Environment submissions database

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed extraordinary pressures on both individuals and our institution and has exemplified the University’s dynamic, collegial and supportive approach. Colleagues are leading and participating in pandemic related research projects across the discipline base including on the evolution of the virus, its impact in Gaza Strip refugee camps, new physical interventions including purpose-designed fibre-optic probes for in-lung analysis and treatment, and the feasibility of wastewater acting as an early warning of future outbreaks. There has been broad and enthusiastic engagement in “sandpit”-style events created bottom-up to address the challenges of the pandemic, bringing colleagues together from all disciplines to seek new ways to tackle the multitude of issues created by COVID-19, and we anticipate that these positive changes to our research community will be lasting. Staff in our Faculty of Engineering re-purposed their expertise to produce over 100,000 pieces of PPE in the first six months of the pandemic and published guidance to allow other groups to produce the equipment. Rutter (from Social Policy) sits on the UK Government’s SAGE group of experts and is co-chair of its Environmental Modelling Group (EMG), concerned with understanding transmission routes and the impact of environmental and behavioural interventions. Our Mathematicians are involved in modelling work supporting the response to COVID. Budd is a member of SPI-M and a SAGE working party on HE and Yates is a member of Independent SAGE. Significant resources were invested in keeping key research facilities open during the first national lockdown. A programme of phased reopening was then implemented to open our other research labs safely, with a focus on those labs needed by ECRs (including PGR students), and it is fair to say that the research laboratory re-start paved the way for the opening up of the campus more generally at the end of summer. The University took full account of protected characteristics in allocating its UKRI CoA allocation and care was taken to ensure that available funding was primarily used to support staff on fixed-term research posts. Despite these efforts, our collective ability to deliver research was impacted, particularly through the first lockdown, and this is reflected in our research income for 2019/20 which was almost 40% lower in the final quarter of the year compared to anticipated levels due to reduced spend. Perhaps the greatest impact of Covid-19 has been on individuals, and this burden has not fallen equally. We have sought to mitigate such imbalance. Within our University we are conscious of the differential impact affecting those with caring responsibilities – most frequently females – and we are now monitoring gender-based impact on research metrics such as funding bids and outputs through our formal reporting.