UK ENABLE Consortium vision, aims and objectives: Local government is uniquely placed to shape the environmental and social factors which fundamentally influence non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and thus our health and wellbeing. Our vision is for local government to consider the health of local populations in all policy and practice decisions and to have the best possible scientific evidence to support those decisions. We will test our vision by working with five different local authority (LA) based public health systems across the UK, learning what works best, and what can be useful for all LAs across the UK. Our consortium brings together academics, practitioners, policy makers and other stakeholders from across the UK in five centres in NE and SW England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales; each with different models of public health delivery. We will develop and test a process that embeds research capacity and expertise in LAs. Working closely with our partners in each LA, we will identify a current priority for improving the health and wellbeing and reducing inequalities of people living in that area. By building relationships between academics, practitioners and policy makers we will enable the LA to access and create new evidence that is relevant for decision making about the priority issue. Scientific rationale for the proposed research: Evidence-informed policy-making aims to improve decision making by using the best available research. Organisational and cultural barriers within the current system have made this approach difficult to achieve. New methods and approaches are needed which bring together researchers, practitioners and policy makers in local government, where evidence is only one contributing factor to decision-making. Embedded researchers and knowledge brokers can help to ensure evidence is used by building understanding of the context, accessing existing, and co-producing new evidence. Intervention(s) of interest and the potential applications and anticipated benefits of the work: By the end of the project we will: 1. Increase research capacity and 'no how' in each LA, focusing on a local NCD priority issue, enabling access to evidence to inform local decision-making. We will develop and share learning which is generalisable across the UK 2. Build and support new partnerships for active and effective research use with practitioners, policy makers, and academia 3. Build knowledge and skills in local government and universities to maximise use of different kinds of evidence for policy, practice and public decision-making 4. Co-create evidence that addresses local government priorities, with a focus on prevention, by working across sectors and disciplines, utilising novel methodological approaches, including complex systems models 5. Develop a range of health and system interventions that have been co-produced and tested across LA areas 6. Create sustained change in research culture in LAs and academia so that evidence use is embedded across local government 7. Evaluate this new approach and methods to see if we made a difference to the health of people living in each area, related to their priority topic, and whether/how this approach could be rolled out across the UK We anticipate that this work will improve population health and wellbeing and increase the use of scientific research. It aims to improve quality, efficiency and effectiveness of public health interventions and services, reduce waste, and improve staff morale and retention. Consortium management: Our across-UK academic leadership brings together experience of applied translational research in prevention from four of the UKCRC funded Centres of Excellence in Public Health. Senior leaders in local government public health, bring practical experience of putting evidence into action. Other members have expertise in systems thinking, embedded research, knowledge brokerage and other skills essential to our success.

MathSys addresses two of EPSRC's CDT priority areas in Mathematical Sciences: "Mathematics of Highly Connected Real-World Systems" and "New Mathematics in Biology and Medicine". We will train the next generation of skilled applied mathematical researchers to use and develop cutting-edge techniques enabling them to address a range of challenges faced by science, industry and modern society. Our Centre for Doctoral Training will build on the experience and successes of the Complexity Science DTC at Warwick, while refining the scope of problems addressed. It will provide a supportive and stimulating environment for the students in which the common mathematical challenges underpinning problems from a variety of disciplines can