News and events

As part of TIBA (the NIHR Global Health Research Unit Tackling Infections to Benefit Africa at the University of Edinburgh), Geoff Banda and Vera Florida Mugittu have contributed to a new report on the social impact of Covid-19 mitigation measures on nine African countries.

Professor Smita Srinivas has been honoured by the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) for her outstanding work in the area of institutional economics.

The team working on the ERC-funded project Medical Translation in the History of Modern Genomics (TRANSGENE), which comprises various Innogen members, have published a freely available online dataset that enables users to identify overlooked individuals, institutions and connections in the history of genomic science.

A free e-book featuring innogen's research into drug manufacturing in Africa has become one of Palgrave Macmillan’s top five open access downloads of all time.

On the 12th June, Nick Bibby, Director of the Scottish Policy and Research Exchange, led an online discussion with over 20 Innogen and OU Scotland researchers on how to engage with the world of policy.

Writing for the Open University’s Social Scientific Research in the Time of COVID-19 series of informed articles, Innogen’s Director, Theo Papaioannou, argues that combating the pandemic will require global application of a non-ideal justice in innovation.

One of the highlights of this year’s BSI’s Standards e-conference was the launch of a Publicly Available Specification on Responsible Innovation (PAS 440), written by Innogen’s co-director, Joyce Tait.

We speak with Dr Fredrick Ajwang a Postdoctoral Researcher at University College Dublin’s School of Politics and International Relations (SPIRe). Fredrick carried out his PhD studies at the Open University under the supervision of David Wield, Julius Mugwagwa and Charlotte Cross. His thesis explored the governance and regulatory challenges faced by smallholder farmers in Kenya’s fresh and vegetables export value chain and ways to ensure that they remain in the value chain. Now, he is exploring innovative ways to mitigate violence in ethnically divided societies and promote development.

We speak with Prof. Smita Srinivas, Professorial Research Fellow, at The Open University (UK) Founder Director of the Technological Change Lab (TCLab) and Visiting Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (India). Her work focusses on economics and public policy. In 2015 she received the EAEPE (European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy) Myrdal Prize for her book on the health industry "Market Menagerie". We discuss her latest paper: Economics and Public Health: a case for interdisciplinary cohesion in the time of Coronavirus and the relevance of her work to the current Covid-19 pandemic.

Recent publications by Innogen members draw attention to lessons learnt from previous outbreaks of infectious disease, and to the importance of ‘local health’ and the law in global health emergencies.