This lecture was given by Dr Whiffin to the Oxford University Personalised Medicine Society on 25 May 2022. Dr Whiffin joined the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics as a Group Leader and Sir Henry Dale Fellow, supported by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society, in Sept 2020. She is also a visiting scientist at both the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She leads the Computational Rare Disease Genomics group, which uses computational approaches to interpret the role of genetic variants in rare diseases. Dr Whiffin’s undergraduate degree was in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge before she studied for a PhD in genetic susceptibility to Colorectal Cancer at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. During her postdoctoral work at Imperial College London, she developed tools and methods to improve interpretation of variants identified in patients with Inherited Heart Conditions.

A recording of a talk given to the Oxford Personalised Medicine Society in November 2021.

George is a statistical geneticist and science communicator. He has worked at the University of Oxford for more than 10 years and his scientific work has been published in Nature and Science, amongst other journals. He has always been fascinated by the potential of DNA to be used to reconstruct human evolutionary history by analysing large genomic datasets with advanced statistical modelling. He now leads Allelica’s scientific team, helping to bring polygenic risk scores to the market for the first time by showing their use in medical genetics.

The Oxford Personalised Medicine Society was thrilled to host Professor Sir Mark Caulfield, Chief Scientist for Genomics England and charged with delivery of the 100,000 Genomes Project. Professor Sir Caulfield is additionally director of the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at Barts and the London school of Medicine and Dentistry. He was Director of William Harvey Research Institute (2002-2020), elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2008 and was President of the British Hypertension Society from 2009-2011.

Recorded live on 4th December 2020, Dr. Justine Loh presents her talk: “Behind Closed Doors: An ED Doctor’s experience of COVID19.” Dr Justine Loh is an Emergency Medicine and Paediatric Emergency Medicine Consultant at Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust. She will be explaining her experience working as a front line doctor during the COVID19 pandemic.

Dr Petousi is a Consultant Respiratory Physician and Senior Clinical Research Fellow in the Nuffield Department of Medicine. Shei has recently been involved in the publication of a paper titled “Successful awake proning is associated with improved clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19: single-centre high-dependency unit experience.”

This talk explains the response to COVID19 in clinical and research settings and provides a snapshot of the Oxford, national and global response to the pandemic as of October 2020. In addition to his work as a clinician, Professor Angus is the Director of the Oxford Centre for Clinical Tropical Medicine and Global Health. His research focus is now on clinical trials and vaccine development in malaria, influenza, HIV, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and in more recent times, COVID19.

Dr Kraemer is a Branco Weiss Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford and an Associate of the Oxford Martin Programme on Pandemic Genomics. His work addresses questions related to the spatial spread of infectious diseases. In January, Dr Kraemer began building a global line list database of confirmed COVID-19 cases, which has evolved into the Open COVID-19 Data Working Group, an initiative co-led by the University of Oxford, Harvard Medical School, Northeastern University, and the University of Washington. Using this data and other global datasets, Dr Kraemer is focused on modelling the impact of human mobility on the spread of COVID-19 and identifying how human mobility data and genomic data can inform when lockdowns can be lifted.

Dr. Chandan K. Sen is a J. Stanley Battersby Chair and Professor of Surgery, and Director of the Indiana Center for Regenerative Medicine and Engineering (ICRME). He serves as Associate Vice President of Research at IU and as Associate Dean of Research at the IU School of Medicine. Additionally, he is the Executive Director of the Comprehensive Wound Center at Indiana University Health and is recognized as a Lilly INCITE scholar. His lab has shown the potential of an electroceutical fabric to be utilized as PPE in the fight against coronaviruses. This fabric manipulates the electrokinetic properties of coronaviruses to reduce potential for infection.

Dr Saad B. Omer is the Director of the Yale Institute of Global Health, a Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) at the Yale School of Medicine, and the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health. He currently serves on the WHO Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety and has previously served on the U.S. National Vaccine Advisory Committee. Dr Omer’s research portfolio includes epidemiology of respiratory viruses such as influenza, RSV, and COVID-19. He regularly contributes op-eds for publications including the New York Times and the Washington Post, and his work has been cited in global and country-specific policy recommendations.