaluated using the Diversity Approach (see below). A Research Uptake Framework will be developed and a dissemination workshop held with key national and international stakeholders.


Therapeutics Accelerator

Prof Sir Marc Feldmann, Dr Matthew Rowland, Prof Jonathan Cook, Prof Daniel Lasserson

AVID-CC Adalimumab for COVID19 in community care While the first wave of COVID-19 is passing, we have yet to identify effective treatments. Most treatments have been used late in the illness. There is a pressing need to identify treatments delivered in community settings that avoid hospital admission. Novel immunomodulatory treatments have a well understood safety profile but are not suitable for studies such as Principle which rely on remote assessment. Hospital at home is a developing networ;  teams of consultant physicians and nurses deliver high intensity care in community settings, commonly using point of care diagnostics. This provides a suitable framework for evaluation of novel therapies. This approach has parallels with healthcare systems employed in low and middle income countries and so the results will directly inform the delivery of interventions in these settings.

Multiple strands of evidence identify TNFa as an important mediator of the hyperinflammatory state that is associated with poor outcome. Early intervention with anti-TNF therapy has the potential to substantially mitigate its effects and improve outcomes. Adalimumab is an established subcutaneous anti-TNF therapy. We propose a randomised dose ranging study in community settings to establish whether it can mitigate progression to respiratory failure (requirement for oxygen, non invasive and invasive ventilation) or death.


Strategic Support: Science

Wellcome Longitudinal Population Study COVID-19 Steering Group and Secretariat Our objective is to provide an efficient coordinating body ("secretariat") for the continued development, deployment, collection and analysis of a shared COVID-19 questionnaire across UK cohorts.

The value of undertaking this in multiple longitudinal UK cohorts is that data can be collected in extremely well characterised members of the population across a wide demographic range who are already engaged in research, who have had data and biological samples collected on them, who have an established collection of record linked data already record linked and who sit behind supported infrastructure able to undertake novel data collection and research. Each of these cohorts is research active and collectively offers a depth or domain expertise not available within any one cohort, including that of UK Biobank. In this first coordination of COVID-19 research in deeply characterised UK cohorts, we identified the added value of a core questionnaire prospectively aligned to capture data pertinent to understanding COVID-19, as well as the direct and indirect consequences of the pandemic on health, wellbeing, social and economic outcomes.


Innovator Award

Dr Wyatt Yue, Prof Chas Bountra, Dr Nicola Burgess-Brown, Prof Robin Choudhury, Prof Sir Marc Feldmann, Prof Paul Riley, Prof Carolyn Carr

‘Harnessing endogenous mechanisms to promote cardiac regeneration’ Ischaemic heart disease remains a major cause of disability and death world-wide. When a
major blood vessel in the heart suddenly becomes blocked, the muscle that it supplies dies
and is replaced with scar tissue. This is what happens in a heart attack. The scarred heart
no longer pumps blood properly and 40% of patients who develop heart failure die within 5
years. There is currently no treatment to help make new heart muscle after a heart attack.
We have identified a protein already present in the body, a single injection of which within a
few hours after injury can dramatically improve heart function by limiting damage and
promoting repair. We will now engineer this protein molecule to retain only the regenerative
properties, whilst eliminating potential unwanted effects. We anticipate the engineered
product to be safe, limit the damage after a heart attack and also promote regeneration of
heart muscle.


Discretionary Award – Innovations

London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

POETIC-COVID – Providing Essential Treatment in Critical Illness for COVID-19 As COVID-19 lacks a definitive treatment, critical care is the primary therapeutic means for
reducing mortality. How the world effectively scales up critical care will be a fundamental
determinant of the overall impact of the pandemic. Advanced critical care may be difficult or
impossible to scale-up in many settings and instead, essential, life-saving treatments should
be provided to all who need. Essential Emergency and Critical Care (EECC) is the basic,
low-cost care required by critically ill patients, such as oxygen and intravenous fluids, and
the system-wide requirements for their provision. The project will assess the costeffectiveness
of EECC and advanced critical care in Tanzania and Kenya, and analyse the
impact of the global and national response strategies to COVID-19 on critical care services.
The project aims to guide COVID-19 responses in LMICs towards scalable strategies with
the greatest potential for increased survival of critically ill patients, both in the pandemic and
beyond.


Discretionary Award - Public Engagement

Responsive Dialogues to Improve Public Engagement on AMR The diminishing effectiveness of antimicrobials is a public health challenge of major global importance. In the Global South, where health systems are weaker and the burden of severe bacterial infection greater, the impact is already being acutely felt. In Malawi, a Ministerial AMR Unit has been established to coordinate Malawi’s response, culminating in a National Action Plan.  However, the implementation of the Action Plan needs key stakeholders – including affected community members – to develop and implement interventions. This project will undertake facilitated dialogues with stakeholders in two different contexts: rural Chikwawa and urban Blantyre. Through four Responsive Dialogues events per area, participants from national, district and community levels will share their understandings, experiences and perspectives on AMR, leading to the co-creation of concrete policy asks and actions.  Conversations will be carefully designed and facilitated to enable evidence about AMR to be shared, understood and used to generate ideas, as well as to inform policies governing how AMR is addressed. Through this approach the project will work closely with the AMR unit to cocreate local actions, that communities themselves can carry out to reduce the burden of AMR as well as policies and interventions that reflect people’s lived realities.


Discretionary Award - OPOH

Economic analysis of health impacts of carbon pricing on land-use  The proposed work is – to our knowledge - the first integrated economic analysis of a single policy intervention and its potential to influence three interlinked threats: the global health crises of both non-communicable diseases and new infectious diseases such as Covid-19, as well as environmental degradation, including biodiversity loss and climate change.

The work will comprise modelling the consequences of carbon pricing, set at a level compatible with keeping climate change within planetary boundaries, with outcomes including land-system change, agricultural production, food prices, diets and health outcomes, and effects on infectious disease and biodiversity. The analysis will consider potential differential effects of carbon pricing across socio-economic groups, and between high, medium and low-income countries, as a basis for considering policy interventions to mitigate inequitable outcomes.

This analysis will contribute to the goal of The Lancet-Chatham House Commission which is to identify actions that can impact positively across the shared drivers of the three threats to human and planetary health described above. Importantly it will provide novel evidence for the ways in which co-benefits and
co-costs of interventions might form a significant part of the political and economic cases for intervening at national and international levels and optimising policy design.


Topic Level bite-sized CPD in Science

Discretionary Award – C&S

Topic Level bite-sized CPD in Science The purpose of the project is to test the impact and value of delivering subject-specific CPD in upper primary, lower secondary science through ‘bite-sized’ online courses linked to micro-accreditation. It will:

 develop three online CPD units focusing on teaching more challenging ideas in science to pupils at upper primary and lower secondary level (ages 9-13)
 test ‘proof of principle’ that a structured online CPD course comprising ‘bite-sized’ CPD units supports teachers of primary and lower secondary science in strengthening their subject knowledge (SK) and their pedagogic content knowledge (PCK); and indirectly improves pupils’ understanding of difficult ideas in science;
 enable teachers using the CPD resources to gain micro-accreditation in those topics, recognising and certifying their skills and knowledge, and explore ways to promote the value of this accreditation to senior leadership and more widely, including as evidence towards other accreditations such as Chartered Science Teacher (CSciTeach);
 test the ‘buy-in’ to the value of micro-accreditation by senior leadership in building up a pool of teachers who are skilled, confident (and ultimately deployed) to teach age and stage appropriate topics of the science curriculum; and as a tool to inform individual professional learning needs, promotion; and support targeted recruitment and retention strategies.


