phylogenetic analysis on their data and plan to share their results in The Lancet.
Anna visiting one of the Alliance For Public Health’s HIV outreach mobile laboratories to help plan the installation of sequencing equipment
Anna also helped to provide training in Oxford Nanopore Covid-19 sequencing to local healthcare staff in her spare time. With their assistance, the Institute was able to sequence 26 patient samples, marking the first time the virus had been sequenced in a lab in Ukraine since the pandemic began. They plan to follow up their work with a collaborative article in PLOS One, and they have also successfully applied for a $60,000 grant to continue supporting local Covid-19 sequencing capacity.
“Working on this project allowed me to bring all of my knowledge to bear on the challenge of working with infectious disease in a low-income country,” said Anna. “We worked alongside local organisations, scientists, outreach teams, nurses, doctors, and other staff members in a fully collaborative process, resulting in a sharing of expertise and transfer of knowledge and the publication of two joint papers.” Anna donated the portable gel electrophoresis machine purchased with her award to the L.V. Gromashevskiy Institute at the end of her placement. The instrument is now being used regularly for sequencing Covid-19, HIV and Hepatitis C. The next phase of their work will involve completing work on assembling their mobile laboratory before embarking on a pilot mobile, real-time molecular epidemiology screening project in Kyiv in summer 2022.
RECIPIENTS OF THE 2021 T H AT C H E R D E V E L O P M E N T AWA R D S
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Maria Rotaru (2020, PPE) received £1100 to support a project aimed at finding ways to fight for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals on access to education and clean water through policy research, design and analysis. She undertook a six-week policy research internship with Somerville JRF Dr Hussam Hussein at the Oxford Martin School, followed by five weeks of volunteering with the Romanian education NGO “Together”.
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Benjamin Freeborn (2020, BA Law) received £1558 to volunteer with Movement on the Ground in the Vial refugee camp on the Greek island of Chios. He is returning in Easter 2022 to conduct a trial of VitaeGum, a vitamin-infused chewing gum aimed at tackling malnutrition and improving oral health.
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Aneeska Sohal (2020, MSc Modern South Asian Studies) used her award of £1000 to develop a second series of her successful student mental health podcast, All Things Mental Health
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Jamie Walker (2019, Biology) was awarded £1448 to support a peat restoration project in the local Lye Valley nature reserve, a rare wetland habitat which is being restored by a team of students, academics and local residents.
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In collaboration with the Ukrainian NGO Alliance for Public Health and the L.V. Gromashevskiy Institute for public health, Anna Yakovleva (2020, Graduate Entry Medicine) used her award of £996 to allow her to help develop HIV/HCV Oxford Nanopore based genetic sequencing protocols suitable for use in low resource, hard to reach environments, enabling surveillance and research into virus transmissions in mobile populations like refugees.
