Alcohol is enjoyed by many and while it contributes to the economy, it is also a major cause of early death, illness, lost work days, violence, social problems, relationship difficulties and inequalities. Governments can reduce these harms by taking action to make alcohol less affordable (price policy) and less easily available (availability policy), and by reducing how much it is advertised and promoted (marketing policy). Across the four nations of the United Kingdom (UK), and in Republic of Ireland (ROI), there have been many recent changes in these alcohol policies which have been heavily debated by campaign groups and politicians. There is a need for research to understand the intended and unintended effects of policies, not just on health, but on social, economic and cultural aspects. As Scotland introduced several new policies from 2005 onwards, and put in place extensive structures to support studies to explore their effects, a broad community of alcohol policy researchers has been coming together. The Irish government has recently passed a world-leading set of policies to reduce alcohol harms, but currently there are fewer researchers studying these policies in ROI/NI, and little contact between those who are. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are also considering further policy changes. Whilst traditionally seen as a medical issue, it is clear that alcohol consumption and harms are affected by culture and politics. This network therefore proposes to bring together researchers from a wide range of social science and other backgrounds, and to draw others into the field, to deliver on the alcohol policy research needed in UK/ROI over the coming years. Our ACTIVITIES will focus on four themes: Availability, Marketing, Price & Politics and will include: 1) A website, blog and twitter feed; 2) A launch event with researchers and policy partners in Dublin; 3) Open seminars on each of the four themes, each hosted by a different university, with side meetings to build teams for future research; 4) Study visits for 4 selected early career researchers to spend time with more experienced colleagues; 5) A workshop to build capacity on alcohol policy research and give time for teams to develop funding applications; and 6) A UK/ROI open research symposium to which any researchers can submit abstracts to present their work, with invited speakers and free places for early career researchers. The network will be led by Prof. Joe Barry in ROI and Prof. Niamh Fitzgerald in the UK. NF is Professor of Alcohol Policy and specialises in studies drawing on expertise across different academic disciplines to better understand intended and unintended consequences of policy interventions. JB has worked in substance use for 30 years and chairs an expert group set up by the Minister for Health in ROI on which 3 academics from this proposal also sit. NF and JB are joined by 14 co-applicants from 13 institutions across the UK, from 10+ disciplines and with cross-cutting interests in the four themes. The bid will benefit from the active involvement of policy partners from government departments in NI, ROI and Scotland; and public health agencies across the UK. It will link into existing policy groups, including the UK/ROI British Irish Council, and the NI/ROI North South Alcohol Policy Advisory Group. The Institute of Public Health in Ireland, an all island body with a remit to inform public policy in both ROI and NI is an active partner and will provide administrative support to the network. We expect that the network will give rise to new research teams involving UK & ROI academics, and new alcohol policy studies focused within or across the four policy themes. With our partners, we will actively plan for the future of the network beyond the funded period.

Developed in partnership with Public Health England, Public Health Wales and NHS Education for Scotland, this bid addresses key challenges that the coronavirus pandemic presents in relation to understanding the flow and impact of public health messages as reflected in public and private discourses. Our collaborators above who are charged with constructing effective public health messages have identified two particular challenges: messaging around geographical borders (e.g. between England and Wales, and in local lockdowns) and messaging aimed at BAME populations. These areas will be the focus of our research, and we will deliver benefits to our collaborators in the form of initial analytical results and discussion from month 2 onwards. As human behaviour is shaped by the reception and production of discourse, and by the reasoning about different sources of information, we propose a new approach to track the trajectories of public health messages once they are released to the public. Moving beyond corpus linguistic approaches that focus on language production, we will investigate the complex relationship between the production and the reception of discourses relating to specific types of public health messages, focusing on linguistic patterns (in particular modality and stance markers). Drawing on our track record in the construction and analysis of heterogenous corpora and our ongoing work on privacy enhancing technologies, we propose to carry out the first large scale analysis of the trajectories of public health messages relating to the coronavirus pandemic in the UK.

We urgently need proactive health support at the level of the general population: we have become, on average, an unhealthy nation. The new statistical norm is overweight to obese (60% of men and 49% of women). Co-related conditions from heart disease to type II diabetes, cost the NHS £48 Bn/year. Lack of sleep costs £40Bn. Stress costs £40Bn. 6% of our GDP goes to preventable "lifestyle conditions." Of the top 20 western nations, the UK ranks 18th or lower in QoL, Health, Wealth, Education and Democracy. Our productivity is 20% lower than the rest of the G7. While there is incredible optimism and investment in the potential benefits of ubiquitous, pervasive technology to help redress these conditions, digital health approaches to date have had low impact. This fellowship hypothesises that the lack of broad and sustained uptake of digital health technology is not a fault of the technology per se but with the range of models that inform how these technologies are designed. The current state of the art in digital health tech is (i) targeted at individuals although health practices are significantly influenced by social contexts; (ii) it assumes that given the right data we will make a rational decision to adopt a health practice without taking into account how the rest of our bodies - from our gut to our nervous system - is involved in decision processes (iii) the tools themselves can be antagonistic to rather than supporting of how the body works. E.g. a "smart alarm" that still disrupts sleep rather than finds ways to help us get sleep is antagonistic to our physiology which requires certain amounts of sleep to stay healthy. While current digital health technologies can and do work for some of the people some of the time, they have not been sufficient to deliver health in the complex contexts in which the UK lives and works. We need to develop better models to inform health tech design. This fellowship proposes to develop and test Inbodied Interaction (the alignment of health tech with how the body optimally performs) as a foundation to deliver and sustain personal and social Health Resilience: the capacity for individuals and their groups to build health knowledge, skills and practice to recover from and redress health challenges, from stress at home to shift changes at work. In line with EPSRC's challenge to "transform community health" by enabling better "self-management," digital interactive technologies must be aligned with how we work as organic-physical-cognitive-social complex systems. In respect of that model of "self" the fellowship will innovate on three strands of inbodied interaction technology: 1) Environment-Body Aligned: designing technology to support our physiology, from displays that help us maintain peripheral vision to stay more creative, to light use in VR lenses to improve cognitive performance. 2) Experience-to-Practice Aligned: to provide rapid access to the effects of better health experiences, and connect these with personally effective means to maintain these. 3) Group-to-Culture Aligned: to support groups identify and build more health resilient practices that work for their contexts. Thus "self-management" is transformed into our 3-level model of how this "self" is empowered by health tech in various contexts to create build and maintain "health." Through our co-design we will be engaging directly with hundreds of participants, and thousands more citizens virtually through our nation-wide Citizen Scientist web trials. We also have regular engagement with our expert advisory team representing industry, policy, and a range of disciplines. The Team is committed to help translate our work from project to practice, from policy to process, for transformational impact. By Fellowship end, we will have new digital health technologies and validated models for those tools to deliver Health Resilience for a Healthy Nation, and so help #makeNormalBetter@scale, for all.

