Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Babraham Institute have found that a naturally occurring modified DNA base appears to be stably incorporated in the DNA of many mammalian tissues, possibly representing an expansion of the functional DNA alphabet.

The new study, published today (22 June) in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, has found that this rare ‘extra’ base, known as 5-formylcytosine (5fC) is stable in living mouse tissues. While its exact function is yet to be determined, 5fC’s physical position in the genome makes it likely that it plays a key role in gene activity.

“This modification to DNA is found in very specific positions in the genome – the places which regulate genes,” said the paper’s lead author Dr Martin Bachman, who conducted the research while at Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry. “In addition, it’s been found in every tissue in the body – albeit in very low levels.”

“If 5fC is present in the DNA of all tissues, it is probably there for a reason,” said Professor Shankar Balasubramanian of the Department of Chemistry and the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, who led the research. “It had been thought this modification was solely a short-lived intermediate, but the fact that we’ve demonstrated it can be stable in living tissue shows that it could regulate gene expression and potentially signal other events in cells.”

Since the structure of DNA was discovered more than 60 years ago, it’s been known that there are four DNA bases: G, C, A and T (Guanine, Cytosine, Adenine and Thymine). The way these bases are ordered determines the makeup of the genome.

In addition to G, C, A and T, there are also small chemical modifications, or epigenetic marks, which affect how the DNA sequence is interpreted and control how certain genes are switched on or off. The study of these marks and how they affect gene activity is known as epigenetics.

5fC is one of these marks, and is formed when enzymes called TET enzymes add oxygen to methylated DNA – a DNA molecule with smaller molecules of methyl attached to the cytosine base. First discovered in 2011, it had been thought that 5fC was a ‘transitional’ state of the cytosine base which was then being removed from DNA by dedicated repair enzymes. However, this new research has found that 5fC can actually be stable in living tissue, making it likely that it plays a key role in the genome.

Using high-resolution mass spectrometry, the researchers examined levels of 5fC in living adult and embryonic mouse tissues, as well as in mouse embryonic stem cells – the body’s master cells which can become almost any cell type in the body.

They found that 5fC is present in all tissues, but is very rare, making it difficult to detect. Even in the brain, where it is most common, 5fC is only present at around 10 parts per million or less. In other tissues throughout the body, it is present at between one and five parts per million.

The researchers applied a method consisting of feeding cells and living mice with an amino acid called L-methionine, enriched for naturally occurring stable isotopes of carbon and hydrogen, and measuring the uptake of these isotopes to 5fC in DNA. The lack of uptake in the non-dividing adult brain tissue pointed to the fact that 5fC can be a stable modification: if it was a transient molecule, this uptake of isotopes would be high.

The researchers believe that 5fC might alter the way DNA is recognised by proteins. “Unmodified DNA interacts with a specific set of proteins, and the presence of 5fC could change these interactions either directly or indirectly by changing the shape of the DNA duplex,” said Bachman. “A different shape means that a DNA molecule could then attract different proteins and transcription factors, which could in turn change the way that genes are expressed.”

“This will alter the thinking of people in the study of development and the role that these modifications may play in the development of certain diseases,” said Balasubramanian. “While work is continuing in determining the exact function of this ‘extra’ base, its position in the genome suggests that it has a key role in the regulation of gene expression.”

The research was supported by Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council UK.

‘Past as Prelude: Polish-Ukrainian Relations for the Twenty-First Century’ is held in partnership with Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, an academic centre in the Department of Slavonic Studies.

The conference will bring together scholars, politicians and public intellectuals from Poland, Ukraine and beyond.

It seeks to develop new directions for the complex relationship between Poland and Ukraine, which has become more important than ever in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine.

Speakers will include Michał Boni, Norman Davies, Ola Hnatiuk, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Paweł Kowal, Serhii Plokhii, Mykola Riabchuk, Sławomir Sierakowski, Frank Sysyn, and Karolina Wigura, among others.

The conference is free and open to the public, but online registration is required at www.PolandUkraineconference.org

The history shared by Poland and Ukraine has seen devastating wars as well as the ethnic cleansing and mass deportations of civilian populations.

It has also witnessed many productive periods of cooperation and solidarity.

In fact, over the course of recent decades, Poland and Ukraine have developed a constructive relationship that may stand as one of the most remarkable political and social achievements of European diplomatic history.

The future of this relationship is still bound up with difficult discussions of the past. The conference ‘Past as Prelude’ is intended to enrich these discussions and to propose new paradigms for the future.

The event will be open to the broader public through roundtable panels that will be livestreamed around the globe. It will also interact with audiences on Twitter via the hashtag #PolandUkraineConference.

‘By engaging eminent thinkers from Poland and Ukraine in dialogue,’ said Dr Stanley Bill, Lecturer in Polish Studies, ‘we hope to cultivate an open exchange of ideas that will yield fresh pathways for the positive development of Polish-Ukrainian relations in circumstances of increasing regional instability.’

The conference marks another productive collaboration between Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, a permanent programme in the Department of Slavonic Studies since 2010, and Cambridge Polish Studies, a pilot initiative launched in the Slavonic Department in September 2014.

Dr Rory Finnin, Head of the Department of Slavonic Studies, said: ‘Our new programme in Polish Studies is quickly becoming the most dynamic initiative of its kind in Europe. It is not only cultivating new ground in the study of Poland but also engendering fresh comparative research into the cultures and societies of Eastern Europe, which is a critical objective for the University of Cambridge.’

The Cambridge Polish Studies initiative – which is sponsored by the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP), the M. B. Grabowski Fund, Trinity College’s Zdanowich Fund, and the School of Arts and Humanities – combines undergraduate education in Polish literature and language with a rich cycle of special events, including guest speakers, public debates, film screenings, and academic conferences.

The initiative aims to make Cambridge a key centre for the study of Poland in the UK and beyond.

