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

We are delighted to award Dr Joseph Akoi Boré (Centre de Recherche et d'Analyse Bio-Médicale Guinea), Dr N’Faly Magassouba (National Viral Haemorrhagic Fever Reference Laboratory, Guinea), Dr Mandy Kader Konde (Center of Research on priority diseases (CEFORPAG) Guinea), Dr Gabriel Carrasco Escobar (Universidad Peruana Cayetano), Dr Aliyu Nuhu-Ahmed (MRC Unit The Gambia at LSHTM), Professor Miles Carroll (University of Oxford), Professor Gwenda Hughes and Mr William Nicholas (UK-Public Health Rapid Support Team and LSHTM), Dr Kimberly Fornace (University of Glasgow) and all their supporting colleagues the Collaboration Prize. Miss Haddijatou Allen won the Research Degree Student Prize, with Dr Sophie Mylan also receiving Highly Commended status for her Research Degree Student entry. Professor Francesco Checchi, Mr Greg Barnsley, Dr Pratik Gupte and Dr Carmen Tamayo Cuartero are awarded the Resource Prize – huge congratulations to all of the winners. 

Each winner will receive a monetary prize 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 Friday 19 July 2024.

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
• Research Degree Student Prize: for recent work on preparedness/response activities (including in the year before joining LSHTM, if relevant)
• Resource Prize: for acting as an epidemic preparedness/response resource for external groups or organisations (e.g providing methods or analysis, situational awareness, training)

Collaboration Prize

A multi-disciplinary team of researchers from the Centre de Recherche et d'Analyse Médicale (CRAM) in Guinea, UK-Public Health Rapid Support Team (LSHTM & UK Health Security Agency), the University of Oxford, CEFORPAG Guinea, National Viral Haemorrhagic Fever Reference Laboratory Guinea, the University of Glasgow, Universidad Peruana Cayetano and the MRC Unit The Gambia at LSHTM are working together to develop an early warning system for Marburg virus in Guinea. 

Marburg virus is found in fruit bat populations but has caused at least 14 reported disease outbreaks in humans primarily in central Africa. When local communities hunt wild animals for bushmeat, including bats, there is a risk that Marburg virus could “spillover” from the bats into humans. This creates a risk of human-to-human spread, which could lead to an outbreak or regional epidemic. 

To help combat this threat, the prize-winning research project, funded through the UK-PHRST’s Research Programme by UK aid from the UK Department for Health and Social Care, is using a One Health approach to understand the presence and transmission of Marburg virus in the forested region of Guinea. 

The research team has been investigating if there is evidence of previous infection with Marburg virus among villagers and bushmeat hunters in the forested region of Guinea by testing their blood samples. In addition, they have been looking for evidence of Marburg virus in bat faecal samples from local roosts. The team has also been investigating how, where and when local communities interact with bats through their hunting practices and other daily activities using GPS tracking, questionnaire surveys and interviews with villagers and hunters, and audio recordings of bats from villages and roosts. 

Using these data, the researchers hope to identify ‘hotspots’ where bats and humans interact in space and time, and therefore where and when there is a higher risk of Marburg virus spillover events. They have been working closely with the Guinean Ministry of Health and hope the hotspot analyses will enable the country to build an effective early warning system for Marburg virus outbreaks - receiving alerts early on will allow public health authorities to visit at-risk communities rapidly and implement effective control measures to prevent further spread. 

The team’s work is an excellent example of the importance of collaboration and capacity strengthening for sustainable research impact. The emphasis on co-creation with Guinean researchers has brought more equitable partnerships and has helped secure support from the Guinean Ministry of Health. Comprehensive training and sharing of tools and resources through the project will also support Guinean scientists to continue their research over the coming years. 

On a global scale, the team’s epidemiological work to understand the distribution of Marburg virus will help the World Health Organization prioritise diseases potential to cause the next pandemic. Miles, one of the project leads based at the University of Oxford, said: “This capacity strengthening approach is vital as low-and middle-income countries eligible for Overseas Development Assistance, like Guinea, require long-term sustainable support rather than temporary support during disease outbreaks.”  

