Queen Mary University of London: against COVID-19 University
Entity: Queen Mary University of London
Category: University
Description: Queen Mary University of London (QMUL, or informally QM) is a public research university in London, England, and a constituent college of the federal University of London. It dates back to the foundation of London Hospital Medical College in 1785. Queen Mary College, named after Mary of Teck, was admitted to the University of London in 1915 and in 1989 merged with Westfield College to form Queen Mary and Westfield College. In 1995 Queen Mary and Westfield College merged with St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College and the London Hospital Medical College to form the School of Medicine and Dentistry. Queen Mary has five campuses across East and Central London in Mile End, Whitechapel, Charterhouse Square, Lincoln's Inn Fields and West Smithfield, as well as an international presence in China, France, Greece and Malta. The Mile End campus is the largest self-contained campus of any London-based Russell Group university. In 2018/19 the university had around 26,000 students. Queen Mary is organised into three faculties – the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Faculty of Science and Engineering and Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry. It was ranked joint 9th in the UK amongst multi-faculty institutions for the quality (GPA) of its research. In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework it was came 20th for its Research Power, fifth in the UK for the quality of research outputs and the Linguistics department was ranked first in the UK. In the UK Research Assessment Exercise results published in December 2008, Queen Mary was placed 11th according to an analysis by The Guardian newspaper and 13th according to The Times Higher Education Supplement, out of the 132 institutions submitted for the exercise. The Times Higher commented "the biggest star among the research-intensive institutions was Queen Mary, University of London, which went from 48th in 2001 to 13th in the 2008 Times Higher Education table, up 35 places." The QS World University Rankings 2019 ranked Queen Mary third in the world for research citations for the subject of medicine. The growth and strength of research at the College was rewarded with an invitation to join the Russell Group of research-intensive universities in the UK in 2012. The university is also a member of the Screen Studies Group, London. Other research highlights include an international team of scientists, led by astronomers at Queen Mary, discovering a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. In 2018, a project involving Queen Mary researchers reached its goal of sequencing 100,000 whole genomes from NHS patients.
Project: The COVIDENCE UK study
Summary: Queen's University Belfast, Queen Mary University of London, King’s College London, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the University of Edinburgh and Swansea University are working on the COVIDENCE UK study, which will help identify who is most at risk of contracting COVID-19 and why some people become more ill than others with the disease. COVIDENCE is a population-based observational longitudinal study that has the following objectives: to determine risk factors for incident COVID-19 and for adverse outcomes of COVID-19 in the UK population; to characterise the natural history of COVID-19 in the UK population; to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on the mental and economic well-being of the UK population; and to establish a platform for the future conduct of randomised controlled trials of interventions to prevent COVID-19 in the UK population.
