Building new bridges between research and policy during a national lockdown

Annette Boaz and Kathryn Oliver are social scientists with expertise in production and use of evidence for, policy. In this blogpost, they reflect on their recent experiences putting their knowledge into practice at the heart of government during a national lockdown. They describe the significant changes they had to make to their planned programme of (face-to-face) engagement work and how it was possible to build relationships and get a significant programme of work underway online to mobilise existing evidence in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the UK government’s Areas of Research Interest framework.