Gwenda said: “This innovative research is an important step in the development of an early warning system for Marburg virus outbreaks in Guinea and has the potential for wider application across Africa. Such a tool could help mobilise early interventions to prevent spread and save lives.”

The team hopes to use the award to invest in solar panels for Joseph's lab – further enhancing its sustainability and capacity to continue researching viral outbreaks in Guinea.

Research Degree Student Prize (Winner)

Haddijatou Allen is a research degree student at LSHTM, having previously worked at the MRC Unit The Gambia at LSHTM as a research assistant and social scientist researching reproductive health, non-communicable diseases and COVID-19. Her journey towards epidemic preparedness and response first started after experiencing the effects of the 2005 cholera outbreak in her home in The Gambia. As a young child, she remembers just how much her family’s daily life changed so as not to spread the virus, and quickly realised that preparedness is vital to saving lives.

Fast forward to 2020 and Haddijatou found herself tasked with evaluating the impact of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) programme   in The Gambia. This reignited her interest in pandemic preparedness and response as she saw first-hand the global effort and cooperation needed to help combat the spread of COVID-19. The ACT-A programme was originally launched in April 2020 to accelerate the development, production, and equitable distribution of COVID-19 tests, treatments, vaccines, and personal protective equipment (PPE). It brought together governments, academia, industry, civil society, philanthropic organisations, and global health entities to combat the pandemic through global collaboration and resource mobilisation.

Haddijatou’s findings highlighted that outbreak detection, official notification and subsequent public health responses were hampered by gaps in logistics, governance, leadership and financial backing. Her evaluation also highlighted that The Gambia and Senegal did not have an official agreement with regards to cross-border collaboration during disease outbreaks (despite working informally together during the COVID-19 pandemic) – a vital component of effective outbreak control at a regional level.

Reflecting on her experiences, Haddijatou notes that the COVID-19 pandemic showed how interconnected and vulnerable we truly are. It also highlighted the power of preparation – countries with strong public health systems and swift response strategies fared better. She hopes her research will support future global actions to control disease outbreaks and distribution of tests, treatments and vaccines are even better coordinated, more inclusive, accountable, equitable and effective. For people on the ground, Haddijatou hopes this will translate to stronger health systems so people have faster access to treatment, and ultimately reducing disease spread and saving lives.

Haddijatou will use the award to support fieldwork and data collection for her upcoming PhD, which directly follows on her evaluation experience. It aims to fill the gap in the initial ACT-A evaluation by exploring how The Gambia and Senegal can establish a comprehensive cross-border collaboration strategy for disease surveillance. This will help identify sustainable funding models and understand what resources are needed to improve cross-border surveillance and response between the two countries.

On her award, Haddijatou said: “Winning this prize fills me with immense gratitude and excitement. This award not only validates the efforts put into this work by the evaluation teams and the participants but also motivates me to keep pushing forward in the field of epidemic preparedness. I am inspired by the recognition and support, and it drives me to continue with my project, knowing that it has the potential to make a meaningful impact on global health security […] and contribute to a safer, healthier future for all.”

Research Degree Student Prize (Highly Commended)

Sophie Mylan is a PhD student at LSHTM in Medical Anthropology using ethnographic methods to explore epidemic preparedness and response in a refugee setting. She was initially inspired by reading about the role anthropologists played in the Ebola outbreak response in West Africa which piqued her interest in how culture and medicine converge in real-life situations. She works as a primary care physician in both the UK and Uganda, and her research allows her to explore how social science methods can contribute to global health research, policy and practice.

Her work focuses on using perspectives from refugees to inform our understanding of epidemic preparedness and response. Disease outbreaks amongst refugees, Sophie argues, magnify long-standing health and social inequalities, it forces researchers and policy makers to think about pandemic preparedness from multiple angles and consider how wider historical, social, economic and political contexts shape outbreaks and affect how people interact with public health interventions.

