PLuS Alliance COVID-19 seed funding

Overview

<p>The PLuS Alliance is a strategic partnership between Arizona State University, King’s College London and UNSW Sydney. The Alliance brings together the collective strengths and resources of these three leading international universities to develop sustainable solutions to society’s global challenges.</p> <p>As an international alliance of highly ranked research-intensive universities, PLuS has both the opportunity and responsibility to harness our research expertise to support the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic (novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2). Our differing national approaches, settings and potential long run impacts offer the opportunity for comparative studies and/or research exploiting digital, big data and 21st century bioscience tools. In response, we are therefore launching a call to the PLuS community for proposals to support novel research to address this crisis.</p> <p>The PLuS Alliance is therefore launching a call for seed funding from its community, to support novel research to address this crisis. Proposals are to focus on the topic of systems resilience. This includes containment interventions and their impact on the population, effectiveness in controlling disease spread, and the short and long-term socio-economic impacts.</p> <p>Systems Resilience: this term is deliberately broad and may cover any one or more of a range of areas including:</p> <ul> <li>Containment strategies (e.g. effectiveness, impact on population, etc)</li> <li>Health system capacity (e.g. responsiveness, robustness, equity, efficiency)</li> <li>Supply chain challenges (e.g. health, staples, global trade, transport, panic buying)</li> <li>Social consequences (e.g. isolation, support, aged care, social distancing/networking, virtual working, education, media)</li> <li>Economic reshaping (e.g. closures, employment, housing, stocks & liquidity, gig economy)</li> <li>Sustainability (e.g. environment, climate, air transport, government policy)</li> </ul> <p>Projects will ideally focus on developing a clearer understanding of impact across multiple settings (e.g. multi-national comparison) and multi-disciplinary, multi-sector approaches are encouraged. Downstream we are looking for transformative learnings from this pandemic, both to emerge as a better and more resilient society and to underpin global strategies for proactive management of future occurrences. The PLuS Alliance and its respective research leadership are committed to the importance of this initiative and will advocate with external funders and encourage partnership with the PLuS Alliance to extend the work of these seed projects through additional funding.</p>