Discretionary Award – C&S

Making change happen in teacher professional development There is a strong evidence base on effective continuing professional development (CPD) for teachers, but in spite of this evidence, there has been limited sustained change towards the goal of all teachers being able to participate in high quality professional development throughout their careers. To address this, greater understanding is needed of how to make change happen: the implementation of innovations and programmes in relation to policy and entitlements and the school environment; and the mechanisms and processes which underpin change.
Applying insights from implementation science and theory-based evaluation, our proposed research will identify a series of ‘mechanisms for change’ applicable to teacher CPD policy and practice in school environments in England, to guide CPD practice by schools and policy-makers. Four complementary project strands (a systematic evidence review; STEM CPD policy analysis; investigating effective change implementation in CPD, through mixed methods of survey and case studies; stakeholder engagement and dissemination) will lead to evidence-based guidance for effective implementation of CPD in England at multiple system levels, whether a local system (e.g. a single department or school CPD), larger system (e.g. programmes for a specific teacher subject group or phase) or the whole education system (e.g. increasing access to CPD).


Mindscapes Curatorial Research Fellow

Discretionary Award – C&S

Mindscapes Curatorial Research Fellow Mindscapes Curatorial Research Fellow
Full-time position with CARMAH, reporting to the Director

This post-doctoral fellowship appointment will assist with the research and development phase of a new project looking at aspects of mental health with a specific focus on Berlin. Alongside pursuing self-directed research, the fellow will work closely with members of Wellcome’s International Cultural Programmes team and Wellcome’s Germany Office under the direction of the International Cultural Producer Danielle Olsen to:

- Develop external partnerships across the city with partner organisations on the theme of mental health in Berlin investigating potential archives, collections, institutions and community led organisations that could provide a focus for transdisciplinary research

- Serve as connector across participant spaces and places, developing creative new links with international city partners (in Bengaluru, New York and Tokyo) as the project develops

- Assist in developing interdisciplinary and inclusive methods and processes between and across the Arts and Sciences on a mental health theme

- Participate in a launch meeting in July 2021 on a mental health theme with a Berlin City focus

- Explore crossover and hybrid experimental curatorial possibilities utilizing original creative work, events, and public programming.


Discretionary Award – C&S

Equity and quality in local learning systems (EQuaLLS) Schooling in England is complex and evolving. Large-scale academisation has fragmented local landscapes and created multiple models for knowledge exchange, increasing the risk that continuing professional development (CPD) for teachers becomes variable in terms of quality, equity of access, and impact. More recently, national CPD frameworks have been made more coherent, while local areas are being encouraged to coordinate CPD offers through new Teaching School Hubs.

Understanding how this systemic process of fragmentation and re-formation is impacting on CPD for schools and teachers is a pressing concern. The EQuaLLS project will focus on ‘local learning systems’ (LLS): place-based localities encompassing a mix of school structures and hub arrangements for teacher CPD.

Using primary mathematics as a case study, we will research 'to what extent, and how, do LLS operate to provide high quality, inclusive professional learning for schools?' In four phases, we will: i) harness existing knowledge; ii) identify three representative localities and 18 schools for study; iii) investigate equity and quality of primary mathematics CPD; and iv) analyse findings, identify implications and disseminate these widely.

The findings will inform policy and practice, helping school and system leaders to shape and navigate high quality, inclusive and effective local CPD systems.

Grants awarded from 1 October 2005 to 30 June 2021


Discretionary Award - Public Engagement

Generating collective solutions to reduce unnecessary antibiotic use in Vietnam Antibiotic resistance in Vietnam is amongst the highest in the world, driven by high levels of antibiotic use for human and animal health. Community understanding and perceptions about antibiotics and antibiotic resistance is poor, and antibiotics are often prescribed inappropriately in healthcare settings. There is limited evidence for the effectiveness of public engagement approaches to promote appropriate antibiotic use, compared to more traditional education-based methods, or for understanding the pathways and facilitating conditions for successful behaviour change.

We will facilitate community-wide change in the way people prescribe and use antibiotics for human and animal health. We will compare three different One Health approaches to change behaviour: training for human and animal health-workers; a public information campaign for communities and farmers; and participatory action research groups. Activators in communities and healthcare settings will guide groups through a four-phase action cycle similar to Wellcome’s Responsive Dialogues approach, covering: 1. Understanding the problem of antibiotic resistance; 2. Planning and implementing strategies; 3. Monitoring strategies and generating evidence; 4. Evaluating strategies and planning future actions. We will evaluate the impact on knowledge and behaviour through qualitative and quantitative methods. We will engage local researchers and policymakers through formative discussions and dissemination meetings.


Neuromatch Summer Academy

Not available

Strategic Support: Science


My Planet Now

Discretionary Award - Public Engagement

My Planet Now My Planet Now is a cinematic short film and feature documentary for worldwide release that seek to break new ground and provide a genuine moment of global coming together on the climate crisis.

The films will tell the global story of the climate crisis in a uniquely human way by inviting ordinary citizens from around the world to film and share their personal stories of their relationship to the planet and experience of climate change. By making these people our co-directors and enabling viewers to experience the world through them, they will offer a sense of connection to the crisis that is unfiltered, intimate and immediate – strikingly different from typical climate crisis documentaries.

The films will marry stories from the frontlines with stories that offer hope and offer a constructive way forward. Critically, they will also bring attention, insight and understanding to the relationship between health and climate, in alignment with Wellcome’s strategic objectives.

The feature documentary’s large-scale, multi-pronged impact campaign will target global and national decision-makers, key stakeholders and the public (including specific target communities). A central theme will be the relationship between climate and health, and we have enjoyed positive initial discussions with WHO about this prospect.


Mental Health Science Summit Bursaries

Discretionary Award - Mental Health

Mental Health Science Summit Bursaries The MQ Mental Health Science Summit, in collaboration with Wellcome, is an interdisciplinary mental health science conference. It brings together people from all disciplines and sectors, focused on transforming mental health. Key to this is the involvement of people with lived experience of mental illness, early career researchers, and delegates from LMICs.

Attendance at the Summit is ticketed. Many delegates are attending in a work capacity, and so are both salaried and have their costs covered by their organisation. For certain groups of key delegates, the ticket price is prohibitive. This is particularly true for people with lived experience who often attend such events in a voluntary capacity and some of whom are insecurely employed, early career researchers who often do not have research grants available to cover conference attendance, and delegates from LMICs who are economically less able to have such funds available.

Following Wellcome' Cat Sebastian’s contributions to the organising committee, we are applying for £4,000 to enable subsidised places for delegates from these three groups to attend the Summit. This will enable 30 delegates to attend. Aa agreed, any funds not spent on bursaries for this year’s Summit will be used to widen access at subsequent events.


Discretionary Award – DSH

Accelerating Drug Discovery with Symbolic-Numerics in SciML Pharmaceutical companies understand the need for modeling stochasticity, by which we can improve the reliability and effectiveness of drugs across the whole population. Our 2020 review in Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, one of the highest impact journals in pharmacology, argued that deterministic models that ignore stochasticity bias clinical and pre-clinical trial analyses. The quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) groups within drug companies are the core units that model and predict patient outcomes, dramatically reducing the research and development timeline by predicting which drugs will fail before clinical trials begin. These groups have recently adopted stochastic dynamical models in order to better achieve their goals. Discussing with CJ Musante, Global Head of Pharmacology at Pfizer, the main reason that stochastic models are not more widely used is due to a lack of software that addresses the needs of QSP modelers. Stochastic models are more predictive of patient outcomes, but computationally expensive. Moreover, turnaround times needed by QSP teams are too short to make use of stochastic models with current software. This proposal addresses this problem, proposing to build software tooling which automates the construction and solution of stochastic models in a way that is orders of magnitude faster than what exists today.


Not available

Discretionary Award - Policy

Association of Medical Research Charities

Exploring options for government support for charity-funded medical research Not available


Human Cell Atlas 2021 Meetings

Strategic Support: Science

Human Cell Atlas 2021 Meetings This year’s Human Cell Atlas General Meeting will convene our community virtually to share updates and insights on new HCA research and initiatives, as well as to highlight the work of the HCA Biological Networks and continue to build on progress from the HCA Biological Network Seminar Series.

Key outcomes of this meeting will include a shared appreciation for recent advances and future needs that will facilitate the construction of an integrated atlas; progress toward strategic roadmaps for different organs, tissues, and systems; and an enhanced understanding of how the Human Cell Atlas will provide a healthy reference for the understanding of disease.

