Can you just start by saying your name and what your current position is?
I'm Somali Bajaj, and I'm literally a default student in the Department of Biology and also part of NARC,
which is the environmental research doctoral training program.
All right. Okay. And what does that stand for? Environmental research.
All right. Yes. Doctoral training. Okay. Yes. Yes.
And so tell me a little about yourself. How did you first get interested in science in general and the kind of work you're interested in specifically?
So I did my undergrad instead back in India in 2010.
And while I was doing my undergrad at a couple of research projects,
trying to understand where I can apply stats in real life, I worked on some gastro intestinal diseases.
I worked on sizing charts for women and how that should be standardised.
But then I realised that what I really am interested in is learning a bit more about where this can actually be applied stats in general,
which in the biomedical field people are always thinking.
Yeah, because while I was getting exposed to generally applying stats and finance and just gender, a lot of companies take or take on data analysts.
Somehow that did not excite me as much, which is I think, okay,
I did do a short stint in a consulting firm for about three or four months, but then soon realised that I wasn't excited about it.
So I left my job and just started working as a researcher and billing in a hospital,
a government hospital in India with the bio stats unit so that I worked on coeliac
disease and how so many people have coeliac disease but do not really know about it.
And while I was doing that, my professor there suggested that because I'm interested in this field should probably study a bit more and
suggested I study bio stats so a bit more focussed on the medical field or just public health in general.
So while I was applying for Masters and Ballots that I didn't really know anyone from my field or from my university in general who had studied bios,
that they all went on to do a bit more data analyst type of jobs or maybe an MBA in general.
While I was applying, I also started working as a consultant for Public Health Foundation of India,
and that just solidified my interest in applying stats to the health public health field.
And then I got a scholarship to go and study at Harvard for my masters in Bio stat.
And that was really eye opening because my undergrad, as much fun as it was, it was quite theoretically the stats.
And that's why throughout I wanted to know where can I really use all of this?
But at Harvard it was very much applied.
We had a lot of methodological subjects which were somewhat easier for me to understand because I'd done a lot of theory,
but it was the applied aspect, which was very new, very exciting and somewhat difficult to understand at first.
But while I was doing that, I was still interested in studying all these things.
Where can I really apply it? So then I worked with a couple of professors at Harvard working as a research assistant,
but mostly on non-communicable diseases because that was the big department there.
And most of the people, at least at that time, used to work on non-communicable diseases at Harvard or the School of Public Health.
So when I was finishing up my master's, I felt like I wanted to still know I can apply, but I was still not very excited about it.
I wasn't excited about applying stats at the population level, so I did not know a lot of biology,
so I wasn't really looking to do something at the cellular level to something at the population level.
But which is I keep using the word exciting, but that's exactly what I was looking for and I didn't quite find something.
So I didn't apply for a Ph.D. then, but I got married after that and my husband and I, we he was working.
So we decided that I can move here and to the UK.
Exactly. To the UK. And then I got a job at the infectious disease department in Imperial and I was working on HIV for the first 9 to 10 months,
and that's when I felt like, Oh, this is exciting.
People's behaviours can affect how a disease spreads and it's not just your behaviour affecting yourself,
it's how your behaviour affects everyone else. Which is where I thought, okay, that's where I want to maybe focus a bit more on.
I worked on Alzheimer's also for a bit and those are two different things, aren't they?
It was. I mean it was, yeah. I would have wanted to continue with HIV, but because of the visa situation,
I ended up working with a very important person in this field who was at Oxford many, many years ago.
Roy Anderson He started the department there, and it was it was a lot of fun learning about Alzheimer's, which is a brand new field.
But again, I knew that it just solidified again my idea that I wasn't quite interested in non-communicable diseases.
And then a colleague of mine there called Ben Lambert, who was again at Oxford and I was at Exeter,
suggested that I get in touch with a few people in Oxford who are working on interesting diseases, infectious diseases.
He's a statistician himself, so I felt like I could follow his advice.
And then I met Moritz Cranmer and Jose Lorenzo, who are now my supervisors,
and they were the first people I met when I was thinking maybe I can pursue a Ph.D. in this.
It's been years, and this is the only thing that excites me.
And I think it was just meeting them just the first time I met them and just seeing how excited and passionate they were about the work.
