Dstl Fellow wins national innovation and creativity award

A Dstl Fellow and honorary professor at Liverpool University has received a prestigious gong at the Women in Defence Awards for her work to combat COVID-19.

Ronni Bowman won the national award in the Innovation and Creativity category at a ceremony in London last night.

She said:

I am over the moon to receive the award. I wasn’t expecting it as there is so much incredible work going on and the calibre of the other people nominated for the award was really high.

I am just one of many people doing work across Dstl to help with the pandemic and this award really recognises the hard work of my dedicated team.

The work involved creating a methodology to pull together models and data into one coherent statistically rigorous viewpoint.

Professor Bowman said:

When COVID hit literally everything else I was doing was put on hold.

It’s something that you never want to happen but it does make you feel that the work that you have been doing is actually useful and there was a point to it.

I developed, with my team, a system that combines different model outputs so it enabled us to combine all the epidemiological estimates from the different universities and create a single unified set of values and predictions of what COVID might do.

The software the team produced is now with Dstl’s partner Ploughshare to look at other ways this can be used.

Professor Bowman is a fellow and works in the field of statistics and data science.

A total of 6 women from Dstl were shortlisted for an award.

Professor Bowman and colleagues from Dstl feature in this short video about how Dstl has supported the global response to COVID-19.

Women in Science v COVID-19