Event Overview

Day 1: Plenary talks and networking opportunities.
Themes: HCA Overview, Computational Advancements and Cross-Cutting Approaches

Day 2: Poster viewings, biological network interactive sessions, and breakout sessions.
Theme: HCA Biological Network updates, and plan to organize to build out roadmaps.

Day 3: Plenary talks, panel discussions and networking opportunities.
Theme: HCA and Disease Impact, and Defining 10-year plan.

A portion of the requested funds will also provide partial support for the 2021 HCA Asia General Meeting, to be held in November or December 2021.


WT/POST Fellowship

Secondment Fellowship Interview Committee

Reading Health in the Collections of the Museum of the Home This project will examine some of the many links that exist between reading and domestic healing in the collection of the Museum of the Home. The focus of the project will be the under-utilised collection of books relating to health and the domestic environment, dating from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. For many, the primary location of their experiences of health and ill health was the home; in this context, the reader was the ‘patient’ and the book took the place of a medical practitioner. How were these texts intended to impact their readers’ domestic practices and their wellbeing – and how did readers interact with these texts? Influenced by Roy Porter’s ‘Doing Medical History from Below’, I will examine the intimate relationships between medical books and their readers, focusing on the ‘patient’s’ experience. Research produced during the Fellowship will inform a gallery redisplay, in addition to providing material for future development of the Rooms through Time galleries. The project will connect a wider audience of museum visitors to these stories through accessible written content as well as the Museum’s public engagement programmes, encouraging understanding of and reflection on a shared history of domestic health.


Research Resources Award

Dr Kirsten Mulrennan, Mr Mark Stevens, Ms Liz Bregazzi, Mr Christopher Bennett, Mr Richard Anderson, Dr Lisa Snook, Ms Claire Haslam, Ms Lisa Greenhalgh

The New Jerusalems: post-war New Town archives in Britain and Ireland The project will make accessible for research eleven archives from post-war new towns in England, Wales and Ireland.  Eight of these archives will be catalogued and all will be safeguarded through conservation and preservation work.  The new towns included are: Basildon, Bracknell, Crawley, Cwmbran, Newton Aycliffe, Peterlee, Redditch, Runcorn, Shannon, Stevenage and Warrington.

The archives are held by nine partner organisations brought together through the Association of New Towns Archives and Museums.  The Association builds on existing academic partnerships, and this project will develop those further.  Key outcomes include not only itemised catalogues and protected collections, but also a collaborative dissemination programme.

This project will provide a substantial increase in the evidence base available for researchers seeking to interrogate the new towns’ legacy. The project is particularly timely in the context of the current public health emergency.  New towns have much to contribute to current policy making in urban planning and public health including: new homes to reduce overcrowding; generous public green space; amenities within 15 minutes of the home; and supporting walking and cycling. There is renewed interest in many aspects of new town design as plans are made for social recovery in the aftermath of Covid-19.


Mass-Observing Covid-19

Research Resources Award

Mass-Observing Covid-19 Mass-Observation (M-O) has been recording everyday life in Britain since 1937. Since the start of the Covid-19 crisis, we have collected over 8500 pieces of narrative life writing, ranging in format from open-questionnaire responses and day diaries to diaries kept for several months by self-selecting volunteers of all ages from around the UK. This unique set of large-scale qualitative data offers extensive research value and potential to contextualise quantitative data generated throughout the pandemic.

This project will open up the extensive collections of qualitative data relating to the impact of Covid-19 on the mental and physical health and social welfare of volunteer writers around the UK. We will build a tool for discovery and exploration that allows researchers to interrogate these collections.

A database will comprise metadata on the writers and writing that enables researchers across disciplines to interrogate the content of the data, thereby contributing to our understanding of the social and personal impact on UK health and wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic. The tool is designed to open up access to the texts that have been submitted, allowing researchers to select relevant materials and export the data into their own choice of research tools for analysis.


WT/POST Fellowship

Incorporating the Social Dimension of Pollution and Health into UNEP's Programmes and Mid-Term Strategy Through a collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), this 6-month secondment will bring insights from the fields of environmental justice, medical anthropology, and health geography into UNEP’s implementation plan "Toward a Pollution Free Planet". The point of departure for this collaboration is premised on an understanding of pollution as embedded in wider processes of industrialisation that causes social fragmentation and a diffused disempowerment of the communities it affects. As this represents an underexplored area of work in international policymaking, this secondment will focus on understanding and proposing implementation pathways that can lead to increased participation of communities in initiatives to curb pollution.

The outputs produced through this secondment will be integrated within UNEP’s Pollution and Health unit's work on integrated methodologies and tools. The first half of the secondment will be spent conducting a literature review on pollution and community action in the form of a report. The report will focus on identifying the factors that promote and hinder community participation, resilience, and agency. The second half of the secondment will be spent to produce an indicators framework to be utilized to assess the effectiveness of UNEP’s implementation plan in engaging the public and fostering participation and resilience.


Research Resources Award

Ms Caylin Smith, Ms Sara Thomson, Ms Susan Thomas

The Archive of Tomorrow: Health Information and Misinformation in the UK Web Archive This pilot project will preserve and provide research access to 10,000 websites relating to health information (and misinformation), and will use this collection to enable more health research on the UK Web Archive.

Our project brings together four co-applicant institutions, and a network of other organisations and researchers, to tackle one of the most pressing research issues of our time: how can the story of changing online health information be captured and understood?

During the Covid-19 pandemic, online health advice, data and scientific evidence have been contested, revised, used and mis-used with global consequences – but the digital record of this activity is fragile and hard to access.

We will:

 Curate a new research-ready collection of websites within the UKWA, with the theme of Health Information and Misinformation, ensuring a wide representation of diverse and otherwise under-collected sources.
 Use this collection as a test-bed to explore options for metadata, computational analysis, ethics and rights issues.
 Build a research network across disciplines including use cases, involving researchers in the process of building, evaluating and using collections.
 Produce a project report with recommendations for future work and advocacy for change to make web archives more representative, inclusive and open for health research.


Public Health Animation in Leeds

Research Resources Award

Public Health Animation in Leeds Leeds Animation Workshop (LAW) is a not-for-profit cooperative company established in 1978 and run by women. It produces and distributes animated films on social, health and educational issues, with international distribution. Subjects include childcare, violence against women, bereavement, child protection, parenting and relationships, gender and equal opportunities, bullying and homelessness. LAW has created films for audiences with learning difficulties and provides training in basic animation for adults and young people.

The LAW archive is a unique survival. It is the only complete archive of a collective independent filmmaking organisation. The archive is key to understanding the production of public information films and provides a counterpoint to ‘establishment’ films of the period. This is an essential national and international resource for exploring intersections between feminist activism, creative practice, and public health information.

The project will:

 Secure the archive in a publicly accessible repository, appraised, organised and repackaged to archival standards.
 Create an online catalogue with detailed index points to enable network mapping and exploration.
 Showcase interdisciplinary research opportunities, and create new research networks through the University of Leeds and beyond.
 Embed the archive in research led teaching and lifelong learning, including online delivery.


Research Resources Award

Curious cures: enhancing the discoverability of medieval medical recipes This two-year, collaborative project will open up to health researchers worldwide 187 medieval manuscripts containing medical recipes across Cambridge collections, and the currently inaccessible corpus of approximately 8000 Latin and Middle English medical recipes that they contain.

A combined programme of manuscript digitisation, cataloguing and conservation will provide multiple points of entry.  Researchers will see recipes in their original form: through high-resolution images viewable via the Cambridge Digital Library (CUDL), and medium-resolution images available for free download and reuse via CUDL and International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) manifests.

Fully searchable XML descriptions of the manuscripts’ contents, physical characteristics, and histories will be published alongside, revealing the intellectual and material contexts in which these texts were circulated and received.  Adhering to interoperable TEI guidelines, these descriptions will facilitate cross-collection discovery, building strong links with comparable manuscripts in Oxford and Manchester.