I knew that I just wanted to apply for a Ph.D. with them, and that's exactly what I did.
I did apply in Oxford with other PIs, but they were always going to be my main supervisors,
and I was just so excited to work with them because they had such interesting
ideas and they were just so passionate about solving so many problems that exist.
And that's exactly what I did. And my Ph.D. was going to be on mosquito borne viruses, and that was supposed to start in 2020.
But that's when COVID happened. Exactly. Yes.
And let's just take a step back on that. So you were still at Imperial at the beginning of 2020?
Exactly. Yeah. So can you remember where you were when you first heard that there was an outbreak of a respiratory disease going on in China?
Yeah. So I used to live a bit. I was not quite in London.
I was in a town called Staines, so I didn't travel to work every day.
And I was just listening on news and seeing people.
Moritz actually write on Twitter. And this was only John when he wrote something about this airborne virus that's circulating in China.
Nobody was talking about it,
but I still remember seeing his tweet at that time and then slowly seeing a few tidbits of news coming up in there and then actually talking to Roy.
Right. I wrote him a name of saying that I feel like we can work from home and I don't want to be susceptible or put other people at risk.
So is it okay if I work from home? I do not know what's happening, but is it okay?
And he was very much on board and he's like, Let let's do that for the whole team.
He sent out an email, but that was very early on, I think.
But that's when we all started. Again, it's privileged to be able to work from home, but that's what we did.
Whether you were in a field where you were likely to be more conscious of how important I mean to you what you understood about the spread of disease,
which most people didn't do? Exactly. Yes. Yes.
And did you do any work on COVID while you were still at Imperial?
MM Yeah. So initially I still remember it was, like I said, quite early on,
our team just in the department decided that we would probably work from home if possible, but there were people still coming in.
And I remember we had this meeting where they called volunteers to just come and help with data scraping from the web.
What a sort of hackathon. So we all sat in a room and we were literally we were assigned countries where a few news articles were coming up from,
and our task was to actually go throughout the day,
just go online, try to extract all the PDFs from the Ministry of Health or whatever news articles,
Twitter, blogs, and get a number of cases that are being reported.
So actually just manually creating a long list because there wasn't any set database to inform all of this.
So literally just sitting, writing in an Excel and curating data from basics,
and that was my first introduction to working on COVID and how reliable with those sources, in retrospect, I'm as reliable as they could be, I guess.
Yeah, Yeah, I think it's it's so difficult.
Oh, it was so difficult at that point to have a reliable global database, which I think it still is difficult to find.
But there are people working and have created these. Excellent.
Databases which have line lists, or even if they don't have lined list, they have some sort of aggregated data.
So that is that exists now.
But was difficult then. Yes. And were you able to see the dynamics of the how the virus was spreading through that work?
Yeah. I mean, I wasn't particularly doing that. There were more senior researchers actually doing the analysis.
So they used to we used to have, I don't know,
weekly calls where they were updating us on estimates of are not for this disease or this new virus that is spreading.
And I was just it was amazing to be able to see all of this from the front seat, really,
and some excellent scientists just working on this and to be able to understand how it is difficult when an unknown outbreak happens.
How how do you actually go about using all these techniques that you've learned which cater to really clean datasets and organise datasets,
But how do you work with messy datasets?
That was the first time I was seeing all of that, and it was exciting and you'd ask me if I'd worked in Imperial.
I, after I finished my Alzheimer's project, Imperial actually had has a group or is it a group or it's called J Idea.
Jamal Infection. I'm sorry, I don't know what it stands for, but J idea they funded to investigate.
I guess infectious diseases spread and I was taken on by Katrina.
How do you spell out you get a d h.
E r Ryanair h a u.
C gear. Yeah. She's an infectious disease modeller, economic modeller.
And she was. So there were almost two sections in the department, one which was doing active research in the infectious disease EPI of Autism remit.
And Katherine was leading more of the economic impact this disease was this disease had on different societies and different parts of the world.
So she recruited me for about six months over there.
I was looking, particularly in England, how lockdowns and other different scenarios of if we have a partial lockdown,
what sectors would be affected if we have a full lockdown,
What sectors are going to be affected most when we lift the lockdown more from an economic perspective?
