About us

The Edinburgh Pandemic Research Forum, led by the University of Edinburgh, is a convening centre for responses to funding calls, a route to informing pandemic science policy, a link to local, national and international research networks, and a host for workshops, seminars and discussion groups.

The Forum is purposefully multi-disciplinary, recognising the whole-of-society impacts of pandemics and seeking to identify ways in which clinical and public health responses can be better integrated with the wider impacts on people, communities, businesses and services.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers in Edinburgh published over 1700 papers, and those papers were cited over 75,000 times in just four years. We led or contributed to major studies of the genetics of human susceptibility to COVID diseases, real-time monitoring of the effectiveness of vaccines in Scotland, global analyses of SARS-CoV-2 genomes, the prioritisation of clinical interventions in Africa, and much more.

That research informed policy and practice, often in real time. We also provided practical support for the response in Scotland, we developed tools, and we provided high-level policy advice to the UK and to governments and agencies internationally. Our efforts have been recognised in numerous awards to research teams and individual researchers.

All this was made possible by Edinburgh having one of the largest groupings of infectious disease researchers in Europe, coupled with the breadth of expertise that covers the whole-of-society impacts of a pandemic. Pandemic preparedness goes beyond infection biology, clinical medicine and public health, encompassing One Health and Planetary Health, human behaviour, social science, economics, ethics, governance, policy, education, innovation and more. All of these topics are well represented in the Edinburgh community, making us exceptionally well-positioned to support a holistic response to future health emergencies.