The Embassy of the Republic of Poland in London, The Oxford Noble Foundation, and The Polish Cultural Institute in London have partnered with Cambridge Polish Studies and the Department of Slavonic Studies to make the ‘Past as Prelude’ conference possible.

In 2007, Dr David Stillwell built an application for an online networking site that was starting to explode: Facebook. His app, myPersonality, allowed users to complete a range of psychometric tests, get feedback on their scores and share it with friends. It went viral.

By 2012, more than six million people had completed the test, with many users allowing researchers access to their profile data. This huge database of psychological scores and social media information, including status updates, friendship networks and ‘Likes’, is the largest of its kind in existence. It contains the moods, musings and characteristics of millions – a holy grail of psychological data unthinkable until a few years ago.

Stillwell and colleagues at Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre provided open access to the database for other academics. Academic researchers from over 100 institutions globally now use it, producing 39 journal articles since 2011.

Meanwhile, the Cambridge Psychometrics team devised their own complex algorithms to read patterns in the data. Resulting publications caused media scrums, with a paper published in early 2015 generating nervous headlines around the world about computers knowing your personality better than your parents.

But how surprising is this really, given the amount we casually share about ourselves online every day? And not just through social media, but also through web browsing, internet purchases, and so on. Every interaction creates a trace, which all add up to a ‘digital footprint’ of who we are, what we do and how we feel.

We know that, behind closed doors, corporations and governments use this data to ‘target’ us – our online actions mark us out as future customers, or even possible terrorists – and, for many, this reduction in privacy is a disturbing fact of 21st-century life.

The Cambridge researchers believe that the new era of psychological ‘big data’ can be used to improve commercial and government services as well as furthering scientific research, but openness is essential.

“If you ask a company to make their data available for research, usually it will go to some corporate responsibility office which deems it too risky – there’s nothing in it for them. Whereas if you tell them you can improve their business, but as part of that they make some data available to the research community, you find a lot more open doors,” says Stillwell, who co-directs the Centre.

Around half of the Centre’s current work involves commercial companies, who come to them for “statistical expertise combined with psychological understanding” – often in an attempt to improve online marketing, an area still in its infancy.

The team has recently launched an interface called Apply Magic Sauce, based on the myPersonality results, which can be used as a marketing and research tool that turns digital ‘footprints’ into psycho-demographic profiles.

“If you use the internet you will be targeted by advertisers, but at the moment that targeting happens in the shadows and isn’t particularly accurate,” says Vesselin Popov, the Centre’s development strategist.

“We all have to suffer advertising, so perhaps it’s better to be recommended products that we might actually want? Using opt-in anonymous personality profiling based on digital records such as Facebook Likes or Last.fm scores could vastly improve targeted advertising and allow users to set the level of data-sharing they are comfortable with,” says Popov. “This data could then, with the permission of users, be used to enrich scientific research databases.”

Measuring psychological traits has long been difficult for researchers and boring for participants, usually involving laborious questionnaires. This will sound familiar to anyone who has used an employment agency or job centre. The team are now building on their previous work with algorithms to take psychometric testing even further into uncharted territory – video games. Job centres might be the first to benefit.   

“A job centre gets about seven minutes with each job seeker every two weeks, so providing personalised support in that time is challenging,” explains Stillwell. “We are working with a company to build a game that measures a person’s strengths in a ‘gamified’ way that’s engaging but still accurate.”

In ‘JobCity’, currently an iPad proof of concept, users explore job opportunities in a simulated city. The game measures psychological strengths and weaknesses along the way, offering career suggestions at the end, and providing the job centre with feedback to help them guide the applicant. The team has tested the game with a group of under-25s and the results are promising.    

For the Centre’s Director Professor John Rust, the team’s background in psychology means they don’t lose sight of the people within the oceans of data: “We’re dealing with organisations that are using ‘big data’ to make actuarial decisions about who gets lent money, who gets a job – you don’t want this left solely to computer engineers who just see statistics.”  

“We want machines that can recognise you as a person. Much of the information for doing that already exists in the servers of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so on. Your searches and statuses are all reflections of questions, experiences and emotions you have: all psychometric data. It’s the basis for a future where computers can truly interact with human beings.”  

Cyberspace has, for Rust, opened a ‘Pandora’s box’ that’s taken psychological testing to a new level. But, he says, the current explosion in big data bears comparison to a previous shift that happened a century ago – the advent of IQ tests shortly before the First World War. Millions of servicemen were tested to determine role allocation within the military. Suddenly, says Rust, overexcited scientists had massive psychological datasets. IQ tests influenced societies long after the war, leading he says to some of the most shameful episodes of the 20th century including scientific racism and sterilisation of the ‘feebleminded’.

“Today you have another psychological big data situation being used to challenge a perceived global threat: terrorism. Government data scientists hunting would-be terrorists are enthusiastically adopting big data, but there will be social consequences again. In many ways, we already have Big Brother – whatever that now means,” Rust says.

“The new psychological data revolution needs serious research, and ethical debates about it need to be happening in the public arena – and they’re not. We have a responsibility to say to people working on this in secret in companies and institutions: ‘You’ve got to come and discuss this in an open place’. It’s what universities are for.”

Inset images: Facebook's Infection (Ksayer1); Dr David Stillwell, Professor John Rust and Vesselin Popov (University of Cambridge).

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed a simple ‘recipe’ for combining multiple materials with single functions into a single material with multiple functions: movement, recall of movement and sensing – similar to muscles in animals. The materials could be used to make robotics far more efficient by replacing bulky devices with a single, smarter, life-like material. The results are published in the journal Advanced Materials.

The new designer materials integrate the structure of two or more separate functions at the nanoscale, while keeping the individual materials physically separate. The gaps between the individual elements are so small that the final material is uniformly able to perform the functions of its component parts.

The materials are synthesised either in a one-pot reaction, with or without solvents; or through a series of sequential reactions, where the component parts are synthesised separately one by one, and sequentially infiltrated and cross-linked at the nanoscale.

