Francisco Perez-Reche is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Complex Systems and Mathematical Biology of the University of Aberdeen. He leads the Aberdeen Group for the Mathematics of Infectious Diseases. His research has a marked interdisciplinary character which uses mathematical modelling and data science as core disciplines to address questions relevant to a broad range of fields including infectious diseases, social contagion, phase transitions in disordered systems and dynamical processes in complex networks. During the COVID-19 pandemic, his research informed the Scottish Government, public health teams across Scotland, and the higher education sector. He is seconded to the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College London, funded by an MRC fellowship. During this secondment, he is working in the COVID-19 Longitudinal Health and Wellbeing National Core Study using metabolomics to better understand COVID-19 symptoms.