So I think that was one of the earlier studies combining epidemiology and economic impact before we knew it's going to impact the economy.
So you were able to use your statistics both to look at the that the as you say, the epidemiology and to a sense that the virology,
the biology, the biology end of it and the economic end of it at the same time,
and do the both those things and this is a general question really how important
are non-biological factors in the spread of an infectious disease like COVID?
Oh, massively. I think that oh, I mean,
that is hopefully going to be a chapter in my thesis because it's it's I think a lot of it is behaviour driven because you
might have a very mild disease and you might have people responding very differently to if the disease was very deadly.
And that is going to make all the difference and communicating the severity of disease.
And I think communication and behaviour, human behaviour which is dictated by fear or by solidarity, it's it's dictated by so many aspects of life.
But I think it's behaviour that drives how disease spreads in the end.
Mm hmm. So you said yes, you you were due to start a PhD on mosquito borne illness.
Sorry. Was it viruses or substance in that would have been in October 2020.
So did you indeed come to us with an idea? I moved on 1st of October, and like I said, I was on a doctoral training programme,
so my first year was really taking a few classes and deciding what my project was going to be do My project was decided.
So it did change because I was going to get well.
I was taking classes as part of the doctoral training programme in my first few months.
Mm hmm. And was that sometimes I do this at the end.
We might as well do that since we've arrived.
That I mean, when you say taking classes, by that time were you able to meet in person again with the classes happening online?
No, everything was online. Yeah, I barely met anyone.
We it was. I think it was the rule of meeting six.
Yes. So we used to meet a cohort in groups of six and university parks.
Really. And everything was just online, you know, I was just sitting in a cute little house in Oxford and studying the courses.
Yeah. Yes. So that made your experience as a PhD student very different from what it should have been?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I suppose so. Yes. No, no, no.
But yes. No, you know. But were you able to get to know your your colleagues and your fellow students in your cohort despite the limitations.
Yeah. I think the programme tried their best to have social events online.
I think just through the classes I knew everyone's faces. I just didn't know how tall they were.
Sure I know their faces. I know how they talk, what they interested in.
When you see them in your life, you just realise how tall or short the person is, if that is the only difference, I guess.
Yeah, I know, but I think the programme tried as much as they could and I did make a few friends and I'm in touch with a few of them right now.
Yeah, I think they did a good job. And you hinted that your big topic did shift.
What was going on? Yeah. So what what did you mean?
And were you getting involved in studies during that first year, even though it was mainly a talk course?
Yeah, exactly. You know, it was more on me.
I reached out to moderates and Jose saying that I am quite keen and I do have time because during the third term,
during the third term of the first year,
you're supposed to find a project and understand what you want to work on and just get a feel for what your Ph.D. might be on.
But because I already knew I wanted to work with Moretz and Jose, so I just asked them if I can start working on some projects.
And I'm like, Throughout this period there have been so many projects which have started and ended just because of interest,
time constraints, capacity and things like that.
But one of the projects that took off quite early on in my Ph.D.,
which also became part of my first chapter, was looking at the spread of alpha variant of COVID in England.
And that's how I really just started with my Ph.D. in the third term.
So remind me about as it's getting a bit distant now.
We started with, I think what was just called the Wuhan variant.
When did Alpha come along? I think it was the end of 2020, Yeah.
Yeah. Was it called something that was that the one that was called the Kent variant. Yes exactly.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah exactly. Yeah. Which supposedly originated or was found in Kent in Greater London.
So who was doing I mean. Yes. So the detection of these variants is that's a job for people who are working in genomics.
So who were your collaborators, who were who were doing that kind of work?
So we have a team somewhat it is very involved with Cog-uk, which is the Consortium for the Genomics in UK,
and we have our collaborators in Edinburgh who do a lot of the genomics plus by Brazil was very involved.
So the whole team really and they were mostly doing the genomics analysis then and I did the stats analysis from here.
That's how we structured that project. And how did, what was the shape of the way the alpha variant spread?
So what I was looking at, what was established was that we found it quite early on in Kent and Greater London.
And then what I was interested in through more, it was so, you know, it's found.
Yeah. So it's going to be spreading faster in Kent and Greater London obviously.