Assessment of the potential impact of future climate change on human health and well-being (the latter via effects on animal health) is hindered by the sheer number of pathogens, their diversity, varied linkages to climate and ecosystems and, often, lack of data. Here we propose to exploit a unique database developed at the University of Liverpool which will soon contain a set of records for all known pathogens of humans and domestic animals. We will use expertise present within the University of Liverpool, the international co-investigators and our project partners to generate a subset of the list, namely all those pathogens that occur in proximity to the UK, France and the Netherlands or threaten these countries; are of major impact in terms of the magnitude and likelihood of impact on human health or well-being; and have epidemiological linkages to temperature or moisture levels in air or the environment and, hence, may be expected to be susceptible to the effects of climate change. This subset of diseases will be subjected to qualitative or quantitative risk assessment to estimate how they will change (in terms of distribution, incidence and severity) under scenarios of future climate change within the next half-century. Our underlying principle is that the data and pathways on which our conclusions are based should be fully recorded, referenced and transparent; as better data become available, it will be possible to update the model outputs. A benefit of our approach is that it is 'bottom-up', at the start giving equal weight to all possible pathogens that could be affected by climate change, and then reducing the list according to agreed criteria. This approach is balanced, allowing the conclusion, for example, that the highest-impact pathogens are largely insensitive to climate change. By contrast, most previous assessments of the impacts of climate change are top-down, starting (and often ending) with the premise that a few key vector-borne pathogens of (usually) humans (malaria, dengue, yellow fever) need urgent consideration. We will listen closely to stakeholders and end-users while designing our risk assessment pathways, and wish to communicate our scientific approaches and findings to them effectively. To the end, we plan to adopt participatory methods throughout the project.

The first human influenza pandemic in more than 40 years is ongoing, with the causative virus having arisen from the combination of two different swine influenza viruses, one originating in the USA and the other in Europe. Analyses have demonstrated that the two progenitor viruses were circulating undetected, probably in pigs, for around 9 years. The ability of influenza viruses to both combine with each other to produce new viruses and also to mutate rapidly are important features in their ability to mutate and transmit in novel mammalian species, including humans. Pigs are susceptible to a larger range of influenza viruses than most other animals and this makes them of importance as animals in which such viral mixing can happen. Swine flu infection is common in pigs in Europe and circulates through many farms on at least an annual basis. Experimental studies at VLA have demonstrated that pigs can be infected with the pandemic human virus and, importantly, can spread the virus to other pigs that they are co-housed with. Outbreaks of swine flu in pigs, caused by the human pandemic virus, have occurred in at least three countries, probably following infection of pig farmers who have transmitted the virus to pigs. In Britain, some pigs are farmed in large, very dense populations and, should these farms become infected with the pandemic flu virus, large amounts of virus would be produced with unpredictable consequences for the farmers caring for the pigs. The origin of the human pandemic virus from swine flu viruses, the susceptibility of pigs to the pandemic virus and the infection of pig farms around the world, against the background of their potential 'mixing vessel' role, raises several immediate and important questions and challenges for both human and swine health. This grant, along with the parallel experimental grant application, aims to answer some of them and, in doing so, to provide an immediate scientific evidence base to inform policies aimed at minimising the impact of the pandemic in both humans and animals. We will define the consequences of spread of the pandemic virus to pigs, considering the individual clinical disease, including the host or 'patient' mechanisms that result in disease signs, and the transmission at the population level. These studies will take into account that some pigs may be naturally partially immune through prior 'normal' swine flu infection. We will use this work to estimate the likely challenge posed to public health by pig infection with the pandemic virus. Our detailed investigations will include genetic studies of archived swine influenza outbreaks, clinical and virological studies of any swine flu outbreaks that occur in British pigs and the health of pig farmers who are exposed through their occupation to these outbreaks. We will substantially add to the amount of data available on swine influenza so we can properly estimate how much future risk is posed by this infection. Analysing data and samples from outbreaks in Europe and careful investigations of outbreaks in pigs and farm workers in contact with them, we will explain better how the pandemic virus arose and spread, including where the initial virus combination took place, so that the likelihood of similar events reoccurring can be predicted and recommendations for minimising the ongoing risk can be made. Using analysis of samples from pig outbreaks and transmission studies undertaken in the parallel experimental grant, we will study the rates of viral mutation and identify the specific mutations in influenza viruses that are associated with spread between pigs and people working with pigs in order to predict better the immediate threats from the pandemic virus mutating to become more virulent in people and pigs, particularly if the human pandemic virus becomes endemic in the pig population.