Hyperdiplomatic transcriptions, created using Transkribus, will provide a level of detail unmatched by existing finding aids, enabling keyword searching and granular, computational analysis of the recipes.  The project will empower other organisations to undertake similar work with their collections by creating a robust and extensible methodology, and disseminating it through a website, workshops and symposium for researchers, curators and libraries.


Research Resources Award

Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People

Exploring Disability: an archive and history of disabled people’s experience of disability and the journey from a medical to a social model perspective. The GMCDP archive collection reveals the changing perspectives, language and attitudes towards disabled people that have occurred over recent decades. It highlights changes in medical practices, discussions and debates around bio-ethics and end of life issues, campaigns for independent living, the self-organisation of disabled people, development of disability culture, and the significant impact of wider health determinants (education, income/poverty levels, employment, housing etc). The GMCDP Archive is the largest, most comprehensive archive of the lives and experience of disabled people and the activism in England (JT Assessment)

The project will:

 Work with Archives+ to catalogue and classify the collection.
 Make the catalogue available online.
 Establish a viable and sustainable system for viewing the collection (providing physical access to research material).
 Make parts of the collection available digitally online (e.g. seminal papers).
 Ensure that all openly available material is presented for viewing in a range of accessible formats and that there is an on-going system in place to transcribe new and/or restricted material. A significant challenge, but essential element of the project.
 Share our learning on making collections fully accessible by developing guidance and toolkits, delivering workshops and training to other collection holders.
 Connect with relevant institutions to promote the resource.


Emergency oxygen response for COVID-19

Coronavirus

Emergency oxygen response for COVID-19 The O2 Taskforce is coordinating access to emergency oxygen for COVID-19 patients in LMICs. Since the start of the pandemic, affordable, sustainable access to oxygen has been a growing challenge LMICs. COVID-19 has put huge pressure on health systems, with hospitals running out of oxygen, has resulted in preventable deaths and huge burden on families of hospitalized patients. Oxygen is an essential medicine, and despite being vital for the effective treatment of hospitalized COVID-19 patients, access in LMICs is limited due to cost, infrastructure and logistical barriers. The O2 Taskforce has identified an immediate need of approx. US$ 90 million over the next 1 – 2 months, with a US$1.6 billion need estimated for LMICs over the next 12 months to support.

The proposal will secure funding ($10 million) for acute oxygen COVID-19 needs in LMICs as identified by the O2 Taskforce. The funds will support countries to access oxygen and to unlock available resources to build more sustainable, resilient oxygen systems. Activities may include technical assistance for implementation of oxygen services, investments for market interventions and for additional country assessments/development of country funding proposals. This investment is intended to accelerate and amplify the impact of follow on scale-up funding.


Not available

Research on Research Institute Grant

Research on Research Institute – CWTS-Leiden Costs - 2021 Not available


WT/POST Fellowship

Inequalities in Longevity by Education in OECD Countries  Socioeconomic inequalities in health are an increasingly central policy concern and accurate measurement is crucial in identifying effective policies to reduce health inequalities. I propose updating and refining previous OECD work examining inequalities in longevity by education in member countries around 2011. Updating the analysis involves using more recent data from national mortality registers linked to administrative data on education. Refining the analysis involves applying appropriate methods to allow for biases due to missing data. This is important since education data are often collected via the workforce, so there may be systematic patterns of missingness relating to non-participation in the workforce, which are associated with education.

The key goal is to devise a robust methodology for routinely calculating educational inequalities in longevity in a time- and labour-effective manner. The project contributes to the OECD mission of promoting wellbeing, and specifically the OECD work package ‘Health inequalities and inclusive growth’ and report ‘Health at a Glance’. It will also help the OECD become the main authority on educational longevity inequalities in member countries.


Discretionary Award – DSH

UK participation in EU Joint Action - Sharing Health Data
 Execute UK assigned tasks and responsibilities within the Joint Action to a high standard, establishing the UK as a valued and trusted partner.
 Gather a body of evidence of NHS and UK expertise on data processing in the health sector to contribute to the development of the European Health Data Space.
 Regularly convene and consult a wide range of UK stakeholders to ensure that UK health data interests across the sector are fully understood and represented.
 Maintain regular updates and briefings on the scope and objectives of the development of the European Health Data Space, to maximise UK preparedness.
 Identify and pursue opportunities to progress UK interests in the health sector, and on digital policy development more broadly.


AMR Action Fund

Discretionary award – DRI

AMR Action Fund The AMR Action Fund aims to bridge the funding gaps and technical barriers that antibiotic developers face as they head into later-stage development and ensure new treatments for drug-resistant infections are available to the patients who need them the most. We aim to bring 2-4 new antibiotics to patients by 2030. We will work with partners to create market conditions that enable sustainable investment in the antibiotic pipeline.


Discretionary award – DRI

Rethinking How to Understand the Burden of Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria: establishing best-practice through comparative analyses This work will complement the Global Research on AntiMicrobial (GRAM) project estimating the global burden of drug resistant infections (antimicrobial resistance, AMR). The work will  establish the best practice in quantifying the burden of AMR through the comparative analysis of selected data sets from the GRAM project and synthetic data generated using mechanistic models. Key goals include comparative estimates of the burden of AMR  for selected data sets and evaluations of the appropriateness of different analytical approaches for different types of data and different epidemiological processes. In particular, the work will determine: i) under what circumstances the assumption that resistant infections fully replace sensitive infections with the same species is appropriate for quantifying the burden of AMR; ii) under what circumstances the contrasting assumption that resistant infections add to the burden rather than replacing sensitive infections is appropriate; and iii) under what circumstances the intermediate assumption of partial replacement is appropriate.


Discretionary Award - Snakebite

Developing Snakebite Research Hubs- Improving Evidence based decision making in Snakebite in Africa Snakebite has recently been recognised as a Neglected Tropical Disease, In addition to the limited availability of high quality antivenoms, one of the major challenges to improving outcomes is that there is currently no established mechanism for a) determining the key evidence gaps, b) coordinating the necessary research and evidence generation and c) providing appropriate scientific and technical advice to governments and Ministries of Health to inform appropriate policy development.

This application seeks to undertake the initial work necessary for planning how these public health and policy issues could be addressed in sub-Saharan Africa. It will comprise two main phases:

a) a wide-ranging scoping review and mapping of critical issues and priorities

b) exploration of the best approaches and structures to address the issues identified in phase 1 and development of a clear strategy and plan to implement a solution

The overarching aim is: To undertake the preliminary work necessary to identify the barriers to evidence-based decision making at national and regional level for snakebite in Africa and to inform the optimal design of a major research and policy initiative that will overcome these barriers.


Discretionary Award – C&S

African Population & Health Research Centre, Kenya

Global Heating and Health Public Engagement Programme (G2H-PEP) Critical to realizing APHRC’s vision of transforming lives in Africa through research is public engagement with research and health concepts. We are submitting this Development Grant to facilitate the preparation of the Transformation pilot grant for which the team has been invited to apply. During the development, a mix of senior and junior staff from APHRC will work with expert consultants and engage stakeholders in the area of Global Heating and its impact on Health to develop the plan for fellowship support and training program for The Global Heating and Health Public Engagement Programme (G2H-PEP). The pilot of this Leadership Transformation Programme will produce a cohort of fellows who will have an extended network of contacts working on public engagement, and will have gained leadership skills and tools to ensure their wellbeing and resilience while developing as leaders in a living system. The overall objective of the program will be to produce a network of public engagement fellows interested in global heating and its health impacts. The co-design process will ensure that the pilot cohort goes through a relevant training program and receives the support necessary for meaningful engagement with the public.


Proof of Concept - Dalberg

Discretionary Award – C&S

Dalberg Global Development Advisors Limited

Proof of Concept - Dalberg This proposal is to help develop an initial proof of concept of the Transformation Programme pilot for public engagement leaders. We propose working for ~4 weeks to help refine and build out what this proof of concept would look like - specifically as it relates to the flow, curriculum and approach of the pilot programme.