But can we show that through the final geography analysis and can we order through show that through the stats analysis just to have a robust
sort of result and then try to understand why is it spreading faster in certain locations And know the other obvious answer is mobility,
but just to put numbers to it. So what we found was that number of imports from Kent and London into different pockets of
England was greatly associated with where it started spreading and it seems quite intuitive.
But the purpose of all of this was that international import is important, but once you it,
it's really important to understand what scale at which you're looking at for your results.
And over here it was subnational levels and understanding the epicentre and how different areas are connected to these epicentres,
just putting numbers to really these results. So it wasn't about the transmissibility of the virus itself, it was more about the people.
Oh, I mean, yeah, I think it's going to be very difficult to talk about transmissibility with a lot of certainty at the population level.
Ideally, to assess transmissibility, you would do a controlled experiment, but you can't really do that.
I think at the population level, like I said, so many factors apart from your question, a very important question.
What really affects transmission over and above biological properties of a pathogen?
And I think it's really difficult to disentangle this at the population level with a lot of precision and accuracy.
And that's what we talk about.
There is a little bit there might be and there were other controlled biological experiments which said Alpha was a bit more transmissible.
But how much more transmissible? And how much of that is attributed at the population level?
I think it's sometimes difficult to make that connection when you just have observational data,
like at the population level, it's all mobility and intrinsic properties that led to its spread.
Mm hmm. So how did you collect that kind of data? Data on mobility and the human behaviour side of it.
So, okay, I feel like all of this stems from what Moore had said access to,
but he had access to all the data which was at the local authority level in England or the mobile provider,
and also Google mobility data, which was quite useful.
I mean, all these mobility leaders that have their own set of biases and problems really,
but we try to make as much use of them as possible and try to understand what
sort of biases are coming from different sources of the same sort of data.
And that's exactly what we did. Just use aggregate population level data about how many trips are being made between
two different locations in England and use that to inform mobility patterns.
Mm hmm. And did you go on from that to look at the other variants that emerged as time went by?
Yeah, exactly. So again, the second paper, which is again part of my first chapter, was looking at the spread of Delta in England,
which was originated or found in India first and then spread quite substantially in England as well.
And yeah, I could talk about the results of that.
Yes, yes, yes. Again, so we had a Edinburgh team leading the final geography or the genomic analysis,
which I think one of the main results they found was that if you remember around I guess late April 21, was it?
Yes, late April 21, we had hotel quarantine for people travelling from India because this had spread and had a deadly wave in India.
So actually that's what the politicians decided to do.
But more often than not, it's already too late.
If you're finding these variants, it's likely that there are lot,
many parents already seated in England, but they did decide to do this hotel quarantine.
And what the genomic analysis found was the quarantine did help in the slowing of the spread of the variant.
But the genes, if you were to think about one person infecting another or infecting another, the genes,
the genes of which ended up being the largest in England of the Delta variant,
were already seeded in England before they implemented the hotel quarantine.
So how useful is it?
It might be, but I think it has to be backed with other non-pharmaceutical interventions that you can do within the country or prepare the country.
And what I looked at in that is how people were mixing within locations and how that affected the growth of Delta in different parts of the country.
And again, it was mobility because the lockdown had opened and people were mixing more freely within their areas.
And even if they were not moving a lot between areas, even because it was already seated in different parts of England,
local mobility patterns were associated with the spread of Delta.
Mm hmm. And I should probably of asked you this before, but how do you turn that into statistics, into a numerical problem that you can address?
Right. So we do have model. So models of when I think about models, I've always thought about why what is the purpose of modelling?
What I think is to get some signal from noise.
It's the signal versus noise. Comparison is quite common in the field where the purpose is.
You have all this data, can you find some trends? Can you find association between two different moving parts of the vehicle?
Really? And what we looked at was the outcome being how fast Delta was growing in proportion
to the other variant which was around and what was changing along with it.
So it was mobility. We accounted for vaccination status that was also changing over time.
We accounted for a number of inputs which really didn't have an effect.
As we were talking, it was more local mobility. So having all these moving parts.
And then having your outcome and then seeing which one is more associated with not saying it caused it,
because that's another different discussion and it requires a lot more detailed analysis.
But when you can see two moving parts that can give you an insight into what the mechanism might really be, and that's how we do the modelling.
