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The Centre for Epidemic Preparedness and Response has awarded prizes to researchers from across the ������app of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and partner institutions to recognise their contributions to the field of epidemic preparedness.

Rania Al-Mukhtar and her team at LSHTM and Debre Birhan University in Ethiopia have won one of two Resource prizes for her work to understand how neglected tropical disease (NTD) programmes are mainstreamed within health systems.

Nadine Beckmann, Sophie Everest, Yang Zhao, Shelley Lees and Olive Leonard have been awarded the second Resource prize for their work on centring communities and their needs during disease outbreak responses using social science and community engagement.

Georgia Venner won the Research Degree Student prize, with support from researchers in Bangladesh, for her work to address the critical gap in understanding the experiences of both national and Rohingya refugee health workers in Cox’s Bazar. 

Each winner will receive a monetary prize, which can be used for activities related to their research. Join us to celebrate their achievements at the Epidemic Preparedness Prize winners showcase on Monday 21 July 2025.

About the Prizes

The prizes aim to recognise and showcase the best of, and often under-celebrated, contemporary work in the field of epidemic preparedness. They cover three categories:

• Research Degree Student Prize: for recent work on preparedness/response activities (including in the year before joining LSHTM, if relevant)
• Resource Prize: for acting as an epidemic preparedness/response resource for external groups or organisations (e.g providing methods or analysis, situational awareness, training)

Resource prize - Rania Al-Mukhtar

Rania Al-Mukhtar is a medical student currently enrolled in LSHTM’s Public Health MSc where she focuses on health equity, health economic and systems, health services leadership, and organisational management. These interests propelled her into epidemic preparedness and response as she witnessed how health inequalities become exacerbated during outbreaks, particularly in low-resource settings. She has since committed to understanding how we can better equip systems, especially in neglected areas, to respond to future epidemics more sustainably and equitably.

Rania’s award-winning research is a scoping review exploring how neglected tropical disease (NTD) public health interventions are integrated into national health systems. NTDs, like chikungunya and dengue, are prevalent in tropical regions and disproportionately affect marginalised populations.  Affected countries often have limited empirical evidence on how to sustainably integrate NTD treatment programmes into their national healthcare offerings.

Working alongside researchers in Ethiopia, Rania’s review will focus on uncovering how NTD programmes are mainstreamed within health systems. She will map the global landscape of such efforts, identify best practices, and highlight current challenges efforts face.

Rania believes that research in this area will “ensure that essential prevention, diagnosis, and treatment reach the people who need them most”. On the ground, this means that people who are at risk of infection from NTDs will be able to access care more consistently and closer to home, without relying on sporadic NTD focused health campaigns. In turn, this will improve their quality of life and help prepare for the next pandemic.

On applying for the prize, Rania hoped to “connect with like-minded individuals passionate about sustainable and equitable health systems”. She also saw the prize as an opportunity to share her work more widely, gain valuable feedback, and contribute to the broader conversation on how integrating services can strengthen health systems and enhance epidemic preparedness.

She hopes that her award will help her to expand this research into a full systematic review and explore implementation strategies in partnership with policymakers.

Research Degree Student prize - Georgia Venner

Georgia Venner, a PhD candidate at LSHTM, is researching the overlooked role of frontline national and community health workers, including Rohingya refugee health workers, in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, amidst one of the world’s largest refugee crises. These health workers face immense challenges while responding to infectious disease outbreaks in refugee camps, all within a precarious legal and political context.

Her interest in epidemic preparedness and response started when she was working for organisations focused on building the capacity of health providers. This experience allowed her to see how localised epidemic preparedness was essential but often failed to fully invest in supporting and understanding the role that frontline health workers play. This sparked her PhD research on the Rohingya refugee response in Bangladesh, a context that has experienced multiple infectious disease outbreaks, including diphtheria, cholera, measles, scabies and COVID-19.

Georgia hopes her work will emphasise that outbreaks in these fragile environments do not occur in isolation; they are shaped by social dynamics, trust, power relations and the everyday improvisations of frontline workers, many of whom are refugees themselves. Ultimately she says her research will be an important part of going beyond the pathogen by ensuring epidemic preparedness and response also “addresses the social, political and relational realities on the ground”. 

Working alongside partners like North South University in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Friendship, a Bangladeshi social-purpose organisation, Georgia carried out in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and workshops with health workers involved in the health response in the Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar. Although her analysis is ongoing, she has already uncovered complex power dynamics that influence healthcare delivery during outbreaks, involving health workers, government authorities, organisational management and patients.

