Responding to health emergencies

Working with national and international policy makers, technical partners and tightly integrated into global alert and response networks, we develop analytical tools to respond to the complex health needs of populations in emergency situations resulting from infectious disease outbreaks, population displacements, climate change, natural disasters or conflict.

During the COVID-19, the institute convened the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team who published reports, software tools, and policy briefs to support the fight against the pandemic globally. The team adopted a policy of immediately sharing research findings on the developing pandemic. Our research helped inform policy decisions in the UK and around the world. Further information can be found in our COVID-19 page. 

Specific objectives of our research on health emergencies are:

• Utilising real-time analysis and intervention modelling to accelerate outbreak containment,
• Identifying high-impact interventions to protect vulnerable and displaced communities
• Strengthening on-the-ground analytical capacity and data collection
• Understanding the factors determining vulnerability and resilience to health emergencies 

In September 2022, the Institute announced ‘The Jameel Institute – Kenneth C Griffin Initiative for the Economics of Pandemic Preparedness” to help us prepare for future pandemics. The initiative will use pioneering integrated economic-epidemiological modelling to provide critical data and analysis to inform public health decision related to pandemic preparedness and disease outbreaks around the world.

See our 2022 annual report for examples of our work.