COVID-19 has changed our lives in innumerable and immeasurable ways. While perhaps not the most significant constraint, challenges to how we can, do, and perhaps should conduct research – about the virus and the pandemic, and/or while living in lockdown – has shaped many of our professional lives. As we look to a future with ongoing constraints, there are questions that we, as a university and as a research community, should be asking:

• What are the practical, methodological and ethical dimensions to conducting research in a pandemic, when some traditional methods (e.g. ethnographic fieldwork, face to face focus groups, collecting human tissues) are not practicable or safe? How can and should we surmount them?
• What type of research can and should we be doing in the current context, and what innovations are we using to conduct research ethically, soundly, and to a high standard?
• What advice and support can we give each other as we strive to conduct responsible and robust research in the COVID-19 context?
• How can these constraints and innovations inform our research going forward?

The Health Innovation Ecosystem and the Health Innovation and Wellbeing Research Community are co-organising a one-day virtual conference where we can present our work and our thinking about these and related issues. The conference is open to any member of UoW, from all disciplines and at all career stages (including postgraduate students). The conference will begin with a welcome from our Vice Chancellor, introductions by Dana Rosenfeld and Nina Smyth, a brief presentation on safety and security in online research, and a plenary address by a bioethicist. The plenary will be followed by online panels, organised by theme, where those with accepted abstracts will give short presentations and ‘attendees’ may ask questions. We will reconvene to hear a short presentation by one of university’s grants officers on the changing funding landscape given COVID-19, and for a second plenary before closing.

Abstracts (300-word limit) can relate to current or planned research but should be relevant to the conference’s broad theme: practical and/or ethical issues of conducting research in the COVID-19 context. If you would like to submit an abstract, please do so here. The organising committee will make decisions on abstracts by June 16th 2020.