Members of CMMID are actively involved in a range of outreach and public engagement activities.
Science festivals and public lectures
CMMID regularly runs activities at science festivals and events, including Cheltenham Science Festival, Science Museum Lates, Royal College of Nursing, New Scientist Live. Members have also give public lectures on mathematical modelling at the Royal Institution, TEDx Thessaloniki, and TED2018, as well as talks on citizen science at Kings College, IDDconf, EEID, and London International Development Centre.
School workshops
CMMID PhD students have been involved in developing an interactive half-day school workshop 'Outbreak control: an introduction to careers in public health', which aims to inspire the next generation of public health professionals. Through five interactive demonstrations, featuring props from marbles to mosquitos, school students will be introduced to the work of epidemiologists, statisticians and lab scientists in an outbreak situation. This work has been supported by the LSHTM Public Engagement Small Grants Scheme.
CMMID members have also run several research projects in collaboration with British secondary schools, including studies of movement patterns, social contact networks, and bacterial infections. Through a series of videoconferences and workshops, the research team helped students design and run surveys, and analyse the resulting data. This work has been featured in featured in PLUS magazine, and supported by grants from Wellcome Trust and the Evelyn Trust. These projects have also generated teaching resources to show how maths can be used to understand epidemics, social interactions and vaccination.
Citizen science
In 2017/18, Petra Klepac and Adam Kucharski developed the BBC Pandemic citizen science project with collaborators at the University of Cambridge, which was showcased in the BBC4 programme 'Contagion!', where it was used in a simulation of an influenza pandemic in the UK. The project aimed to collect large-scale data on human interactions and movements, to create a new gold-standard data set for use in future pandemic analysis and in wider infectious disease research.
CMMID have also been involved in Flusurvey, an internet-based project to track the spread of influenza in the UK (and further afield).
