The Alan Turing Institute is delighted to announce that Professor Mark Birkin has been tasked with leading a key workstream of The Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic (RAMP) initiative which is bringing modelling expertise from a diverse range of disciplines to support the pandemic modelling community working on Coronavirus.
The Royal Society has convened RAMP to help model the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and guide the UK’s response.
Professor Birkin’s expertise will help to connect epidemic models to transport and urban analytics.
Mark is the Turing’s Programme Director for Urban Analytics and a Turing Fellow. He is Professor of Spatial Analysis and Policy in the School of Geography, University of Leeds and Director of the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics. The Turing is also providing project management support to RAMP.
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; and triage incoming literature to ensure effective information flows.
Mark said, “RAMP and its distinct, cross-disciplinary approach provides an important platform for predictive analytics supporting policy insight and enhanced decision-making. The Turing and I welcome the opportunity to continue to be actively involved in the UK’s fight against the pandemic.”
Further Information:
An important goal of RAMP is to enhance modelling capacity in time to create a clearer understanding of different exit strategies from the current lockdown.
RAMP will operate beside Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics (DELVE), a multi-disciplinary group, convened by the Royal Society, to support a data-driven approach to learning from the different approaches being taken in other countries to tackle the pandemic.