During her PhD fieldwork, Sophie spent 18 months in northern Uganda, including 14 months in a refugee settlement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through ethnographic methods, and close interactions and learnings from South Sudanese refugees, in addition to over a hundred in-depth interviews, Sophie’s research explores the connections and disconnections between global narratives and framings around disease outbreaks, the current biomedical focus on public health measures, and the lived realities for refugees. She reveals these (dis)connections by examining four areas of epidemic preparedness and response: the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in the settlement, COVID-19 screening particularly amongst new refugees arriving during the pandemic, COVID-19 containment and policies of lockdown in relation to humanitarian protection, and finally contrasting the temporality of epidemic preparedness with that of daily life for refugees.

Ultimately, Sophie hopes that her research will draw attention to the real-life impacts of pandemics and subsequent public health control measures on those living in humanitarian settings. She believes that in order to better prepare for the next pandemic, humanitarian organisations and governments must factor in these influences from the very beginning to ensure that public health approaches have effective and meaningful impacts on people’s lives during outbreaks.

According to Sophie: “If people’s lived realities are given greater weight in the way in which we talk about epidemic preparedness and response, and I can contribute to that, then I think I’ve done a good job.”

The prize will allow Sophie to run a research dissemination workshop in Uganda to share her findings and invite feedback directly from the people involved in producing her research. She hopes to think together with them about what should be done with the research findings.

Resource Prize

A team of researchers led by Francesco Checchi have developed mathematical models used in a joint LSHTM and Johns Hopkins University study to understand the number of excess deaths  being caused by the ongoing Gaza conflict. The team includes LSHTM academics Carmen Tamayo Cuartero, Pratik Gupte and Greg Barnsley who have a range of experience, from veterinary science, ecology and evolutionary biology to COVID-19 modelling, respectively.

Why is it important to prepare for the next pandemic? Carmen emphasises the need for realistic testing of epidemic preparedness plans including social and political contexts to prevent otherwise theoretical plans falling short. Similarly, Pratik highlights the need to maintain outbreak analytical tools even when there are not ongoing outbreaks to ensure the skills and tools are available to be used quickly, should another pandemic arise. Greg takes a more global scale view, arguing that international frameworks and response plans must be developed before the next pandemic in order to ensure that all countries, regardless of their levels of resource, are prepared.

Driven by a desire to minimise the loss of life during disease outbreaks, the team applied their modelling expertise to better understand the potential impacts of a disease outbreak on the Gazan humanitarian crisis. Carmen and Pratik helped develop the mathematical models using the Epiverse-TRACE platform’s software tools, and Greg developed models to track the levels of population immunity for different infectious diseases historically included in routine vaccination schedules in Gaza. The team then used the models to estimate the impact on civilian casualties caused by potential outbreaks of diseases such as cholera, diphtheria, polio and dysentery, among others.

The models are open source and publicly available and can therefore be used in future humanitarian crises to inform decision-making and intervention planning to prevent and mitigate the impacts of infectious diseases in already fragile environments.

The award allows the team to continue their work through organising a workshop on modelling for humanitarian crises. This will involve gathering interested experts to understand which modelling approaches are the most relevant and useful, and identify priorities to make modelling methods and tools more accessible, including researchers and practitioners in low-and middle-income countries.

Carmen and Pratik hope that winning the award will enable the team to “contribute to advances in the field” and “convince more epidemiologists to adopt scenario modelling to make an evidence-driven case for policy actions”.

Greg said: “I’m grateful to have won and for research into health and diseases in humanitarian crises to receive recognition. These settings have a very high burden of disease, […] but research in humanitarian settings is difficult due to issues with generating data and a lack of funding.”

Find out more about the Centre's 2024 Prize Winners' Showcase event and the benefits of becoming a Centre member. 

If you're interested in learning more about how mathematical models are increasingly used to understand the transmission of infectious diseases in populations, sign up to the LSHTM Short Course: Modern Techniques in Modelling.