IGPP (Institute for Global Pandemic Planning) Warwick is now advertising for fully-funded PhD students. Happy to chat to anyone that is interested. eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Good update on the bird flu situation ttps://www.sciencenews.org/article/bird-flu-avian-flu-h5n1-virus

Fantastic paper by SBIDER member Yulia Timofeeva - showing that diversity in neurotransmitter response is governed by just a few key proteins. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I found this article an excellent summary of the current situation with pandemic-planning. Many have forgotten how bad COVID-19 was and how much worst a future pandemic could be. There seems to be a collected desire to pretend the SARS-2-CoV pandemic never happened. www.science.org/content/arti...

Massive congratulations to Rosemary Collier, Gavin Perkins and Siobhan Quenby (all at Warwick University) for their well-deserved awards in the 2025 New Year’s Honours list.

Instead of listing my publications, as the year draws to an end, I want to shine the spotlight on the commonplace assumption that productivity must always increase. Good research is disruptive and thinking time is central to high quality scholarship and necessary for disruptive research.

Yet more proof of how carefully vaccines are scrutinised and regulated, unfortunately I expect it will be used to support the anti-vaccine propaganda.

Vaccine exemptions in Michigan have nearly doubled since 2020, increasing from 3.2% to 6.2% in 2023. Cases of whooping cough in Michigan are currently higher than they’ve been for 20 years. This is what happens when vaccine misinformation flourishes. www.bridgemi.com/michigan-hea...

Two new papers from the SBIDER group: Bryon & Nigel, on tumour growth and circadian rhythms: www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/12... James & the team at KEMRI, on the spatial distribution on rhinovirus in Kenya: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Probably the scariest thing I've read recently: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... The one reassurance is that "The bovine airway and mammary gland epithelium have predominantly avian-type receptors", so there should not be strong evolutionary pressures while H5N1 is in cattle.

We have 4 post-doctoral positions, working with linked data to improve public health and health services with www.liverpool.ac.uk/population-h... and www.liverpool.ac.uk/civic-health... #episky #econsky #AcademicSky @profbuchan.bsky.social

Truly brilliant news, and a fantastic example of vaccination in action.

I still can't work out why it seems to take weeks to go from a pre-print to the submitted version. Surely there's a better way. (Although I'm certainly not the first to say this).

Really pleased to have finally submitted the work on Cost-Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines to a journal. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... This work helped to underpin the JCVI decision on vaccination for 2025. www.gov.uk/government/p...

Hi All. Inspired by the brilliant day at the Isaac Newton Institute on Thursday (21st Nov) about communicating mathematics - I'm going to force myself to post something at least every week.