Discretionary Award - Mental Health

Assessing the prospective impacts of Universal Basic Income on anxiety and depression among 14-24-year-olds In a context of austerity, pandemic and unemployment, 14- to 24-year-olds have above-average levels of anxiety, significant rates of depression and lower life satisfaction than previous cohorts. Building on our model of upstream socioeconomic pathways for health impact, this project examines prospective impact of Universal Basic Income, a system of unconditional cash transfers, on anxiety and depression among 14-24s. It brings together an established, multi-disciplinary team to:

Objective 1)     create a ‘risk’ factor for anxiety and depression among 14-24s from existing data

O2)       deploy the RSA’s Citizen Engagement Workshops and focus groups with disabled people to advance designs for a ‘transitional UBI’ for 14-17s, an overall scheme aimed specifically at mental health impact, and account for additional needs

O3)       use the ‘risk’ factor to model the impact of the cash transfer schemes from 2) on anxiety and depression among 14-24s

O4)       design research protocols to measure impacts in different schemes using the examples of ActEarly’s Bradford pilot and the RSA/Scottish Government’s prospective Dunfermline trial

This will lead to a series of publications, an end of project report published by the RSA and a set of impact measurement research materials. We will seek to ‘leverage’ these to secure further funded research.

Grants awarded from 1 October 2005 to 30 June 2021


Discretionary Award – DSH

The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies

The International Digital Health & AI Research Collaborative (I-DAIR) I-DAIR is a Geneva-based global platform to enable inclusive, impactful, and responsible research into digital health and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for health. I-DAIR’s mission is the transformation of personal and public health through collaborative research and development of digital technologies. This proposal for a grant of GBP 2 million over two years (2021- 2022) to fund the key capabilities necessary for I-DAIR to fulfill its primary functions as an enabler of digital health and as a convener of key stakeholders for digital health. The grant will complement a CHF 7 million (GBP 5.4 million) investment by Fondation Botnar, which has allowed I-DAIR to start building a Project Team and begin a two year incubation phase, with launch scheduled for 2022. By enabling key strategic outcomes, Wellcome’s contribution will allow the Project Team to make the case for I-DAIR at launch as a global catalyst for digital health and artificial intelligence (AI) research and development (R & D), and for democratising the R & D landscape by bringing more attention to networks, needs and opportunities in low-and middle-income countries.


Discretionary Award - Policy

Independent High-Level Panel: Financing for Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response

A high-level panel, led by co-chairs Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Lawrence H. Summers and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has been mandated by the Italian presidency of the G20 to propose reforms and other measures that will lead to more reliable and sustainable financing of pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. To support the deliberations and decision-making of the panel, Bruegel and CGD will establish a team to lead the analysis and content development of the proposals. The work of the project team and the panel is aimed at eliciting concrete and cooperative action by the G20 finance ministers. The team will develop an outline for the final report of the panel for discussion and feedback with the co-Chairs. Furthermore, the team will carry out three background analyses that will enable the informed discussion and brainstorming among panel members and the development of financing proposals: i/ landscaping current financing and issues, existing asks and proposals, ii/ landscaping current financing and issues, existing asks and proposals and iii/ governance, organization, and incentives. Reflecting the panel’s views as well as the teams’ own analyses, a draft and then final report will be developed building on the initial outline and the background analyses and consultations.


PhD Studentship (Basic)

What influences cancer services uptake in Ghana and how can this information support policy-making? My research is about what influences people in Ghana to use cancer services. Cancer is an increasing problem in Ghana due to changes to lifestyle and population age. Many things influence cancer services use including, disease beliefs, stigma, healthcare trust, and costs. The Ghanaian health system seeks to expand cancer services in a way that benefits as many as possible, but challenges remain in understanding why some patients do not attend.

I plan to use mixed methods to explore what influences cancer service use and how this information can be useful for Ghanaian policymakers. A key stage will involve surveying public members’ beliefs and behaviours. I will analyse data collected to see how information about age, gender and job relate to peoples’ views and might influence whether they would use cancer services; I also hope to build profiles of types of people to help policymakers target help to those most in need. To further understand and check the analysis, I will use narrative interviews with a range of the public to listen to what they think and why they act as they do.

I will bring together the findings and discuss with policymakers how this could help inform their decision-making.


Discretionary Award - Snakebite

Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene

RSTMH small grants for snakebite 2021-23 Snakebite is a strategic priority for RSTMH given its high levels of death and disability. Although there has been an increase in research funding recently, there is still an unmet need to encourage junior researchers to undertake a career in snakebite research. The RSTMH Small Grants Programme is a unique grant funding programme open to early career researchers from anywhere in the world that aims to fill a gap in the research career pathway. RSTMH grants are for up to £5,000 to those early in their careers (e.g. researchers, healthcare professionals, NGO workers, health economists, social scientists) who are working in a field relevant to tropical medicine or global health.  These grants typically represent the first time someone has received funding in their own name and helps develop their research and management skills.

In 2020, Wellcome piloted a partnership with RSMTH to fund 10 grants in snakebite research. With Wellcome funding, RSTMH awarded grants to African, Asian, South American and European nationals across various snakebite research areas. Following on from the success of the pilot, RSTMH is seeking funding for a 3-year partnership with Wellcome to fund 10 projects per year and up to 30 in total in snakebite research.


Discretionary Award - OPOH

International Health Advocacy for Climate Action -- GCHA capacity grant Climate change presents a unique and urgent threat to planetary health.  Compounded by the COVID19 pandemic, we face a very real risk of losing 50 years of global development, exacerbating health, economic, and social inequities.

COP26 will provide a special opportunity for global leaders to set a course for a healthy and green recovery.

Informed voices from across the globe are crucial in driving decision makers to deliver ambitious climate action. Health workers are among society's most trusted and respected professionals, and the health case for climate action is powerful, offering millions of lives saved through reduced non-communicable diseases, health resilience, and adaptation, and fully offsetting the costs of mitigation through health cost savings.

Wellcome Trust funding will enable the Global Climate Health Alliance (GCHA) to amplify the voices of medical and other health professionals globally, including those in low and middle income countries (LMIC) which have been underrepresented in the international climate conversation, on the massive health opportunities of climate action.

We will build capacity, link new voices to media advocacy opportunities, and disseminate Wellcome coalition asks through our global networks, thereby influencing climate action at the national and international level in the run up to COP.


Discretionary Award - OPOH

Strengthening the climate and health capacity of AfGH and SfGH      Action for Global Health (AfGH) and Students for Global Health (SfGH) in partnership aim to increase our respective health networks' (reaching more than 50 organisations), and members' (in 34 student branches) contribution to a shared climate and health agenda through capacity building, mobilising, and increasing collaboration between key stakeholders (our members, partners and other actors) and supporting synthesised advocacy and campaign events in the lead up to COP26. In particular we will focus on increasing access to engagement with youth, global south and NMIC stakeholders on the intersection of health and climate.

We will partner to work with the 'Climate Change Coalition' to activate and engage cross sectoral partners including global south, LMIC and youth organisations around a shared policy agenda and build support for sustainable health and climate change strategies leading up to G7 and COP26. We will actively participate in the climate coalition and build our and other actors' resources to activate and mobilise support for health and climate. We will draw on the breadth and strength of our members collective experience and expertise to actively engage with and broaden understanding of the intersection between health and climate.


Discretionary Award - Policy

National Academy of Sciences, America (NAS)

Secretariat Support for G20 High Level Independent Panel (HLIP)  The G20, as proposed by the Italian G20 Presidency, has mandated a High-Level Independent Panel (HLIP) to recommend actionable solutions for reliable and sustainable financing of the global commons for pandemic prevention, surveillance, preparedness and response. The Panel’s recommendations will be presented to the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting in July. To provide the HLIP with support for logistics, coordination, outreach, and communication/engagement, The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) proposes to establish a joint Secretariat comprised of 4-5 individuals from the NAM and the Wellcome Trust. From February through October 2021, it is expected that the joint Secretariat will support the execution of the independent review by the HLIP. The work of the Secretariat during these eight months will include: 1) meeting logistics and organization; 2) meeting facilitation (agenda setting, conduct, and procedures); 3) outreach and communication with key political and other stakeholders; and, as needed 4) limited research/analytical/writing support for health-related content.