“We’re used to thinking of synthetic materials as structural, rather than functional things,” said Dr Stoyan Smoukov of the University’s Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, who led the research. “But we’re now entering a new era of multi-functional materials, which could be considered robots themselves, since we can program them to carry out a series of actions independently.”

Smoukov’s group had previously demonstrated combined movement and muscle memory in a single material, but this is the first time that materials have been specifically designed and synthesised to perform multiple functions.

Smart polymers were first developed several decades ago, but multiple functions have not been effectively combined in the same material, since previous efforts have found that optimising one function came at the expense of the other.

In these new materials, the individual functions are integrated yet kept separate at the nanoscale. The researchers combined two different types of smart materials: an ionic electro-active polymer (i-EAP), which bends or swells with the application of voltage and are used in soft robotics; and a two-way shape memory polymer (SMP), which can be programmed to adopt and later recall specific shapes, in a type of muscle memory.

The resulting combined material is what’s known as an inter-penetrated network (IPN). Due to the fact that the separate components are meshed at the nanoscale, there are unbroken paths within each component from one side of the material to the other, yet there are nanoscale boundaries between them as well. Such IPNs are highly resistant to cracks, making them very mechanically stable. Rather than stop at mechanical stability, the researchers were interested in using these structures to make multi-functional artificial muscles, which can move, sense, and also report on their environment.

The movement in these hybrid materials can be controlled in several different ways, including by light, temperature, chemicals, electric field or magnetic field. These various stimuli can be used to make the materials change colour, emit light or energy, or change shape.

Making IPNs has been tried before with a type of plastic known as a block copolymer, but it has been difficult to fine-tune their exact structure because of difficult synthetic procedures. These difficulties limit the types of functionalities that can be combined, and those that are made are sometimes too costly for practical applications. In this case the researchers were able to use phase separation combined with ordinary polymer syntheses to achieve the complex structures.

According to the researchers, utilising this technique may open up a whole new avenue for smart materials, since materials that have been designed for other, single, purposes could create a large variety of multi-functional combinations. Much like choosing from an array of starters, main courses and desserts in a restaurant menu to create a multitude of dinner options, materials that perform different single functions can be combined in a mix-and-match approach to perform a myriad of tri-functional combinations. And in theory, according to the researchers, more than three intertwined components are achievable as well.

“It’s sort of like proteins, where using just 20 amino acids, you can get 8,000 different combinations of three amino acids,” said Smoukov. “Using this method, we can pick and choose from a menu of functions, and then mix them together to make materials that can do multiple things.”

The capabilities of these materials could make them very useful in robotics – in fact, said Smoukov, these types of materials could even be considered robots on their own.

“We’re trying to design materials that approach the flexibility of living things,” said Smoukov. “Looking at the functionality of living things, we then want to extract that functionality and find a way to do it more simply in a synthetic material. We’re peeling back some of the layers of mystery that surround life.”

The research has been funded by the European Research Council (ERC). 

(Beowulf – XXXIII. Project Gutenberg.)

“A major theme in heroic and epic literature is obtaining treasure and giving it out to the people – treasure was particularly important in a pre-monetary economy. Dragons, often depicted jealously guarding their hoard, represent the obverse of generosity, like a bad king figure,” says Dance.

“Beowulf is the longest Anglo-Saxon poem that we know of, and it is complex, carefully wrought and evocative. It’s good poetry as well as being a good poem — a finely crafted piece of treasure in its own right. A lot of words and the way it arranges its ideas are recognisably poetic compared to Old English prose”.

Dance explains that the words “draca” (dragon) and “wyrm” (serpent, reptile) are used fairly interchangeably in the poem to refer to the hero’s final foe.

“When the dragon appears towards the end of the poem we see that, very early on in written culture, the fantasy fiction idea of a dragon that we have today is already formed. Looking at dragons in modern fiction you can see that our ideas of what a dragon is depend quite closely on the ways they are presented in medieval literature like Beowulf, especially via the works of authors like J. R. R. Tolkien, himself an Anglo-Saxon scholar,” says Dance.

Dr Judy Quinn of ASNAC, who researches Old Norse poetry, says that Scandinavian and Icelandic poems demonstrate how productive a symbol the dragon remained for poets in the medieval period.

“Poets were drawn to the legend of dragons such as Fáfnir and Níðhöggr found in the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda – a 13th century Icelandic anthology of traditional anonymous verse. The proverb ‘dragons often rise up on their tails’ is recorded in the 12th century Icelandic poem Málsháttakvæði,” says Quinn. “The dreki or dragon most often encountered in medieval Scandinavian poetry is a ship, named for the dragon shape carved out of the prow of Viking-Age war-ships.”

Whether in it, or on it, or providing a useful container for it, the dragons of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology have a long and storied relationship with water. Which is perhaps unsurprising given how the fire-breathing lizards of our imaginations started life in many cultures and mythologies – as serpents, sea monsters, or river deities.

But to find the most unusual connection between the MAA’s dragons, we need to turn to an even more essential element – tea.

Medieval England, between the 16th and 18th centuries, gives us an exhibit affectionately nicknamed “Dragon in a cup”. One of the highlights of the MAA’s permanent Archaeology of Cambridge display, this piece of stained glass depicts St John the Evangelist. At the end of an outstretched arm, St John holds a poisoned chalice – with a tiny dragon peeping over the rim. It is a fairly common motif for St John to be depicted in this way, bearing an ominous cup of dragon – although the dragon in question looks far too friendly to be poisoning anybody.

For the next stop on our tea cup quest, we’re off to Borneo by canoe again to find another intricately carved prow, known to the museum staff as George.

Part-crocodile, part-dragon, George is afflicted by a condition that most tea-lovers will be able to sympathise with – he sees tea cups wherever he goes.

And finally, once more to Tibet and this tea cup decorated with a long, green dragon. Donated to the museum by the Williamsons, this cup is part of a large collection of Tibetan artefacts, including a teaspoon and a folding tea table both decorated with images of dragons.

