Julia Gog – Professor of Mathematical Biology and a very good friend of Plus – gave a brilliant lecture last month at the Isaac Newton Institute for the Cambridge Festival.

In this talk Gog gave a mathematical, as well as personal, look into how we all had to balance the different harms – from the virus and from the steps we all took against the virus – during the COVID-19 pandemic. Watch the talk to discover that the “optimum” solution for an individual and a population can be very different. Mathematics alone can’t tell us what to do, but it can be a powerful tool to frame our thinking.

We've been working closely with Gog and her colleagues at the JUNIPER modelling consortium – you can read more about their work here. And we are very proud to be collaborating with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI), which was hosting this talk. You can read all out content from our collaboration with the INI here.

This video forms part of our collaborations with JUNIPER, the Joint UNIversity Pandemic and Epidemic Response modelling consortium, and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI).

JUNIPER comprises academics from the universities of Cambridge, Warwick, Bristol, Exeter, Oxford, Manchester, and Lancaster, who are using a range of mathematical and statistical techniques to address pressing question about the control of COVID-19. You can see more content produced with JUNIPER here.

The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.