Discretionary Award – C&S

Decolonization and global health research: initiating an African centred exchange This award will support a series of interactions between academics from diverse backgrounds with a shared interest in mapping, analyzing and critically unpacking decolonization debates in global health research.  Decolonization discussions and activism have become far more prominent over the last year, bringing both opportunities for positive transformation (through disruption, change and renewed interest in global power inequities) as well as challenges (including the ‘trending’ of the decolonization agenda leading to – at worst – the ‘colonization’ of the arena itself).  Now, as much as ever, decolonization discussions and debates need to be critically examined.  We will organize a set of exchanges and activities to: 1 Unpack and reflect upon the term ‘global health research’ using a decolonization lens; 2 Examine how tacit, or embedded, forms of knowledge from Africa are drawn upon and feature in global health research; 3 Imagine what a decolonized or African-centred, and ethical, research initiative in global health might look like; and 4 Share our learning, advocate for change, and identify an African home for future work.  We will incorporate a covid-19 research lens, but only in recognition that covid-19 will shine a light upon or amplify far longer and deeper policies and processes.


Discretionary Award – C&S

SA-UK/MH: Medical Humanities co-working between South Africa and the UK. This programme of exchange and networking will:

i. Energise the Medical Humanities research ecosystem in South Africa as it evolves.

ii. Embed the research environment at the CSHHH Glasgow, and its current partners, in this process.

iii. Seed a cohort of early-career scholars in the Medical Humanities with experience of research, training and teaching collectively in both South Africa and the UK.

Context

Since 2018 members of the CSHHH Glasgow and the University of Johannesburg have worked together in the Medical Humanities. The Wellcome Trust and both universities invested in these activities. Following the success of this co-working, partners from the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town joined the collaboration. The core objective is to connect the four institutions in order to jointly conduct research, training and teaching so that Medical Humanities research ecosystems continue to grow together in both countries.

Activities

The focus is on seeding those ecosystems through investment in the researchers of the future and fresh collaboration across the countries and institutions.  The programme will enable;

1. Four Masters students and one Ph.D. candidate to be co-supervised by the PIs.

2. Enhanced networking and communications capacity, including new online resources and platforms.


PhD Studentship in H&SS

ERG11 Social Science and Bioethics, Early Career Awards

An ethical investigation into environmental sustainability in healthcare.  Healthcare as an industry is one of the most environmentally destructive on earth in almost every respect (e.g. energy use, harmful gas emissions, and physical waste). The enormous environmental toll of delivering healthcare is fundamentally at odds with healthcare's goal of improving health and wellbeing. Indeed, it is the drive to achieve healthcare excellence with world class medical safety and effective treatments that is ultimately so resource intensive and polluting. This project aims to address the dilemma of how to ethically make medical decisions that adequately account for patients and the environment. In particular, I am interested in how we can ethically make trade offs between what is owed to individuals, collective groups, and future generations. For example, what might be best for the treatment of an individual may harm the environment and be detrimental to collective society or future generations. What is the best course of action? I use these three groups as lenses to examine three case studies of areas of environmental concern in medicine: the environmental cost of medical treatments; medical waste production; and the environmental benefits of remote treatment. My findings aim to inform this cutting edge area of applied ethics, healthcare policy and practice.


PhD Studentship in H&SS

Conflict, Mental Health and Peace in Colombia: Improving Global Health Practice Through the Integration of Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) and Peacebuilding With 22.1% of global conflict-affected populations afflicted by mental disorders, Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) has become an increasingly important set of interventions (Charlson et al., 2019). However, care has remained removed from broader socio-political and historical context. This is despite that the psychosocial" is conceptualised as one’s psychological development within, and in interaction with, the social environment (Glass, 2000). In conflict-affected contexts where social environments become strained, structural issues of reconstruction are typically managed by "peacebuilding" actors. In other words, MHPSS and peacebuilding remain siloed, ignoring that peace and mental health are intrinsically linked. Furthermore, interventions remain top-down and externally driven.

Accordingly, this research builds atop interdisciplinary critiques of both fields and asks, "can community-based critical psychology approaches effectively integrate and improve MHPSS and peacebuilding practice in conflict-affected areas?". Focusing on fieldwork with conflict-affected youth in Bogotá, Colombia, this research will take a Participatory Action Research approach in collaboration with local partners and communities, whereby Critical Community Psychology theories will be applied for the development of integrated "psychosocial peacebuilding" approaches. Through the introduction of these theoretical and methodological innovations, a "skeleton" of a model can be developed to be "fleshed out" and implemented in other conflict-affected contexts.


Discretionary Award – C&S

Renewing Phenomenological Psychopathology Neuroscience and genetics have failed to deliver new treatments for mental disorders. It has been suggested by the NIMH that progress in biomedical approaches has been hampered by our conceptualization and taxonomy of psychiatric disorders and psychopathology. A renewed emphasis on experiential components and first-person perspectives is required to address this problem. Historically, phenomenology, as a branch of philosophy, has provided this methodology and knowledge to the mental health sciences. However, phenomenological psychopathology remains somewhat fossilized in the humanities and social sciences of the mid-20th century. This co-led international award will (1) renew phenomenological psychopathology with the recent contributions of analytic philosophy of mind, hermeneutics, structuralist/post-structuralist philosophy, history, literature, values-based practice, developmental psychology and service user research; and (2) reinvigorate phenomenology for mental health as the philosophical science of subjectivity and first-person experience.

We will develop international scholars from across disciplines and career stages to develop their research leadership and management activities and to engage in Award activities including international exchange fellowships small grants and, knowledge exchange events. The award will commence the reconstruction of phenomenological psychopathology for the 21st century as a democratic discipline with a historicized and inclusive account of the experience of the mental disorder developed.


PhD Studentship in H&SS

The gendered harms of ‘voluntary return’: women’s experiences of disrupted relatedness, bodily precariousness, and gender-based violence in the UK and Punjab Since 2012, the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ immigration regime has sought to precaritise non-citizens’ lives, and thereby encourage their voluntary departure. In recognition of this explicitly violent objective, empirical legal scholars have increasingly sought to elucidate migrants’ experiences of adversity in the UK with attention to the legal structures and practices that comprise this regime. This research will seek to expand this focus to return practices. Previous research on return has overwhelmingly focused on deportation – which comprises a minority of returns from the UK – and neglected voluntary return, despite its statistical and conceptual significance to the hostile environment regime. As voluntary return also affects far more women than deportation, the practice carries additional importance for scholars of gender and migration. Through ethnographic and narrative accounts of South Asian women’s lived experiences of ‘voluntary return’ from the UK to Punjab, this research will foreground voluntary return’s impacts for women’s health, safety, wellbeing and relationships, and consider whether these experiences might be conceptualised as ‘gendered harms’. These findings will develop understandings of migrant women's autonomy, dignity and bodily integrity, and states' obligations to non-citizens under a political and legal system that sharply differentiates their rights from those of citizens.


PhD Studentship in H&SS

ERG10 Medical Humanities, Early Career Awards

Metropolitan Modernism, Venereal Disease and Social Hygiene, 1899-1945 Following the lapse of the Contagious Diseases Acts in the late nineteenth century - legislation that allowed for the routine inspection of prostitutes in order to reduce the rates of STDs - rising rates of venereal disease created, by the outbreak of war in 1914, an atmosphere of widespread sex panic that associated the disease with moral infection, particularly in metropolitan locales. My research proposes that the venereal disease epidemic of the early twentieth century was a significant medical and cultural event of particular concern to literary modernists in and around the city, including Joyce, Woolf, Eliot and Pound, and Lawrence, and activated a nexus of interrelated concerns such as anxieties surrounding birth control, prostitution, and non-procreative intercourse. This project will demonstrate how the eugenic language of social hygiene influenced modernist aesthetic strategies and suggest that literary modernism itself contributed to emerging ideas of sexual health by reflecting contemporary fears of illness and contamination. In doing so, it will deepen our understandings of the place of the literary in the production of medical knowledge at this time, and examine the crucial role of cultural forms in the dissemination and transmission of public health discourse in the early twentieth century.