That's the only explanation.
And and to what extent were the studies that you were doing, you and your colleagues were doing influencing policy at the national level?
Oh, I'm not entirely sure. These were somewhat retrospective even of real time, but I think by the time again,
moderates was quite involved with a lot of the other groups that were in forming government policies.
So I'm not quite sure how much of the preliminary results were being relayed on to the government.
Exactly. Yet this was part of Sage four. He was part of SPI am definitely.
But yeah, I'm not sure how much he was relaying or how much he, you know, not I'm not sure.
But our results did work. Our papers did come out as retrospective analysis, but not too delayed, if that makes sense, within a few months.
But through the whole peer review process, it takes a lot of time.
But I'm sure there were feed ins I don't like say it said, Has your PHC become entirely about COVID?
I hope the mosquito borne virus is being forgotten or nothing.
I thankfully, I have some excellent researchers around me who are still working on many important diseases that are relevant to the entire world.
So I've been part of small projects looking at dengue, Zika and chicken.
Go now in Mexico with one of my colleagues, Bernardo, and I hope to do more of that, at least in the next at least in the last year.
I do want to, if not after my PhD, because I do understand, I know it's COVID and it might get boring after a point,
but I think there's just so much data that I it's almost impossible not to make use of all then
access to data that you have to understand all these mechanisms that govern disease spread.
So how far through are you at the moment? When do you intend to submit?
I'm supposed to submit by October 20, 24.
Oh, right. Okay. Yeah, I suppose it's a four year program. Yes, yes, yes.
My son did one, so it's a nice, um.
Uh. Yes.
I wonder I've got a question about collaboration because, um, I mean,
obviously your field is very interdisciplinary, so you will always have been collaborating with others.
But did you have a sense that working on COVID, there was a greater sense of sharing,
of openness, of data, of bringing more people in who perhaps might not have been?
Absolutely. No, I think that's a brilliant question.
And I think if you just look at the number of authors that you see on the paper, that's changed massively.
People argue that it might not be reflective of how much people work or how much work people have put in,
but I think it's almost amazing how much people are recognising the importance of interdisciplinary work.
I mean, both my papers and now have been with people from a completely different field, which I do not completely understand.
But together we can bring so much insight and almost sometimes do robust checks to the kind of result the counterpart is bringing,
which I think is excellent because you're not only talking about your results being robust,
you're also talking about or you can also look at mechanisms through which they get the same results,
which is brilliant, I think, and getting perspectives not only so when I talk about Delta growing faster in a certain place,
I would also want to maybe collaborate with social scientists to understand why was that really happening?
Why were people moving around in one place more than the other, which you can't really just get from the data you have?
So it's important to if you really want to make a change, you have to have you need to have this multi-layered collaboration to solve a big crisis.
And I think COVID really was shining a light on this interdisciplinary work going around the globe.
And when you also asked about data access and how it was definitely a problem initially, and even now,
I think that cases where data is not made available freely, a lot of it is to do with just ethics of data governance.
And I think that a lot of people, like I said, working on this and my supervisor also has a collaboration with Google called Global Dot Health,
where they're trying to make lots of international linguists,
linguists available to scientists all over the world so that we can take science forward.
And so are you fairly optimistic that the lessons that have been learned through working on the pandemic might continue to apply in the future?
I hope so. I mean, I would definitely hope so.
I do see a change in general about data sharing and science sharing, really idea of sharing and the fact that things have become online.
I know it's been problematic for so many reasons, but I think access to just knowledge has become greater,
sometimes not in the direction you would want it,
but I think there have been so many positives and negatives from this that you can maybe focus on positives when you want to at least.
And and I was struck that you mentioned when you were at Harvard,
the main focus was on non-communicable diseases, which are obviously the biggest problem in Western societies.
Infectious diseases is still an absolutely enormous problem, mainly in the in the global south.
Is that the area that you want to continue to work in?
And do you think the fact that everybody's been looking at infectious disease for the last
three years might raise the profile of what sometimes get called neglected diseases,
even though they affect millions of people? Absolutely.
You know, when I say the focus was on non infectious diseases, it was more so at Harvard,
the School of Public Health, They have a Department of Infectious diseases.