All that remains is for someone to discover a dragon using a tea cup and the MAA’s collection will truly be complete.

You can meet all of these dragons, and many more of their friends prowling the treasures at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology – from Javanese Batik cloth, to Japanese netsuke.

During the summer, children can embark on their own animal adventure and try their hand at finding all of the exhibits in the museum’s Animal Safari Trail.

Admission to the museum is free and it is open every day except Mondays.

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: E is for an animal that takes pride of place among the medieval manuscripts in the Parker Library, and is the subject of vital conservation research in Thailand's 'Golden Triangle'.

Inset images: Figurehead of a canoe, accession number Z 2403 (University of Cambridge); Derge iron water bottle, accession number D 1976.115 (University of Cambridge); Viking ships (Jos van Wunnik); Circular panel of glass, showing a saint with a dragon in a chalice, accession number Z 16318 (University of Cambridge); Head for front of canoe, accession number Z 2698 (University of Cambridge); China tea cup (University of Cambridge).

Thirteen inspirational academics have been honoured for the outstanding quality and approach to their teaching.

The 22nd annual Pilkington Prizes, which honour excellence in teaching across the collegiate University, were held at Corpus Christi College last night.

The prizes are awarded annually to academic staff, with candidates nominated by Schools within the University.

The Pilkington Prizes were initiated by Sir Alastair Pilkington, the first Chairman of the Cambridge Foundation, who believed passionately that the quality of teaching was crucial to Cambridge’s success.

This year’s recipients received their awards at a ceremony attended by Professor Graham Virgo, Pro-Vice-Chancellor  for Education.

Dr William (Bill) Allison – University Reader in Physics, Department of Physics
Dr Bill Allison, Reader in Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, has made a huge contribution to physics teaching during his career, and inspired many students both in the lecture theatre and the laboratory.  His innovative lecture courses on topics such as condensed matter physics and thermodynamics have been well received by students, and he has always been a willing contributor to the teaching program.
Dr Allison has made a significant effort in the undergraduate laboratories to make sure students appreciate the importance of experimental physics and enjoy learning practical physics skills. Student feedback such as ‘Head of Class Bill Allison is absolutely brilliant…’ is a testament to this.  In addition to this wide-ranging and high-quality contribution in the laboratory and lecture theatre, Bill has in previous years played a leading management role, organising the laboratory's teaching and serving as Chair of the Physics Teaching Committee.

Dr Stephen Barclay – University Lecturer in Palliative Care and General Practice, Department of Public Health and Primary Care
Dr Stephen Barclay leads the Clinical School’s teaching programme in Palliative and End of Life Care.
This is a challenging topic for medical students, confronting their expectations of what a doctor can do, often in emotionally charged situations. Stephen and his team help students to develop the knowledge and skills required, culminating in the highly regarded two day “Death and Dying” course for final year students.  Dr Barclay has taken Cambridge’s programme, nationally recognised for its excellence, and used it to lead the development of a national curriculum.
Graduates regularly contact us to share how valuable the Palliative Care teaching has proved to be, sharing feedback such as: “The palliative care teaching I had in Cambridge was amongst the best student teaching I had… Since qualifying it has been immensely useful and I have often used what I learned.”
Dr Barclay is a truly excellent and inspiring teacher who willingly gives his time to students.  More widely, he is a clinical pastoral advisor, sits on the Fitness to Practice Committee and plays a major role in the development and implementation of high quality written and clinical assessments.

Dr Paula Buttery – Senior Lecturer, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
Dr Paula Buttery has played an instrumental role in developing the new Linguistics Tripos. As the teaching coordinator for this new Tripos she has worked tirelessly to ensure the successful delivery of its courses. She is also involved with a new MML initiative to develop a course of inter-departmental translation seminars in which she will contribute a session on machine translation.
Dr Buttery applies equal energy to her engagement in the Department’s MPhil course, in which she coordinates the Research Methods Seminars and the Computational Linguistics course. She is respected by both colleagues and students who recognise not only her organisational ability but also her excellence as a teacher at every level, reflected in consistently outstanding feedback from students. She inspires the gifted, motivates those who struggle and is unstinting in giving extra time to those who need it, supporting them with great patience and good humour.
Last year Dr Buttery was awarded funding from the Cambridge-Africa Alborada Fund to build a spoken language corpus of an indigenous Ugandan language with partners at Makerere University, Uganda, and to develop a teaching skills exchange.

Dr Nik Cunniffe – Lecturer, Department of Plant Sciences
Dr Cunniffe began teaching maths to biologists in 2007, firstly as a postdoctoral researcher and then as a Lecturer. In that time he has taught mathematical modelling, statistics, ecology and computing to students in the Department of Plant Sciences. In particular, he is making the computational tools that pervade modern biology accessible to undergraduate students.
His numerous exemplary citations, taken from student feedback over the years, identify his abilities as being sympathetic and subtly humorous, yet mathematically precise and accurate. Anyone who can teach mathematics to biologists and win plaudits such as “amazing”, “the best maths lecturer I have ever had”, or “brilliant lecturer, change nothing” clearly excels in explaining the significance of mathematical biology to undergraduates.
Dr Cunniffe makes an outstanding contribution to teaching practice and learning outcomes in mathematical biology, and demonstrates excellence in style, consistency and diligence. He has been keen to adapt his teaching methods, both in terms of revised lecture content, style and delivery, as well as administration. He has also introduced an additional practical class on epidemiology to the 1B Plant and Microbial Sciences course, as well as contributing lectures and programming practicals to the zoology module “Population Biology”.
Dr Cunniffe is an invaluable contributor to the Department both through his independent research group, and via his continued collaboration colleagues. He also makes an active contribution towards the administration of graduate progression and supervision, as well as driving forward an important research programme which includes key issues such as ash dieback and sudden oak death.