PhD Studentship in H&SS

Blurring the Boundaries: A Study of Advanced Nursing Practice in the United Kingdom (1990-2010) Advanced nursing practice has been of tremendous value to British healthcare. The government, NHS managers and patients alike have placed high expectations on Advanced Nurse Practitioners (ANPs), and researchers have concluded that ANPs have risen to the challenge. However, it is ironic that while ANPs have been deployed across varying sectors of British healthcare, neither the government nor the NMC - nursing's regulatory body - has placed legal parameters around the role's boundary of practice. There is no doubt that professional boundaries in healthcare have shifted. Before the 1990s, nurses had been innovatively expanding their practice boundaries in response to service needs. Consequently, the ANP role evolved under changing healthcare needs. It could be interpreted that British medical history does not understand advanced practice. Therefore this study will draw on the example of the USA and interpret such evidence to be applicable to the British context. Nursing historiography currently lacks any historical analysis of the implementation of Advanced Nurse Practitioners, their role and advance practice's evolution. This thesis will correct this oversight and be the first to write a holistic historical analysis of advanced practice's scope of practice.


PhD Studentship in H&SS

Temporalities in Tension: Rethinking Healthcare Provisions for Sexual Migrants This work responds to a growing volume of research on the wellbeing of sexual migrants. Little attention has been paid to defining migration in this literature, which is often understood in a purely spatial sense. In this project, I claim that sexual migrants – whether from the UK or abroad – traverse temporal, as well as spatial, boundaries. This, I claim, has important implications for sexual wellbeing and risk. Through ethnographic research in a London sexual health clinic, including two sets of 15 semi-structured interviews with service users and ten interviews with clinic staff, I seek to uncover the extent to which abrupt shifts between timelines, such as coming out of the closet, transitioning, or moving to radically new environments such as halls of residence or retirement homes, contribute to sexual risk. This research will problematise racist and imperialist geographies of risk that locate risk in faraway lands, while also bringing to light corrective measures that will improve patient experiences and health outcomes of temporal migrants, from wherever they originate. These measures include a recalibration of eligibility criteria for targeted risk reduction interventions and an identification of further training needs for sexual health staff working with temporal migrants.

Grants awarded from 1 October 2005 to 30 June 2021


PhD Studentship in H&SS

Exploring ‘the domestic’ in contemporary hospice architecture: a critical examination of the architecture and design of in-patient palliative care facilities in England This project proposes a new critical study of English hospice architecture, aimed at making evidence-based recommendations for inclusive hospice design. Although 40 million people need palliative care worldwide annually, relatively little research has examined the settings in which palliative care is administered or attempted to understand how patients, visitors and staff experience them. The widespread tendency in contemporary hospice architecture to make palliative care settings resemble domestic residences is rarely interrogated, despite potential problems surrounding the home’s complexity and the question of whose home is being imitated. A better understanding of hospice architecture is needed to establish how to design hospices inclusively for individuals from all socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, especially given documented disadvantage in access for some groups.

This project will employ an interdisciplinary methodology, examining English palliative care facilities through site visits and analysis of primary documents, and exploring how individuals experience these environments through ethnographic field work, including observation, interviews and focus groups.

This study will provide a novel examination of English hospice architecture, highlighting the voices of the users of palliative care settings. Findings will be synthesised into recommendations for policy makers on how to address the issue of domestic design inclusively in palliative care settings.


PhD Studentship in H&SS

The Progress Paradox: Exploring the nexus between development, social inequalities, and mental distress in northern Pakistan Mental health activists and service-users have long argued for research and interventions to take into consideration structural determinants of mental distress such as violence and inequality. Yet, current scholarship on high rates of mental distress amongst women in Pakistan focus on proximal social determinants (factors pertaining to individuals and families).

This project challenges public health investigations that places responsibility of poor mental health of women in the region on family conflict, thereby misplacing causal accountability and missing the opportunity for large-scale transformation and social change. Taking poor mental health amongst women in northern Pakistan as a case study, this project examines how structural determinants such as gender inequality, poverty, and impact of development interventions, shape women’s mental health in northern Pakistan. The proposed research will comprise of in-depth interviews, participant observation and archival research in Gilgit Baltistan, where high rates of suicides/attempted suicides have been recorded.

The project draws on critical perspectives from the fields of global mental health, international development, and gender studies. It aims to provide evidence and insights to researchers, mental health service providers, advocates, and policymakers in delivering health and gender justice through informed interventions and policies in Pakistan, and more broadly, South Asia.


Discretionary Award – C&S

Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene. Building Capacity in Medical Anthropology This collaboration between Brazil, Mexico and the UK brings together environmental, indigenous, biosocial, multispecies, gender and theoretical expertise in Medical Anthropology, to extend interdisciplinary engagement concerning how the Anthropocene epoch impacts on human health. Supported by a post-doctoral researcher in each of the collaborating centres, we will develop Medical Anthropology in four areas: i) indigenous experience and coloniality of the Anthropocene, ii) gender, reproduction and environmental justice, iii) multispecies ethnography and human-animal health,  iv) COVID-19 and public understanding of the Anthropocene. From this research and in conjunction with open access publisher UCL Press, we will develop a tri-lingual digital resource for teaching and public reference.

Our collaboration will begin online with bi-monthly meetings followed in February 2022 by a three day virtual cross-disciplinary seminar with invited expertise in science, geography, politics and history. We will work collaboratively to examine how these disciplines can inform Medical Anthropology of the Anthropocene and to identify articulations with policy and practice as these impact on human and environmental wellbeing. In November 2022 we will hold a face-to-face workshop in Mexico to develop dissemination and publications including the digital teaching resource and a multilingual special edition of a Latin American Medical Anthropology journal.


PhD Studentship in H&SS

Humour and polemic in UK disability arts and its institutions, 1976-2010 This practice-led project, from a disabled artist-researcher, investigates humour as a form of activism within the UK Disability Arts Movement. Focusing on the under-researched National Disability Arts Collection and Archives, it will document the emergence and uses of critical or polemical humour between 1976 and 2010. This archival research, supported by conversations with the movement’s artists, will combine object-orientated creative practice and sensory enthnography with historiographical research.

Art history has neglected these artists, who created institutions essential to UK arts today. Overlooked by disability studies too, their transgressive humour critically engaged with changing ideas of disability. For the medical humanities, the research will create new knowledge of how disabled people have driven and understood changing ideas of disability. For critical medical humanities, this project will offer a new paradigm of disability arts research, specifically addressing the significance of the disabled artist-subject as researcher.

At a time when the experience of disability in the UK is increasingly individualised, understanding this humour’s agency, collectivity and its effectiveness in disability activism is urgent. This study will inform arts policy, re-position disability activism within art history, and inform critical understanding of how ideas of disability are influenced and understood by disabled people.


PhD Studentship in H&SS

The Beaumont Society: Trans Cultures, Identities and Everyday Subjectivities, 1966-2004  This project will be the first comprehensive history of the Beaumont Society, a UK based trans support network. It will focus on the ways that members of the Society conceptualised their sense of self,  both within the organisation and in relation to other trans and cis gender people and cultures. This research will be much more than a history of the society itself but will make significant strides in historicising trans identities and experiences in the UK, exploring the ways trans people negotiated the medical and health discourse that have historically legitimised trans identity, alongside other ways of understanding gender crossing in their everyday lives. These perspectives will in addition allow for reconsideration of wider themes of belonging and selfhood and the changing nature of social movements from the 1960s to the early years of the internet. Using a combination of archival research and oral history the project will be organised thematically, examining trans subjectivities through the everyday including domestic life, work, clubs and leisure, and other countercultural and political movements. The relationship of trans identities and experience to shifting gender norms will be a cross cutting theme.


