The School of Public Health is sad to hear of the passing of one of our colleagues, Alan Lunt.

Alan joined the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics last September as an MRC Skills Development Fellow, working with Fred Piel and Marc Chadeau-Hyam on systems approaches to sickle cell-related cardiopulmonary disease. Alan had developed an original research programme aiming at better characterising patients suffering for sickle cell disease. At the interface between clinical and computational sciences his research stood out as ambitious and promising. Unsurprisingly, he was awarded the prestigious MRC Skills Development Fellowship.   

As an independent thinker he was able to initiate and develop his own research programme, which fostered several collaborations within the College and with other institutions. Owing to his scientific culture, experience and appetite, he became central to our collaboration with the National Heart and Lung Institute and the Bioinformatics group, led by Professor Fan Chung, where he contributed to the analysis of the U-BIOPRED asthma cohort as a direct extension of his work.

Since joining the School, Alan had become a valued and central member of our team. Alan was also a team worker contributing to the successes of the group and he was appreciated for his clarity and availability by the students he supervised. For all these qualities Alan was seen by all his colleagues as a bright, humble, kind and approachable scientist, and he will be very much missed.