Dr Elizabeth DeMarrais – Senior Lecturer, Division of Archaeology, Faculty of Human, Social and Political Sciences
Dr Elizabeth DeMarrais has been nominated for her consistently exceptional record of development and delivery of innovative new teaching in Archaeology and the Faculty.  Her teaching activities have covered a broad range but her primary focus is on archaeology of the Americas, particularly South America.
Since arriving in Cambridge in 1998, Dr DeMarrais has created three new course offerings at undergraduate and MPhil level, as well as working with Dr Robb to set up and run the Material Culture Laboratory. This centre for interdisciplinary research provides a lively forum for theoretical debate among students, post-doctoral researchers and staff. Dr DeMarrais regularly supervises undergraduate and MPhil dissertations, encouraging students to make use of the first-rate collections held in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Of a total of 21 undergraduate dissertations supervised since 2000, five of her supervisees have won the Departmental Prize for best dissertation of the year.
Feedback from her students is overwhelmingly positive in describing her teaching and pastoral abilities.  Students frequently share comments such as “Elizabeth’s take on the politics of material culture still tinges the way I think about both archaeology and the world I live in. In short, she is a great, great teacher.”; “Elizabeth cares deeply for her students. She always took time to meet with me when I needed advice, and she was always supportive and encouraging” and “She always encourages her students to think independently, and challenge everything we thought we knew about how human societies should work. Her lectures are outstanding: she effortlessly communicates complex ideas and theories, and presents the material in a clear manner.”
Dr DeMarrais has inspired several generations of undergraduate and graduate students by her adept academic guidance in an impressive array of subject areas within Archaeology. She is an outstanding teacher and most deserving recipient of this award.

Dr George Follows – Consultant Haematological Oncologist, Addenbrooke’s Hospital
Dr George Follows’ is a specialist in haematological oncology, particularly caring for patients with lymphoma and leukaemia.  He has an extensive research portfolio in Clinical Trials and was awarded a University Associate Lectureship in 2008 in recognition of his outstanding contribution to teaching. 
Dr Follows has an extremely busy clinical practice but despite this workload, students have ranked him as the best clinical teacher in Cancer Medicine over the past ten years.  In the last five years, he has consistently received three times more "Outstanding Teacher Nominations" than the next highest ranked colleague in a department of over 60 oncologists, thus repeatedly being awarded the departmental Watson Cup for teaching.  In 2013 he was awarded the national Stanley Cup for teaching students in oncology.
Dr Follows has all the best attributes of a successful clinical teacher.  His teaching is grounded in clinical experience for the students and he finds the time and space within his clinical practice to deliver huge amounts of bedside teaching of the highest quality.  Students describe him as “outstanding” and “inspirational” and he is rarely seen in the hospital without a retinue of eager students following behind!

Dr Julia Gog – Reader in Mathematical Biology, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics
Dr Julia Gog is both an excellent lecturer and supervisor, as questionnaire feedback from students has consistently shown.  Those students who were already interested in mathematical biology, and those who hadn't previously considered studying the subject, have commented on how inspiring her lectures are.  She combines innovative teaching methods to great effect, including vivacious handwritten lecturing and sharing supporting materials online.
In addition to her lecturing, she is committed to supporting students and helping them reach their full potential. For example, she has helped undergraduates find summer research placements in various branches of mathematics, and has given many stimulating talks to student societies.
The Faculty is grateful for her insightful statistical analyses of student Tripos performance and her input into framing policy for the structure of credit for project work, on gender issues relevant to its recent Athena SWAN award, and on ensuring fairness of admissions between Colleges. We think that Julia Gog is an outstanding teacher and highly deserving of this prize.

Dr Bart Hallmark – Lecturer, Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology
Dr Bart Hallmark has shown sustained excellence in teaching in the Department. He has transformed our teaching of Process Design by completely rewriting the lectures that cover the material, and setting a variety of exercises for students on this topic. Dr Hallmark’s lecture courses are always well prepared and students enjoy his lectures, commenting favourably on his explanations and enthusiasm.
In particular, Dr Hallmark has developed the main Design Project, which is an essential element of professional accreditation. Teams of third year students have just five weeks to design a solution to an issue faced by a particular industry, set by the industrial partner. The Design Project is largely responsible for transforming them from undergraduates into engineers who can face the challenges of real world problems. The work required for the Design Project to run smoothly is enormous and it is largely thanks to his efforts that the Project is so successful.
Dr Hallmark makes a number of other significant teaching and outreach contributions. He promotes the undergraduate course at Open Days and answers queries from potential students. He organises the Department’s Teaching Consortium of industrial companies. In particular, he brings industrial visitors into the Department so that they can run transferable skills workshops for undergraduates.

Dr Adrian Kelly – University Lecturer, Department of Pathology
Dr Adrian Kelly has been a Teaching Officer in the Department of Pathology since 1997, and became a University Senior Lecturer in 2012. Over this period he has made a sustained, outstanding contribution to the teaching work of the Department.  He is a popular teacher in the Natural Sciences Tripos, the pre-clinical Medical and Veterinary Sciences Tripos, and for the second MB qualification.
Dr Kelly has consistently delivered excellent teaching through his lectures, project supervision, (senior) examining and practical demonstration. He is a popular teacher at IB and Part II, noted in particular for his clear and concise handouts and lecturing style.  He has been the Part II course organiser for the Department for many years, and has more recently played a key role in streamlining Part II admissions, maximising the course options to attract the best students, whilst balancing this against the available departmental resource.
Dr Kelly has played a key role in strengthening links and fostering positive relations between the Department and the Colleges. He has established a strong process in the Department for dealing with student and College concerns, and is a committed and well-liked supervisor at both Trinity and Wolfson Colleges.
Dr Kelly has established and maintained productive funded research in immunology, but nonetheless he has been keen to commit substantial time to teaching. In all his teaching roles he has always remained very positive, collegial and constructive. He is a truly excellent colleague.