PhD Studentship in H&SS

Zoonotic divergences: humans, rats and micro-organisms in Guarani-Mbya villages of Jaraguá Indigenous Land (São Paulo/SP, Brazil) My PhD research aims to deepen anthropological understandings of health, illness and disease in contexts where the Guarani-Mbya people, rodents and microorganisms become entangled through leptospirosis within the Jaragua´ Indigenous Land – a small territory surrounded by the city of Sa~o Paulo, Brazil’s largest metropolis. My project will be based on the ethnographic study of multispecies relations entangling indigenous people, Leptospira spp bacteria, governmental agencies of disease and rodent control, and health professionals. The project will focus on the examination of Guarani-Mbya perceptions of and practices around rodent-borne infection so as to unsettle the colonial vestiges of epidemiological reasoning that continues to inform understandings of zoonosis. This investigation of human-rodent relations will be path-breaking for Amerindian Studies, as, for the most part, these have focused on animal-human relations primarily in contexts of hunting and pet-keeping. The ethnographic data produced by the project will also be useful for reconceptualizing and developing rodent-management strategies and community-led programmes in other Amerindian contexts, contributing to critically expanding the One Health initiative towards an ethnographic-based, decolonized, community-led, and multispecies approach. [zoonosis, Amerindian Studies, rats, Guarani-Mbya, Brazil]


PhD Studentship in H&SS

Transnationalism and Changing Medical Practice Paradigms in Exile Tibetan Medicine  and the West  Transnational medical practice is a common phenomenon in contemporary Tibetan medicine, especially among exile practitioners in India and Nepal. Both in the form of medical tours abroad or local treatments of foreign patients and via telemedicine, doctors provide transnational medical care. However, as a result of the deterritorialization of practice and practitioners or new phenomena like telemedicine and innovations in medical treatment options, varying degrees of changes in contrast to national treatment paradigms occur that raise questions about the efficacy or benefit for patients. This research seeks to explore and analyse transnational Tibetan medical practice and asks to what extent this trend transforms essential principles, perceptions, and representations of Tibetan medicine. The aim is to determine and question tendencies towards a modern or global Tibetan medicine, following Wujastyk and Smith's categories of modern and global Ayurveda. Using the methods of participant observation and semi-structured interviews with Tibetan medical doctors and patients, I will conduct a 13 months long multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in India, Nepal, and Europe. Ultimately, the research will help to understand the challenges to and possibilities for globalised medical practice, contributing to the growing anthropological interest in global health.

Keywords: Tibetan medicine, transnational medical practice, therapeutic travel, telemedicine


PhD Studentship in H&SS

Medicine, charm or treasure? Mediterranean red coral in England c.1600-1750. Mediterranean red coral has long been treasured around the world and is currently under threat from intensive fishing, oil drilling and rising sea temperatures caused by climate change. This project will explore the value placed on Mediterranean red coral, Corallium rubrum, a natural material sourced and prized in medieval and Renaissance Italy but also a culturally significant foreign import to Protestant England c.1600-1750. While coral is highly visible in early modern English sources, the historical importance of coral to English beliefs about physical and mental health is yet to be analysed. Drawing on a wealth of documentary evidence, material and visual culture, held in The National Archives, V & A, British Museum, Wellcome Collection, Science Museum and National Portrait Gallery, I will examine how coral was used as a medicinal ingredient, contributed to a domestic armoury against natural and supernatural threats, and was also a luxury commodity, perceived to be a material imbued with particular values, properties and powers in English society. Once considered to be a limitless natural treasure of the seas, the ecological threat to red coral in the Mediterranean makes understanding our long history of engagement with this precious species all the more critical at this time.


PhD Studentship in H&SS

Skeleton Merchants as Agents of Socio-Scientific Advancements: Exploring the History of Bone Trade in Colonial and Postcolonial India, 1858–1985  My dissertation seeks to argue that the modern Western Scientific advancement was largely predicated on the supply of South Asian bones from India to Britain during the legal creation of the British Raj in 1858. In doing so, it attempts to link the trade of bones and bodies to what I call the ‘Red Industry’—a full-fledged socio-economic establishment employing numerous labourers, specialized in different units, which thereby assumed a pivotal place in the network of imperial capitalism, propelled by profit. Besides leading to the emergence of ancillary industries, wherein bones are seen as potentially esoteric, aesthetic and even agricultural resources, I argue that the ‘Red market’ also projected itself as indispensable with regards to the contributions in various socio-medical fields: forensic anthropology, phrenological works, osteo-archaeological discoveries and leading studies on Osteoporosis. Focusing primarily on the local perceptions of the dead, and the surrounding inter and intra-caste polemics on dissection, the work essentially seeks to bridge the long-standing gap between the trade economy and the overarching historical debates predominantly concerning bio-ethics and public health, while interacting with law, labour, society and medicine throughout the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries—the era of decolonization.

Keywords:

British Raj, South Asia, Public Health, Medicine


Discretionary Award – C&S

Bioethics Research: Interdisciplinary Group of Early Career Researchers: Bristol-Kyoto-Yonsei (BRIDGES:BKY) Building on a developing track record of collaboration between Bristol, Kyoto and Yonsei, BRIDGES:BKY aims to address shared bioethical challenges, through sharing learning and expertise, to benefit postgraduate and early career researchers (PGR/ECRs). Our four challenge areas are: (1) ageing and end-of-life care; (2) clinical ethics support; (3) reproduction and genomics; and (4) theories and approaches in bioethics. These are shared (indeed, global) challenges, which invite new research, and in which the partners have complementary research interests. Guided by these challenges, BRIDGES:BKY will share learning and expertise, including on different methodological approaches to research in these areas. BRIDGES:BKY will leverage our existing links and partnerships to deliver new opportunities to PGR/ECR participants, drawn from across the partner institutions (and beyond), to participate in, and benefit from training workshops, conferences and a (virtual) visiting researcher scheme. Supported by teleconferencing and a dedicated website, activities will be virtual, with some in-person elements (where appropriate). All partners will host and contribute to these activities, through which PGR/ECR participants will develop their knowledge and skills, and their - and the partners’ - future collaborative research endeavours will be shaped.


PhD Studentship in H&SS

Health Professional Responses to Deathbed Phenomena: Implications for medical knowledge and care Meaningful dreams, visions and coincidences are a remarkably common feature of the dying process. While patients and families report their profound spiritual significance, mainstream clinical literature explains them in materialist terms. This project asks how health professionals respond to such events on the ground, whether they reflect this materialist approach or if there are examples of healthworkers engaging in more ontologically and epistemologically open ways. The research will explore how philosophical responses influence the day-to-day practices of care. It will also ask whether variation in interpretations of such events runs along existing lines of social or cultural difference among both healthworkers and patients. I will take a methodologically interdisciplinary approach combining an ethnography of a hospice in-patient unit (utilising my experience as a palliative care nurse) with narrative interviews of staff who have responded to deathbed experiences. Drawing on feminist care theory, science and technology studies and the medical humanities this study will explore the significance of responses to deathbed phenomena for both clinical knowledge practices and patient care.


Coronavirus

Leveraging COG-UK expertise to support the global dissemination of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequencing Control of the COVID-19 pandemic depends on the development and equitable roll-out of vaccines that remain effective over time.  But the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 variants that exhibit variable degrees of immune evasion, and other characteristics including greater transmissibility and/or lethality, threaten to undermine our ability to control COVID-19. It is widely accepted that vaccines will need to be altered over time as the virus mutates. Effective vaccine re-development is dependent upon the availability of global viral sequence data, but there is a lack of sequence data for much of the world, including low, middle and high-income countries. The COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK) (including the Wellcome Sanger Institute) will leverage its expertise to develop a comprehensive global learning programme on SARS-CoV-2 genome sequencing (COG-GLOBAL). This will be achieved by working with experienced on-line educators. Specific aims include the development of an open access, online modular global learning programme on SARS-CoV-2 sequencing and analysis, allowing users to follow pathways of learning according to professional expertise (laboratory scientist, clinical practitioner, data scientist  &  epidemiologist, bioinformatician or policy maker); and the development of train-the-trainer courses in collaboration with the Wellcome Connecting Science Advanced Courses, Wellcome Africa and Asia Programmes, and other contributors.


Sanger Resource Collaboration