But when you talk about the Department of Epidemiology or Department of Bio stat, all of our case studies are guided by non-communicable diseases.
So I was never really exposed to methods from stats that I can apply to infectious diseases in the regular modules.
I would have to go to the infectious diseases modules to actually see that.
Yes, I mean, I mentioned Roy earlier.
He has a big group working on neglected tropical diseases.
Some of them truly are neglected tropical diseases. They're very niche in terms of where they exist.
I mean, I. I really, really do hope that people understand the importance of studying infectious disease and spending,
as you can say, more funds into this whole research area.
But unfortunately, I mean, I think of it as an excellent example of when people actually do that.
It's when it affects them. The Western world. You know, I, I remember talking to my family back in India when COVID was happening,
and they were just talking about how so many people didn't really care about COVID because they had just so many other diseases,
so many other problems in life that COVID is just one of them.
And having lockdowns when so many people can't afford to really stay at home and their
livelihoods depend on getting wages for the and you're asking them to stay at home.
And then it was we literally are surrounded by so many other diseases.
What is one more disease going to do to us? It is a disease of the privileged.
I think over in general. I know a lot of people won't agree with it, but it's just my personal opinion.
I've seen how people respond to it and what they feel about it.
It isn't politically driven, it is truth driven, and a lot of people won't get it.
But I know a lot of people in India will get it because you see that impact.
You know, that's very interesting and sobering perspective.
So, I mean, just coming back to to you yourself living here in the UK,
how threatened did you feel by the possibility of actually catching the virus yourself?
Like I said, I think of when I was growing up in India.
I mean, I've been very privileged to grow up in a safe environment where I was taken care of.
I had access to a lot of health care, but I was always cognisant of the problems that exist, at least to some extent.
I wouldn't say I've been brilliant at understanding how the world functions, but I was cognisant to some extent and I've always I mean,
I was always scared when I when I was living in Staines,
we were living in a three storey apartment sort of set up and I was more scared for the person living downstairs.
It was just an elderly man, so I didn't want to get infected just so that I do not touch surfaces while going up to my apartment,
which ends up infecting this person.
But maybe deep down I was of course scared of all these complications that were happening to young, healthy individuals.
Also not downplaying the is how long COVID has affected people.
But if I was completely honest, not entirely scared.
And also I think the health care system, even though it was very overburdened, I've had a very good experience with the NHS.
You know, even during COVID, I had a bad day.
I was not feeling too well and the ambulance had rushed and they took such good care of me.
It was the middle of the pandemic and I did have faith in the health system, you know.
And how did it impact on on your ability to work?
I mean, obviously, you chose to work from home like like so many people where you were.
You working longer hours, do you think? Sometimes I think sometimes not entirely.
I think of generally in general, I do not push myself because I know I will burn out and it happens quite quickly.
If I do that. I'm very aware of how much I can work.
I try to stick to 9 to 5, even when it's strict deadlines.
I try to be just more productive. Not everybody can do that.
I know it's difficult, but I think that's how I've grown up.
So I used to just finish my work by five sun setting, work setting and yeah, yeah, I was able to do that.
I think working from home was okay for me. I my husband is lovely, so it was so nice to be able to spend so much time with him again.
I know people have had difficult times, but I was just, I think, lucky again,
just counting my blessings and also how privileged we were to be able to afford to do that.
But yeah, it was okay for me if not good. Yeah.
And, and did the, the, the pandemic conditions change or, or I mean things like going out for walks.
Did you have routines that you adapted to, to kind of fit around the constraints.
Yeah yeah yeah. We we. You. You're interested in dance?
I seem to have read somewhere. I do dance? Yes. Yeah.
Oh. Oh, yeah. It's been a while.
But I used to dance for my college back in undergrad.
Um, I. Oh, we're not into sports, so we.
We bought new bikes, and we used to just cycle around winter and just go for really long bike rides.
And that was most of the time. And then my cousin's back in India.
We had a regular Zoom call where we were all working out, which everyone was doing around the world, but we had that.
I was celebrating buddies, my grandparents buddies.
We were having a little quiz online,
but I think I just reconnected with my family a lot during this time and it was so nice to have everyone fighting this together.
And um, I, but I do remember, I know this isn't the question, but, well, you could ask me the impact.