Professor James (Jim) Secord  – Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Professor Jim Secord is one of the outstanding teachers of his generation. Combining the innovative approach exemplified by his own superb publications on nineteenth-century sciences with a shrewd sense of student needs, he has made a huge contribution to education and training in the subject at every level.
Professor Secord began teaching in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in 1992, after having developed a major teaching programme at Imperial College, London.  At Cambridge he has always been deeply engaged in teaching, both in terms of course administration and design, and as a lecturer, supervisor and mentor. His lectures set complex scientific material within a rich social, economic and cultural context, in a way that is accessible to students who have typically not studied any humanities since GCSE.  Students consistently describe his lectures as ‘a joy to listen to’, ‘genuinely interested in everything he was speaking about’, and ‘awesome’.  As one student summed it up: ‘Jim Secord is a fantastic lecturer’.
Professor Secord combines outstanding lecturing with famously brilliant supervision of coursework, from undergraduate dissertations to PhD theses, distinguished by gentle but probing questions that push students to learn for themselves how to research and write.  Secord has an admirable record of working with students who are in potential difficulty or have not been able previously to achieve to their full potential.  His care in dealing with students is also evident in his work as a college Director of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, a role he has undertaken at various colleges in the past, including Churchill, Clare and John’s.  As a fellow of Christ’s since 2008, he has developed a strong group with one of the largest cohorts of HPS students in any of the colleges.
As an equally effective and caring mentor to colleagues locally, nationally and internationally, time and again his engagement has turned inquiry in more productive directions and shown us how to draw our audiences in. Having thus taught the teachers too, he is an exceptional candidate for a Pilkington Prize.

Ms Mary Ann Steane – Senior University Lecturer, Faculty of Architecture and History of Art
Over many years Mary Ann Steane has made an enormous contribution to the Department of Architecture as coordinator of Tripos teaching and lecturer in environmental design. She became a Lecturer in in 2000 and has been Senior Lecturer since 2012.  These official titles do not sufficiently convey her deep understanding of and commitment to the problem of how architecture students learn to design. To successfully learn such a personal and subjective discipline requires both a teacher and an enabler: as well as conveying knowledge and experience, one must ensure that the student is in a position to be able to learn creatively.
Ms Steane does a superb job of balancing these different aspects of teaching. By interacting with students and coordinating the Department’s design teaching fellows, she has devised undergraduate programmes that promote students’ imaginations yet serve to establish them as responsible young designers in the profession.
Her first year lectures in environmental design focus on introducing the complex problem of human ecology in architecture. Students have praised the direct encounters in her field trips, in the UK and beyond, for ‘looking at light in real buildings....’ and her lectures for ‘allow[ing] me to see what we should be constantly thinking’. Her influence also extends to more mature students, with a recent MPhil supervisee having won the 2014 Royal Institute of British Architects President’s prize for his dissertation.

Dr Edgar (Ed) Turner, Teaching Officer in Biological Sciences, Institute of Continuing Education
Since joining the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE) in January 2012, Dr Edgar Turner has been Academic Director and ICE Teaching Officer in Biological Sciences. He is also an affiliated researcher in the Insect Ecology Group, University Museum of Zoology, and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. 
As well as being a charismatic and enthusiastic science communicator, Dr Turner supervises undergraduate and graduate students, has taught an undergraduate zoology field course since 2001, gives Part 1A and 1B lectures, and is Director of Studies at Clare College. Outside the University, he has presented over 70 public lectures since 2006.
As ICE Teaching Officer, Dr Turner has made an enormous difference to the Institute’s Biological Sciences teaching and strengthened our links to the School of Biological Sciences, particularly to Zoology, and to the Museums and Collections. Ed’s teaching includes short courses on topics including evolution, zoological collecting, and the secret lives of insects.  He also leads well-received biodiversity tours of Madingley.
Dr Turner has also designed and delivered several new University of Cambridgequalifications, including a Certificate and Diploma in Evolutionary Biology and an Advanced Diploma in Ecological Monitoring and Conservation. Some of his teaching is fully online and his associated open-access online tasters are very popular.
Dr Turner is full of creative ideas and is a committed and collaborative colleague who contributes fully to the Institute’s work.

Professor Jim Woodhouse – Professor, Department of Engineering, School of Technology
The breadth and consistently outstanding quality of Professor Jim Woodhouse’s contributions to the teaching of Engineering in Cambridge over the last 30 years is remarkable. His experience spans the teaching of first year undergraduate mathematics, through instruction in advanced experimental techniques for graduate students, to providing leadership to his colleagues across the Engineering Department in course design and delivery.
Professor Woodhouse has made good use of his mathematical background to teach widely across the disparate aspects of mathematics used in engineering, from complex analysis to vector calculus to variational methods.  He has created well organised and coherent courses that have lived on well past his lecturing tenure. But Professor Woodhouse is also a practical academic, as will be clear to anyone who has heard his wonderful outreach lectures on the engineering of a violin.
He has designed and taught courses on almost all aspects of vibrations and dynamics, and has been instrumental in setting up many hands-on laboratory activities that play such a valuable role in the teaching of engineering. Professor Woodhouse has made an exceptional and enduring contribution to education in Cambridge.

A new study of an otherworldly creature from half a billion years ago – a worm-like animal with legs, spikes and a head difficult to distinguish from its tail – has definitively identified its head for the first time, and revealed a previously unknown ring of teeth and a pair of simple eyes. The results, published today in the journal Nature, have helped scientists reconstruct what the common ancestor of everything from tiny roundworms to huge lobsters might have looked like.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge, the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto have found that the creature, known as Hallucigenia due to its strange appearance, had a throat lined with needle-like teeth, a previously unidentified feature which could help connect the dots between it, modern velvet worms and arthropods – the group which contains modern insects, spiders and crustaceans.

