Dr Ellen Brooks Pollock, Senior Lecturer in Infectious Disease Mathematical Modelling, from the Bristol Veterinary School, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Protection Research Unit in Behavioural Science and Evaluation in Population Health Sciences has been awarded an OBE for her services to the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M) and the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) during the COVID-19 response.

Dr Brooks Pollock has worked in infectious disease modelling for 15 years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been a regular contributor to SPI-M, a subgroup of SAGE that provides modelling evidence to the UK government. 

She developed a methodology for condensing multiple policy options into a single figure that was used by the highest levels of government to manage and plan the easing of lockdown, including for the partial re-opening of schools in June 2020, the full re-opening of schools in September 2020 and vaccination rollout. 

Her current work to support the UK’s COVID-19 response during the pandemic includes quantifying the role of groups and gatherings on COVID-19 transmission, demonstrating that single-person households could safely form a bubble with other households, the impact of temporarily easing restrictions during the Christmas period, modelling the spread of COVID-19 in universities and measuring the increased mortality associated with the B.1.1.7 (Alpha) variant. 

She is the Bristol co-lead for the JUNIPER (Joint UNIversities Pandemic and Epidemiological Research) consortium and last month she guest edited the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Special Issue on ‘Modelling that shaped the early COVID-19 pandemic response in the UK’. 

She leads the University’s Scientific Advisory Group modelling subgroup, which has supported the University’s COVID-19 response. Last year [June 2020], she established CON-QUEST, an online survey of University of Bristol staff and students, which has fed into University of Bristol and national decision-making. 

She is passionate about communicating mathematical modelling in non-technical ways and has been on the editorial board of Mathematics Today since 2017.  In 2011, she was jointly awarded the Institute of Mathematics Catherine Richards prize for the article ‘Pigs didn’t fly, but Swine flu‘ about modelling the H1N1 influenza pandemic.

Professor Tim Cook, Honorary Professor in Anaesthesia, from the Bristol Medical School: Translational Health Sciences (THS) has been awarded an OBE for his services to anaesthesia during COVID-19.

Professor Cook works at the Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust and is a full time District General Hospital consultant in Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine.

His overall interest is in improving safety and quality in anaesthesia and intensive care using a bottom-up approach. He was awarded the Royal College of Anaesthetists (RCoA) Macintosh Professorship in 2012-13 and in 2014 the Difficult Airway Society Professorship.

In January 2020, he became aware of the pandemic risk of COVID-19 and spent the next two months highlighting the risk and raising the alarm that the pandemic was coming to colleagues locally and nationally working with the Royal College of Anaesthetists and Association of Anaesthetists to disseminate information to allow for early preparedness. Clinically, he spent several months working from home and has since returned to Anaesthesia and Intensive Care medicine in Bath.  In advisory and academic roles, he has worked with colleagues in Bath, at the Health Service Research Centre at the Royal College of Anaesthetists and with Bristol’s AERATOR research group.

He has collaborated on numerous research papers in the last 18 months work that includes:

• rates of deaths among healthcare workers from COVID-19 and the impact on ethnic minorities and staff working on the frontline. This work was quoted in parliament and in inquiry work on the topic and has been widely influential.
• provided the first guidance for UK anaesthetists on how to anaesthetise patients with COVID-19 and prepare them for ICU treatment, which was the first global guidance and has been widely used internationally.
• first to systematically document the mortality globally, of patients admitted to ICU with COVID-19. Showing a reduction as the first surge progressed and how this plateaued in autumn 2020.
• reviewed the relative risk of different groups of healthcare workers for infection, hospital admission and death and this was used to emphasise the importance of early vaccination of healthcare workers.
• collaborated on one of the first research studies to show that procedures undertaken during anaesthesia such as intubation and oxygen treatments are lower risk for aerosol spread than coughing.
• modelled the impact of vaccinations on deaths, hospital and ICU admissions in the spring of 2021.