I think the impact was okay for me, but I remember my granddad use he was quite active, used to play tennis table tennis,
swim and because he was susceptible or was at high risk, he was confined to his house and that had a very severe impact on him.
He, he was, he was he wanted to go out. He wasn't scared.
He wanted to just play. But then it's all this we didn't allow him really.
And it it did not impact like in a good way.
And he did whatever he could use to walk around in the house cycle stationary cycles.
But yeah, I just remember not everybody had the same.
No, no. Everybody has a very, very different experience.
Some people really enjoyed it, but, you know, some people were climbing up the walls.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yes. And things like remote working.
Have you seen that that that's been adopted more widely.
Are you using that more in your work now. Uh, virtual meetings and so on?
I think so, yeah. I think it's become, like I said, very easy access to knowledge.
So all you may be setting up a meeting with someone in the US used to feel like a big deal,
but now it's just so common just setting up a meeting with someone and emailing people.
Just the idea that you can email a very senior person and they will respond to you because everyone is online now in a way.
I don't know what I used to think. Well, people not on their computers and would,
but it could have just been because you were very junior before and the idea
you just couldn't envisage that this person would respond to your instruction.
And actually they do. Yeah, exactly. Well, I feel the words become closer.
You're talking to people sitting in extremely different parts of the world and working on the same idea.
It feels so much more connected.
And in general, some days when I don't feel like coming into work just because I'm in a writing mode, I can go to a café and work.
I can just work from home. My husband's been working remotely for most of the time.
Even though he work, he goes to work sometimes and mostly for the social aspect of getting his team together.
But he's quite productive at work, at home, and he has his own set up.
So yeah, it's made life more flexible, I would definitely say.
Yeah. And has the experience of the work you've done through the pandemic changed your
thinking about the kinds of problems that you might like to work on in the future?
Absolutely. Yes. Like I was saying, and you just how you put these questions into numerical models,
when I did put them and I got these results, there was another question.
Like I said, why is there more mobility in one place?
Why is that really happening now that I see that this impact so apparent gross or variant of concern is growing,
Why is that really happening, going deeper or digging deeper into the mechanism?
And that's what I've been working on, is understanding how socio economic status, how equity in disease transmission impact or disease spreads.
And I've been very fortunate to be working as part of a collaboration between Oxford University and Ernst and
Young to answer a question that UK agency put forward about how testing was useful as an intervention in the UK.
So we were made to do a lot of free and tests and PCR tests.
So they are doing an incredible job doing the self evaluation, external self evaluation of whether the interventions in testing were really helpful.
And through that we've looked at different sectors testing in schools, testings and testing.
In health care settings. And what I focussed on is whether testing was really equitable because these tests are free,
but are they really equitable in the sense that you released them?
They are free and everybody should be taking them and everybody should be reporting it.
But are people really doing that?
That's what I've looked at and we've just submitted our report to you to say, Oh, we're in the process of finalising and submitting,
but I hope to have those results and the set of extra results as part of my next chapter and hopefully publish soon.
So did you have to collaborate with behavioural sciences on that? We do have that to interview people about their behaviour.
Yes, I didn't do that. I did the quantitative analysis, but we have an excellent team from Eli from Oxford doing all the qualitative analysis,
understanding what was really happening by talking to people, going through a lot of reports that people had collected back in the day.
So we have a lot of qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis.
And is, I mean, is it too early for you to be thinking about postdoc positions or have you started to plan for that?
I have age. I haven't thought about what it would be, but I'm quite certain it's going to be in research.
And like I've mentioned hundreds of times, I absolutely love my supervisors.
Ben, Crystal Moritz, Josie and I have so much to learn from them.
So even then give me the settings because Ben Lambert, yet he was the one who connected me to my other two supervisors.
He was my colleague in Imperial, but he got me involved in this UK tourism budget as well.
Bristol Donnelly, Crystal Dunn and Moritz Kramer and Jose Llorente.
Yeah, I mean, I've been I've enjoyed my time so much and I'm still enjoying it.
And every time I speak to them, they're just so passionate about what they do and I have so much to learn from them.
I feel like I've been researching hopefully around them for a bit longer before I can be a bit more independent.
But I think I'll always want to collaborate with excellent scientists that have found you.