Arthropods, velvet worms (onychophorans) and water bears (tardigrades) all belong to the massive group of animals that moult, known as ecdysozoans. Though Hallucigenia is not the common ancestor of all ecdysozoans, it is a precursor to velvet worms. Finding this mouth arrangement in Hallucigenia helped scientists determine that velvet worms originally had the same configuration – but it was eventually lost through evolution.

“The early evolutionary history of this huge group is pretty much uncharted,” said Dr Martin Smith, a postdoctoral researcher in Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, and the paper’s lead author. “While we know that the animals in this group are united by the fact that they moult, we haven’t been able to find many physical characteristics that unite them.”

“It turns out that the ancestors of moulting animals were much more anatomically advanced than we ever could have imagined: ring-like, plate-bearing worms with an armoured throat and a mouth surrounded by spines,” said Dr Jean-Bernard Caron, Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum and Associate Professor in the Departments of Earth Sciences and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. “We previously thought that neither velvet worms nor their ancestors had teeth. But Hallucigenia tells us that actually, velvet worm ancestors had them, and living forms just lost their teeth over time.”

Hallucigenia was just one of the weird creatures that lived during the Cambrian Explosion, a period of rapid evolutionary development starting about half a billion years ago, when most major animal groups first emerge in the fossil record.

At first, Hallucigenia threw palaeontologists for a bit of a loop. When it was identified in the 1970s, it was reconstructed both backwards and upside down: the spines along its back were originally thought to be legs, its legs were thought to be tentacles along its back, and its head was mistaken for its tail.

Right side up and right way round, Hallucigenia still looks pretty strange: it had pairs of lengthy spines along its back, seven pairs of legs ending in claws, and three pairs of tentacles along its neck. The animals were between 10 and 50 millimetres in length and lived on the floor of the Cambrian oceans.

More significantly, Hallucigenia’s unearthly appearance has made it difficult to link it to modern animal groups and to find its home in the Tree of Life. In 2014, research from Cambridge partially solved this problem by studying the structure of Hallucigenia’s claws, which helped definitively link it to modern velvet worms.

In the new work, researchers used electron microscopy to examine fossils from the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum and the Smithsonian Institution, definitively sorting Hallucigenia’s front from back, and making some surprising observations.

“Prior to our study there was still some uncertainty as to which end of the animal represented the head, and which the tail,” said Smith. “A large balloon-like orb at one end of the specimen was originally thought to be the head, but we can now demonstrate that this actually wasn’t part of the body at all, but a dark stain representing decay fluids or gut contents that oozed out as the animal was flattened during burial.”

Identifying this end as the tail led Caron to revisit the fossils and dig away the sediment that was covering the head: the animals died as they were buried in a mudslide, and their floppy head often ended up pointing down into the mud. “This let us get the new images of the head,” said Caron. “When we put the fossils in the electron microscope, we were initially hoping that we might find eyes, and were astonished when we also found the teeth smiling back at us!”

The new images show an elongated head with a pair of simple eyes, which sat above a mouth with a ring of teeth. In addition, Hallucigenia’s throat was lined with needle-shaped teeth. The fossils originated in the Burgess Shale of Yoho National Park in western Canada, one of the world’s richest sources of fossils from the Cambrian period.

The ring of teeth that surrounded Hallucigenia’s mouth probably helped to generate suction, flexing in and out, like a valve or a plunger, in order to suck its food into its throat. The researchers speculate that the teeth in the throat worked like a ratchet, keeping food from slipping out of the mouth each time it took another ‘suck’ at its food.

“These teeth resemble those we see in many early moulting animals, suggesting that a tooth-lined throat was present in a common ancestor,” said Caron. “So where previously there was little reason to think that arthropod mouths had much in common with the mouths of animals such as penis worms, Hallucigenia tells us that arthropods and velvet worms did ancestrally have round-the-mouth plates and down-the-throat teeth – they just lost or simplified them later.”

The material for this study was collected between 1992 and 2000 and represents more than 165 additional Hallucigenia specimens – including many rare orientations and well-preserved specimens.

Parks Canada, which holds jurisdiction over the Burgess Shale sites located in Yoho and Kootenay national parks, is thrilled by this discovery and eager to share this exciting new piece of the ever-unfolding Burgess Shale story with their visitors.

The research was funded by Clare College, Cambridge, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Royal Ontario Museum. 

It’s a fact of modern life – with every click, every tweet, every Facebook Like, we hand over information about ourselves to organisations who are desperate to know all of our secrets, in the hope that those secrets can be used to sell us something.

Companies have been collecting every possible scrap of information from their customers since long before the internet age, but with more powerful computers, cheaper storage and ubiquitous online use, the methods organisations use to gather information about people have become ever-more sophisticated. And sometimes those organisations know us better than our own families or friends.

For example, several years ago, data analysis tools used by the US retailer Target had become so precise that they were able to determine, with astonishing accuracy, whether a woman was pregnant and how far along she was, based on her purchase of certain products. And in one particularly embarrassing incident, Target knew that a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did, much to her father’s displeasure.

“What Target learned from that incident is that marketing too accurately can really make people squeamish,” says Professor Jon Crowcroft of the University’s Computer Laboratory. “But if they made their marketing a little less accurate by increasing the amount of privacy they give their customers, they found they can still retain or increase their customer base without making people feel as if they’re being spied on.”

Crowcroft’s research is in the area of ‘privacy by design’ – systems that allow us to live in the digital world and protect our privacy at the same time. As the concept of the Internet of Things – internet-connected washing machines, toasters and televisions – becomes reality, Crowcroft insists that privacy by design is needed to address the massive power imbalance that occurs when our personal data is shared with, and sold by, corporations, governments and other organisations.

But privacy by design doesn’t mean disconnecting from the online world and putting on a tinfoil hat – far from it. “There’s already a lot of data stored about each and every one of us – the things we buy, the food we eat, the health issues we have – and for each of these market segments, there are perfectly legitimate uses for that data,” adds Crowcroft. “Collecting healthcare data is fantastically useful for tracking pandemics, preventative care, more- efficient treatment, public health – those are all perfectly reasonable and positive uses for big data. At the same time, most sites gather information in order to target ads more accurately, and most people are actually okay with that. So the question then becomes, what is privacy by design?”

