(above) Image Professor Julia Gog presenting at the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. You can watch the lecture here.

JUNIPER Consortium Newsletter
January 2022

Dear friends and associates of JUNIPER,

Welcome to this months edition of the JUNIPER consortium's newsletter. It was a busy end of 2021 and start to 2022. At the end of the year the consortium members provided early short-term projections of omicron dynamics in England to SAGE (you can read the report here) and provided advice to UK government on the potential impact of different interventions.

JUNIPER co-lead Professor Julia Gog joined Professor Jonathan Van-Tam as one of the guest lecturers on the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on 29th December, you can watch the episode here. And if you missed Julia's Rosalind Franklin lecture at the Royal Society back in October, you can watch it here.

Events

MONTHLY SEMINAR SERIES 

Speaker: Dr Emily Nixon (University of Bristol)
Title: Who takes part in social contact surveys? A mixed methods analysis of participation with relevance to epidemic modelling
Date: Mon 28th February 12:00pm-13:00pm (GMT)
Further details and link to watch the talk here

WEEKLY SEMINAR SERIES

We have a weekly informal seminar on Wednesdays at 16:00-17:00 GMT followed by a virtual beer hour. If you are interested in attending please sign up here. 

Recent Papers and Articles

Article published in Statistical Methods in Medical Research on Fitting to the UK COVID-19 outbreak, short-term forecasts and estimating the reproductive number, by members at the University of Warwick. You can read the full paper here.

Preprint on JUNIPER consortium's initial projections of omicron dynamics in England is available here. This work was present to SAGE and you can view the report here.

Preprint on a computational framework for modelling infectious disease policy based on age and household structure with applications to the COVID-19 pandemic by members at the University of Warwick and University of Manchester is available here.

Preprint on Bayesian Estimation of real-time Epidemic Growth Rates using Gaussian Processes: local dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 in England by members at the University of Warwick is available here.

We are happy to be working with Plus Magazine to bring the work from consortium members to a wider audience. Check out the full list of articles here. Recent highlights include Why the generation time of COVID-19 is important and Understanding waning immunity

For a full list of outputs from the consortium, check out our website here​.

Upcoming events

The Role of Uncertainty in Mathematical Modelling of Pandemics is a three-day workshop on 8th-10th February 2022 which will focus on uncertainty quantification methods for epidemiology models and forms part of the RAMP continuity work. Find out more including how to register​ here.

Genomic, Evolutionary and Epidemiological Approaches for Pandemics is a one-day workshop on 15th March 2022 which will look at the integration of phylogenetic and epidemiological tools. Find out more including how to register here. 

Thank you as always for your continued support and interest. We hope you all have a lovely break over Christmas and we look forward to more interactions with you all in 2022. 

- JUNIPER consortium

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Contact: Dr Ciara Dangerfield - ced57@cam.ac.uk (JUNIPER scientific programme manager)

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(above) Figure showing projections of infections, hospitalisations and deaths based on early omicron variant dynamics from JUNIPER consortium preprint on the early short terms projects for omicron variant available here.