All three partner institutions in the LCN (King’s College London, Imperial and UCL) are currently working remotely in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of the LCN experimental facilities are open and operating at a limited capacity, and activities related to COVID-19 research have been ongoing throughout the pandemic. You can read more about the work being done by our i-sense team in response to the outbreak here.
Scientists from i-sense are calling on technology companies to work with researchers and governments to help curb the COVID-19 pandemic by sharing their data in a legal, proportionate, ethical and privacy-preserving manner.
Writing in Nature, the group from UCL, Imperial College London, Chatham House, Diagonal Works and the London School for Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, led by Professor Rachel McKendry (Director of i-sense EPSRC IRC), says that with access to relevant and vital information, technology companies have an important role to play in ensuring patients and populations are protected.
Open data from mobile phones, and digital footprints from web searches and social media, remain largely inaccessible to researchers and governments, however access to this information could be important in public health efforts. You can read more about this initiative here.
If you require access to any of the LCN experimental Facilities located in the LCN building on the UCL Bloomsbury Campus, please find further details on how to access these on the LCN Building Information page.