Early Career Awards for Pandemic Modelling

Congratulations to Dr Rob Currie and Dr Ben Wynne who have received RAMP Early Career Investigator Awards from the Royal Society.

Researchers Dr Rob Currie and Dr Ben Wynne from the School’s Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics have been working as part of the Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic initiative.

Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic

The Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic (RAMP) initiative was established to bring together modelling expertise from a diverse range of disciplines to support the pandemic modelling community already working on Coronavirus (COVID-19).

RAMP is designed to:

• provide support for existing research groups;
• create new models or insights that can be used to inform the work of the Government’s scientific advisors, through data science-based approaches;
• apply knowledge from related epidemiology domains;
• triage incoming literature to ensure effective information flows.

The goal of RAMP is to enhance modelling capacity to create a clearer understanding of different exit strategies from the current lockdown.

Royal Society RAMP Early Career Investigator Awards

These Royal Society RAMP Early Career Investigator Awards (RECIA) recognize early career researchers who have made exceptional contributions to the initiative.

We're very pleased to have this opportunity to help towards understanding the current pandemic. As physicists, it's not obvious how we can contribute in an area which is naturally associated with medicine and biology, but we all have a shared need for the computer modelling of complex systems. Whether we're simulating particle collisions at CERN, or investigating how lockdown measures slow the spread of a virus, we need to be able to analyse the results of our simulation to make useful predictions.