East India Trading Company School for the Health and Wellbeing of Transatlantic Sailors E-Newsletter
School Newsletter Fall 2021
Researchers at the East India Trading Company School for the Health and Wellbeing of Transatlantic Sailors have been at the forefront of cutting edge research on coronavirus across a range of disciplines. Maybe next time you look your alive and smiling elderly relative in the eye you’ll spare a thought for these brave men and women that have gone above and beyond during the pandemic, selflessly delegating work amongst their post-doctoral students while under immense pressure from stakeholders. We managed to grab five minutes with three prominent professors to ask them about their backgrounds, hopefully you will find their stories inspirational!
Prof Wassily Schmitzelkrepf
I have always been interested in working with numbers. Even before I was able to walk I had a favourite number, the number four. It wasn’t until I started my undergraduate in theoretical computational physics at Yale that I could understand the fascinating mathematical properties behind the number and why it crops up so much in nature: a square has four sides, plus the number features prominently in the sports of darts, golf, and cricket.
It was in my pokey dorm room at Yale that I shared with my then-girlfriend, the heir to a Russian blood diamond fortune, that I began to realise that I was losing enthusiasm for my final year Physics project (environment traversal and targeting algorithms for small unmanned craft). Feeling despondent I was moping around on campus and ended up going to a presentation on a project funded by the Walfred Muntz Foundation that gave microloans to Tanzanian women so that they could purchase excess veterinary medicine stock from the US to cure brain parasites that, left uncured, would eventually kill them. Even though the loans required pharmaceutical companies to lend an upfront cost equivalent to a full 0.001% of their annual turnover, they agreed to it!
People tend to think that infectious disease models are simple compared to complicated physics problems such as unmanned craft, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Infectious disease models often involve a difficult optimisation component due to the small budgets allocated to eradicating infectious diseases, not a problem that I had to deal with previously.
Prof Ernest Langford
My PhD was actually in Jazz bassoon performance, I often wonder what my late supervisor would have made of my change in direction. He was a short, ruddy man, whose fingers were often bleeding profusely due to the amount of time that he spent shredding out licks on the bassoon. He would knock back his glass of bourbon before punching out his latest practice piece and then thrust the bloody bassoon into my hands for me to copy (I now know of course that this is very unsafe and could be a potential transmission route for a multitude of blood-borne pathogens).
I got my first infectious disease modelling gig at National Health Britain. After playing a particularly vigorous bassoon set at their Christmas party I stumbled light-headed into a meeting of economists that had come to scrutinise some modelling of a human myxomatosis vaccination programme. Never one to shy away from a performance, I started to improvise, letting the curves and shapes on the powerpoint flow through me and into a common understanding of the benefits of reducing human suffering for all involved. Thankfully, economists understand human wellbeing and infectious disease models even less than jazz bassoon players and the head of National Health Britain, Tristram Quailingham, was so impressed that he offered me a job modelling full time.
Prof Penelope Sawk-Golgotha
I was the first woman to study for an undergraduate degree at the prestigious St Bartleby’s college. The institute was so unprepared and backwards looking that there was not even a women’s toilet, so I had to share the men’s bathroom until half way into my second year. I like to recount this struggle to the young women doing unpaid internships in my lab to inspire them to overcome their struggles, whatever they may be.
I sit on the government advisory panel for Fast Alarming Rhinovirus Threats: Necessary Obstructions, Investments, Sanctions, and Enrichment (FARTNOISE for short). Over my time on the panel I’ve come to realise that it’s best to think of lockdown as removing society’s pumphandle, just like John Snow did in Soho back in 1854. I’m happy to report that there have been zero cases of cholera in the Broad Street area since.
When my daily routine of endless zoom calls becomes too much, I have the slight fortune of being able to get out of my rural converted farmhouse where I live with my husband and two children and take my two St Bernards, Bob and Roy, out for a long, muddy walk along the seafront.