The world needs to be prepared for the next global pandemic and research across the Edinburgh Infectious Disease community is helping to meet this challenge. The Edinburgh Pandemic Research Forum 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 the clinical and public health responses can be better integrated with the wider impacts on people, communities, businesses and services. The Edinburgh community made an outstanding contribution to research during the COVID-19 pandemic. This Forum will help us respond even more effectively to future infectious disease challenges. Professor Mark Woolhouse Edinburgh Pandemic Research Forum Lead 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. 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. This article was published on 2026-03-10
