It’s a pleasure to be in touch with colleagues and friends at this unprecedented time of challenge. Like other members of the Alliance, we in the University of Liverpool have postponed events and meetings, cancelled the international seminars and conferences that we’d been looking forward to in the coming weeks, and are now teaching our students online. The scale of the changes in our working lives that we’ve had to introduce with great speed has been breathtaking. This is true of universities all over the world, and we extend our warmest greetings to those who are also having to deal with the unseen threat of this dangerous new disease. All universities share a commitment to teaching and research, and to making the world a better place, and at this moment of common trial we in Liverpool are thinking of you all.

We know the universities of the Alliance will come though this ordeal wiser and stronger, with our ambitions and hopes for the future intact – including our ongoing plans for a third Heritage Roundtable, to be hosted in Nazarbayev University (Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan) in autumn 2020, if circumstances allow. In Liverpool, we’re finding new ways of looking after each other, and working together. Our researchers are gradually achieving a greater understanding of the virus, and of how to defeat it. Some are working on the discovery of a vaccine. Others are supporting the development of better treatment regimes, to help those infected recover as quickly as possible. This vital work is moving forward in universities across the globe, and it’s important that we share our findings as effectively and quickly as we can.

It’s important, too, that we don’t neglect the health and wellbeing of students and staff as we continue our work. We are encouraging everyone to take regular breaks, to eat and sleep as well as possible, and to take exercise. Even if we can’t leave our rooms and apartments, we can all use exercise programmes online to stay active. And it’s vitally important that we keep in touch with each other – not only so that we can do our work, but also to provide the opportunity for the social interaction we need as much as food and sleep. We must live separately to defeat the spread of the virus, but we also need to be together. Fortunately, technology enables us to do that in ways that would have been inconceivable to our ancestors.

Good luck, everyone! And stay well.