be tackled. The need for mathematically skilled researchers, trained in an interdisciplinary environment, has never been greater and is viewed as a major barrier in both industry and government. This is supported by quotes from reports and business leaders: "Systems research needs more potential future leaders, both in academia and industry" (EPSRC workshop on Systems science towards Engineering, Feb 2011); Andrew Haldane (Bank of England, 2012) said "The financial crisis has taught us the importance of modelling and regulating finance as a complex, adaptive system. That will require skills currently rare or missing in the regulatory community - including, importantly, in the area of complexity science"; Paul Matthews (GlaxoSmithKline) stated "Scientists trained in statistical and computational approaches who have a sophisticated understanding of biologically relevant models are in short supply. They will be major contributors in the task of translating insights on human biology and disease into treatments and cures." Our CDT will address this need by training PhD students in the development and innovation of mathematics in the context of real-world systems and will operate in close collaboration with stakeholders from outside academia who will provide motivating problems and real-world experience. Common mathematical themes will include statistical behaviour of complex systems, tipping points, novel methods in control and resilience, hierarchical aggregation methods, model selection and sufficiency, implications of network structure, response to aperiodic forcing and shocks, and methods for handling complex data. Applications will be driven by local and external partner expertise in Epidemiology, Systems Biology, Crop Science, Healthcare, Operational Research, Systems Engineering, Network Science, Financial Regulation, Data Analysis and Social Behaviour. We believe that the merging of real-world applications with development of novel mathematics will have great synergy; applications will motivate and drive mathematical advances while novel mathematics will allow students to solve challenging real-world problems. The doctoral training programme will follow a 1+3 year MSc+PhD model that has proved successful in the Complexity Science DTC. The first year will consist of six months of taught training, followed by 3-month group research projects on problems set by external partners and a 3-month individual research project, leading to an MSc qualification. This preparation will enable the students to make rapid progress tackling their 3-year PhD research project, under the guidance of one mathematical and one application-oriented supervisor, alongside general skills training and group research projects. We have over 50 suitable supervisors with relevant mathematical expertise, all enthusiastic to contribute; they will be supported by a similar number of application-oriented supervisors from across campus and from external partners. The CDT seeks the equivalent of 7 full studentships per year from EPSRC and has commitment from non-RCUK sources for the equivalent of 3 full studentships per year.

Developed in partnership with Public Health England, Public Health Wales and NHS Education for Scotland, this bid addresses key challenges that the coronavirus pandemic presents in relation to understanding the flow and impact of public health messages as reflected in public and private discourses. Our collaborators above who are charged with constructing effective public health messages have identified two particular challenges: messaging around geographical borders (e.g. between England and Wales, and in local lockdowns) and messaging aimed at BAME populations. These areas will be the focus of our research, and we will deliver benefits to our collaborators in the form of initial analytical results and discussion from month 2 onwards. As human behaviour is shaped by the reception and production of discourse, and by the reasoning about different sources of information, we propose a new approach to track the trajectories of public health messages once they are released to the public. Moving beyond corpus linguistic approaches that focus on language production, we will investigate the complex relationship between the production and the reception of discourses relating to specific types of public health messages, focusing on linguistic patterns (in particular modality and stance markers). Drawing on our track record in the construction and analysis of heterogenous corpora and our ongoing work on privacy enhancing technologies, we propose to carry out the first large scale analysis of the trajectories of public health messages relating to the coronavirus pandemic in the UK.