Through her interviews, she found that health workers often felt hierarchical pressure which sometimes compromised care practices and weakened relationships within the refugee community. Further, health workers largely felt unprepared for outbreaks and ignored by management and the wider health sector in-country coordination team. They also experienced challenging mental and physical health issues which were related not only to infectious diseases but also volatile camp insecurities.

Rohingya refugee community health workers were uniquely exposed to significant risks as they were working and living in unsafe camp conditions. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, they were continuously relied upon to debunk complex misinformation, share scientifically accurate information, assist vaccine campaigns and provide non-stop support to community members affected by COVID-19 – all while receiving little professional recognition, workforce discrimination, and inadequate renumeration.

Georgia’s research is the first of its kind within the context of the Rohingya crisis to combine social science and health worker data – she dedicates it specifically “to all frontline health workers of this world working in crisis settings”. Her research is providing critical insights into how health systems in crisis settings can be strengthened for future outbreaks.

She hopes that her PhD research will help advocate for policies that protect health workers, ensure better resources, and address power imbalances within health systems. Georgia hopes the prize will help increase the visibility of her work and is grateful for the opportunity to recognise the importance of “social science research in pandemic preparedness, which is often underappreciated but crucial for understanding the complexities of health systems during crises.”

Resource prize - UK Public Health Rapid Support Team Social Science & Risk Communication and Community Engagement team

The UK Public Health Rapid Support Team's (UK-PHRST) Social Science and Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE) team has been recognised as a critical technical resource for global health security partners, including Ministries of Health, multilateral organisations, NGOs and academic institutions. Co-led by Nadine Beckmann and Sophie Everest and comprising Shelley Lees, Olive Leonard, Rose Burns, Jen Palmer and Yang Zhao, their shared expertise has led them to become a technical resource in their own right.

Their mission is to shift outbreak response away from a top-down approach, which often relies on instructing communities to change their behaviour, towards a community-led response model. This approach is based on an understanding of community members’ concerns and centred around supporting affected communities’ specific needs in the face of crisis.

This is important, explains Nadine, as “too often in outbreak response we see the impact that not listening and acting on community perceptions, concerns and experiences can have […] resulting in treatment centres not being used, vaccination campaigns not reaching those most at-risk and public health advice that is out of touch with the realities of daily life.”

To drive this paradigm shift, the team promote a more empathetic, listen-and-learn approach across all response pillars and build social science approaches into UK-PHRST’s triple remit of deployments, research and capacity strengthening. For instance, the team are now regularly deployed to disease outbreaks to provide their technical expertise – becoming the one of the most deployed expertise types within UK-PHRST.

They also regularly conduct vital social science research alongside in-country partners. For example, they conducted research examining and produced an which can be used to facilitate community workshops and participatory action planning.

Perhaps the team’s most significant resource to help include qualitative, community-level data into outbreak responses is the Rapid Qualitative Assessment (RQA) methodology they’ve developed alongside key partners. RQAs generate and analyse data from interviews, focus groups, observations and community conversations quickly and efficiently to create actionable insights. This means that public health response teams can more rapidly incorporate real-time community feedback in decision making compared to traditional social science research methods. In turn, this allows the RQAs to act as the “eyes and ears of the response”, ensuring different outbreak responders can adapt quickly to what is often a constantly evolving situation. For affected communities, this means that they can have more of a say over how decisions which affect their daily lives are made - ensuring that public health interventions actually meet their needs during a disease outbreak. Through their regular deployments across multiple cholera, mpox and Marburg outbreaks, severe drought, flooding and displacement, the team have refined the methodology to ensure it is suitable for responding to complex, multi-sectoral emergency responses.

Since using RQAs in the cholera outbreaks in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe in 2023, Nadine explains that the team have “supported the adaptation of these tools to be used by partners across multiple outbreaks and in many countries across east and southern Africa,” and are working with partners through the Collective Service to develop and roll out training packages for local and international organisations, with a vision to establish a FASST (Field Anthropology and Social Science Training) programme to support the professionalisation of rapid qualitative evidence generation for epidemic response.

What’s more, the team’s dedicated Social Equity & Human Rights Officer, Olive Leonard, has ensured the team remains focused on the impact of gender during disease outbreaks which often disproportionally affect women. For example, Olive recently co-led a  with Shelley Lees, Nadine Beckmann and the  in Dar es Salaam in February 2025. The training aimed to enhance attendee’s qualitative data collection skills by weaving in a gender justice lens to ensure they capture the needs and capacities of all genders and debunk a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

Ultimately, their vision is for their work to lead to “community perspectives being integrated into decision making as early and as often as possible during an outbreak, ensuring that interventions will meet the needs of affected communities through innovative, effective and trusted solutions.”

Find out more about the Centre's 2025 Prize Winners' Showcase event and the benefits of becoming a Centre member.