The Centre for Epidemic Preparedness and Response has awarded prizes to researchers from across the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to recognise their contributions to the field of epidemic preparedness.

We are delighted to award Katharine Sherratt, Hugo Gruson, and Sebastian Funk the Resource Prize, Rachael Pung the Research Degree Student Prize and Abdoulie Kanteh the Collaboration Prize – huge congratulations to the winners. This is the first year that the Centre has awarded prizes.

Each winner receives a £700 from the Centre, which can be used for any related activities to support their development and research dissemination.

Find out more about their research below and celebrate their achievements at our upcoming Epidemic Preparedness Prize Winners Showcase on Thursday 6 July 2023. 

Katharine Sherratt, Hugo Gruson, Sebastian Funk – Resource Prize

Based at LSHTM, Sebastian Funk, Professor of Infectious Disease Dynamics at LSHTM, leads the epiforecasts group (part of the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Disease), and develops methodology and tools for real-time modelling and forecasting of infectious disease outbreaks. In 2020 the group was joined by Kath, a Research Assistant, and in 2021 by Hugo Gruson, Lead Software Architect at data.org.

Fast forward to the COVID-19 pandemic and many teams across the world worked to model the transmission of the virus.  Working with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), Kath, Hugo, and Seb set out to bring these different groups together to openly compare their model predictions and simultaneously create a community of modelling expertise across Europe – thus the European Forecast Hub was created in March 2021. The Forecast Hub is an online platform where modellers upload weekly forecasts and results are compared, evaluated, and visualised freely by anyone across the world. 

Building on this success, Kath and her team set up The Scenario Hub, a shared platform where modellers could project the impact and explore the range of uncertainty around taking specific public health decisions. This Hub also directly informed ECDC public health recommendations. 

By building these platforms, the team also helped create a simple way to compare the different predictions and projected scenarios that different modellers came up with, ultimately supporting anyone to use modelling results in an accessible, understandable way during infectious disease outbreaks such as COVID-19. 

Ultimately, Kath, Hugo, and Seb hope the team’s work will enable researchers around the world to rapidly deploy and scale up similar infrastructure in the event of future infectious disease outbreaks. The prize will allow them to continue conversations with US based partners to develop more sustainable, generalisable software tools for future modelling collaborations. They also hope that spreading the word about the Hub resources will help highlight modelling as a vital part of epidemic preparedness.

Kath said: “It’s great to be recognised by the Centre for Epidemic Preparedness and Response and I hope the Resource Prize will raise awareness of the benefits of investing in resources and infrastructure, not just new research, to prepare for epidemics.”

Rachael Pung – Degree Student Prize

Rachael Pung is a research degree student at LSHTM and a senior data analyst at the Ministry of Health in Singapore. Through her work at the Ministry, she saw first-hand how mathematical modelling and outbreak surveillance could be integrated during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is particularly intrigued by how mathematics can be used to rapidly understand an outbreak situation by capturing and summarising a complex process with multiple possibilities into formulae and equations.

At the beginning of the pandemic in Singapore, as part of her day-to-day work, Rachael realised that, as mass community testing was not available, tracing the virus’ exact spread in the population was extremely difficult. As a result, she created a scientific study, published in BMC Medicine, which involved constructing a mathematical model to understand the importance of different outbreak response measures (for instance border closures or contact tracing) in controlling SARS-CoV-2 and to identify potential missed infections – all without needing to rely on the costly and time-consuming logistics of mass community testing. 

Rachael says she hopes her work will help to shape the design of future surveillance systems and encourage the integration of modelling into public health agencies as countries reflect on the COVID-19 pandemic and plan for future outbreaks. In the meantime, she is hopeful that the data used in her model will continue to be recorded and collected by governments so they can use her model to quickly and efficiently reduce the loss of life and societal disruption if another pandemic strikes. 

The funding from the prize will allow her to attend two conferences to present her work. 

Asked how she felt about receiving the prize, she said: “Feeling happy is an understatement. Having done a lot of this work in my spare time, it is comforting to receive the award and it has helped push me forward on my path of my PhD.

“It’s also a great example of showing that the work goes beyond the Singapore Ministry of Health and is in fact a contribution to the wider research community as well.”

Abdoulie Kanteh – Collaboration Prize

Abdoulie Kanteh is currently pursuing a PhD at LSHTM. His research focuses on understanding the evolution and transmission dynamics of infectious disease pathogens during the COVID-19 pandemic in The Gambia – an interest sparked by the fact that he was one of the initial scientists in The Gambia to identify and sequence the first case of coronavirus in the country. 

In his award-winning study, published in the Lancet Global Health, alongside colleagues from the MRC Unit The Gambia at LSHTM, the National Public Health Lab and the Ministry of Health in The Gambia, his team described the genomic epidemiology of the coronavirus. This involved uncovering the genetic makeup of the virus and factoring in how it spreads in the real-life conditions of The Gambia to paint a full picture of how the virus spread in the country.

Looking ahead, Abdoulie is clear - pandemics or epidemics have huge consequences for society and will occur again because humans continue to encroach into animals’ habitats – The Gambia alone already faces several infectious diseases. As such, he hopes that his research highlights the importance of maintaining and further investing in the infrastructure and skills required for accurately and rapidly responding to outbreaks especially through genomic sequencing. In his eyes, it is at the forefront of understanding how a virus evolves and to help mitigate and curb its spread quickly. As his study’s partner-centred approach shows, collaboration is vital in epidemic and pandemic preparedness - we cannot do it alone, we have to act as a global network to learn from and work with each other. 

The prize money will contribute towards Abdoulie’s expenses to attend a bioinformatics for viruses training workshop in Cape Town, South Africa, helping to build his technical skills and further progress his PhD work. 

Abdoulie said: “I am really honoured to win this prize. For me it shows that high quality research can be done by junior scientists everywhere in the world, it doesn’t matter if you’re from a low- or middle-income country.

“It has helped me develop my own self confidence. I dedicate my win to all the authors and a big thank you to my PhD supervisors and collaborators who worked tirelessly to make sure this work was successfully published.”

About the Prizes

The prizes aim to recognise and showcase the best of, and often under-celebrated, contemporary work in the field of epidemic preparedness. They cover three categories:

• Collaboration Prize: for new multidisciplinary research on the topic of epidemic preparedness/response that brings different LSHTM/MRC Unit groups together.
• Resource Prize: for acting as an epidemic preparedness/response resource for external groups or organisations (e.g providing methods or analysis, situational awareness, training).
• Research Degree Student Prize: for recent work on preparedness/response activities (including in the year before joining LSHTM, if relevant).

The applications were assessed based on several criteria, some of which included:

• Does the work/research bring together different LSHTM/MRC Unit groups or external organisations together?
• Is the research of high quality in terms of innovation and/or impact?
• Does the research/work address one or more of the following themes: sustainable epidemic preparedness and response, equitable partnerships, and decolonisation of research activities?