Fungal infections are a growing problem, now killing more people than tuberculosis or malaria globally. Unfortunately fungi are also becoming resistant to the main anti fungal drugs we use to treat them. We have show that this is due to mass use of antifungals in agriculture. These are needed because fungi are the main pathogens that destroy crops. Furthermore global warming is increasing the threat of fungi across plant, animal and human health. To combat this, new types of antifungal therapies are coming into medical use, however we are already seeing equivalent antifungals being used in agriculture, known as "dual-use". We urgently need a holistic framework to ensure that we don't lose the efficacy of anti fungal drugs, both as medicines and as fungicides, whilst ensuring that we can continue to ensure that our food supplies are protected. In order to address the issue of antifungal resistance we have developed a Fungal One Health and Antimicrobial Resistance Network. One health refers to approaches that seek to balance and optimise the health of people, animals and ecosystems. The key challenges we face our to be able to understand the specific reasons why emergence of anti fungal resistance occurs within a one health context, to develop early warning systems that allow us to know when resistance in occurring or spreading, to identify the key hot-spots in the environment where anti fungal resistance is occurring, and have better understanding of where antifungals are being used most across one health. This will allow us to identify appropriate countermeasures that allow us to deliver judicious stewardship of antifungals so they can be used appropriately to enable food security and animal and human health, whilst ensuring that the risk of anti fungal resistance is minimised. In order to address these challenges and deliver appropriate countermeasures we have brought together a diverse range of scientists from across the relevant disciplines, as well as key stakeholders from relevant government departments, healthcare, agrochemical and pharmaceutical industries and end users such as farmers and patients. They will contribute to 4 working groups that focus on 1: the underlying causes of dual use anti fungal resistance, 2: surveillance of anti fungal resistance, 3: understanding the role of agricultural waste streams and water as hotspots for antifungal resistance, and 4: developing countermeasures such as anti fungal stewardship and other interventions to mitigate the risk of antifungal resistance. Our key aims will be to advance our knowledge of the underlying drivers of dual use antifungal resistance, how this occurs within the ecosystem, to develop surveillance systems and antifungal stewardship toolkits. We will develop policy documents and white papers, undertake outreach with end users, the public, governmental bodies and NGOs. The Network will train the next generation of multidisciplinary researchers in this area and develop pragmatic research proposals to enable us to fight the spread of anti-fungal resistance.

Secondary schools are important settings for health improvement, providing access to young people during a critical period when health risk behaviours markedly increase. Yet despite sustained effort to promote health through schools, the evidence for school-based interventions that effectively address issues such as obesity, smoking, alcohol use and mental health is limited. Health improvement research in school settings is challenging, with trials currently implemented in an ad hoc and inefficient manner. This is in stark contrast to research in primary care, which was greatly enhanced by the advent of primary care research networks (PCRNs) which facilitated an increase in the quantity and quality of randomised trials, improved research capacity and provided support for practitioner-led research. Such a step change is urgently needed to advance school-based research in the UK. The project aims to improve the quantity, quality and efficiency of public health research in schools by developing and evaluating a School Health Action Research Partnership and Network (SHARPEN). The research to evaluate and refine SHARPEN has 3 strands. In the first, researchers from Cardiff, Bristol, Oxford and Swansea universities will work in partnership with the Welsh Government, Cancer Research UK, Public Health Wales and Cardiff and Vale University Health Board to establish a network of up to 90 secondary schools that are 'trial ready', by developing more efficient recruitment, consent and data linkage procedures. We will identify the infrastructure and processes necessary to make the network efficient, effective, acceptable and rewarding for both schools and researchers. We will explore the barriers and facilitators to making the network sustainable. Students in network schools will complete the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) survey, a school environment schedule will be completed for each school, and we will pilot a system that uses these data as a basis for providing regular, tailored feedback to schools on pupil health behaviours and the school environment. In the second strand we will test the feasibility of establishing school-based action research partnerships to see whether they add significant value to the network model. Five schools will each form an action group of pupils, teachers, parents, health professionals and academics and over the course of a year each group will review their HBSC survey and school environemnt data, identify health priority areas, discuss the links between health and educational outcomes and develop and implement a school health action plan. Action plans will draw on the project partners and local resources and adopt a whole-school approach to health improvement. We will evaluate the action research partnerships to capture how they worked, the factors that hindered and helped them, and whether schools and other stakeholders found them feasible and useful. During this strand, student and parent views on data linkage will also be sought. Issues around informed consent and anonymity will be discussed with students and parents and if possible, data linkage will be piloted. The aim of the third strand is to scope the potential for sustaining the network and expanding it in Wales and for transferring the network model to secondary schools in England. Lessons from the first two strands will be fed back to key stakeholders in England and Wales and their views will be sought on network sustainability and its potential for expansion. The development of new school health research networks in England and Wales has significant potential to coordinate, increase and strengthen school-based research and inform evidence-based school health activity, thereby contributing to young people's health in the UK.