“What we’re trying to do is develop processing frameworks that would allow this data to be useful and to be used, without the somewhat creepy feeling that you’re constantly being watched,” says Crowcroft’s colleague Dr Richard Mortier.

The type of system that Crowcroft and Mortier envision is one in which the user has the scope to allow access to their data on a case-by-case basis, rather than it be harvested whether they like it or not: computations are performed where the data is gathered, and the results are pushed back to the organisation that wants the data.

“We can change the big data problem completely by moving where the data is processed,” explains Mortier. “Rather than having systems where all of the data is gathered in some huge central location and processed, if you reconstruct the system so that the data is processed in the same place it’s gathered, individuals would be able to take some of the control of their information back from corporations and surveillance organisations. Instead of one huge central processing node, we want to see billions of smaller nodes, which would make information quicker to access, and could potentially be stored
at lower overall cost.”

Crowcroft and Mortier have designed and partially built systems where a person’s data stays local to them, and they can have the option to decide what is shared and with whom. For example, a patient can share their healthcare data with their GP, but the GP would have to get authorisation from the patient before sharing that data with a pharmaceutical company.

“People realise they’re being marketed to, but I don’t think they realise the scale of it – it really is a hidden menace,” says Crowcroft. “The point is that we could build systems that could stop that completely, and re-enable it on the basis of a level playing field. We want to see systems where people have agency over their data, giving them the ability to allow or prevent certain types of access.”

Contrary to what some people may assume about the nature of digital life, adds Crowcroft, the vast majority of people highly value their own privacy. He points to the launch and then recall of Google Glass, a wearable computer worn like eyeglasses. “People started wearing these things into restaurants and other diners wouldn’t put up with it, because they didn’t want to be recorded while eating their lunch – it really creeped people out,” he says.

“And that’s in a public space: imagine the same sort of thing happening in a private space. It’s about the asymmetry and the idea that this is being done to you and you have no comeback. The problem with digital infrastructures is you don’t see them, and to a certain extent companies depend on people not understanding them – we can build systems where there are mechanisms through which they can be understood.”

Crowcroft and Mortier recognise that they’ll never convince everyone to ditch cloud computing and switch to a decentralised system. But that isn’t their goal. “It takes a while to show that new ways of doing things can really work,” says Crowcroft. “If these sorts of systems become a reasonably widely used alternative, it will go a long way towards keeping companies and cloud storage providers honest. The very small number of providers leads to the exploitation of the network effect, where they have a strong monopolistic position over a certain type of data. And monopolies are not good for economies. If a decentralised system is more ethical, enough people using it may incentivise the big providers to be more ethical too.”

Inset image: Professor Jon Crowcroft and Dr Richard Mortier (University of Cambridge).

Around 16,000 people in the UK are estimated to be affected by frontotemporal dementia (also known as Pick’s disease). Patients are often affected at a young age, 50-65 years old. The disease affects the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, at the front with both shrinkage and loss of important brain chemicals like serotonin. As a result, symptoms of frontotemporal dementia include changes in personality and behaviour, and difficulties with language.

One of the key symptoms is disinhibition – impulsivity and impetuous behaviour. This is partly a result of a deficiency in serotonin, an important chemical within the brain which is responsible for maintaining normal behaviour as well as mood.

A team led by Dr James Rowe from the University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge looked at whether citalopram, a commonly-prescribed antidepressant, might restore the brain function – and potentially alleviate the symptoms of disinhibition. Citalopram is known to restore levels of serotonin, even in patients who do not have depression; this increase in serotonin helps the brain activity needed make decisions about what to do, and what not to do.

The researchers examined the brain activity associated with disinhibition in patients and healthy volunteers. The patients received either a dose of citalopram or a placebo, in a double-blinded placebo-controlled trial. Participants took part in a ‘Go-NoGo’ task whilst their brain activity was monitored using a combination of magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG). In the task, the volunteers needed to intermittently hold back from a habitual action, choosing to press or not to press buttons.

As expected, patients with frontotemporal dementia made many errors on the task, with difficulty holding back from actions. The performance on the task was closely related to their everyday impulsive and disinhibited behaviours.  Compared to the placebo, citalopram boosted activity in the dementia patients in their right inferior frontal gyrus, a critical region of the brain for controlling our behaviour, even though this part of the brain was shrunken by the disease.

Dr Laura Hughes from the University of Cambridge and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, first author on the study, says: “This is a very promising result, which builds on a lot of basic laboratory science here in Cambridge. It suggests that it may be possible to treat patients safely and effectively for high risk and challenging impulsive behaviours, although more work is needed to identify those who are most likely to benefit from this type of drug.”

The research was primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust with additional support from the Medical Research Council and the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference
Hughes, LE et al. Improving response inhibition systems in frontotemporal dementia with citalopram. Brain; e-pub 22 May 2015

The Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre is a partnership between Cancer Research UK, the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. It recognises the need for sustainable cancer research in the long term, and will be further investing in training programmes for up and coming scientists.

Funding for the Major Centre includes expanding the clinical facilities and infrastructure necessary to strengthen collaborative research and expand tissue biopsy collection. The Centre will also invest in technology including diagnostics, blood processing, informatics and imaging.

The chances of survival for patients increase significantly if cancer is caught at an early stage and this a priority for the Centre, which will build upon its early detection programmes. Becoming a Major Centre will help fund research nurses, data managers, tissue processing, build patient groups and related sample collections essential for life saving research.

Professor Richard Gilbertson, Li Ka Shing Chair of Oncology in Cambridge and Director of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre, said: “The designation of the Cambridge Cancer Centre as a Cancer Research UK Major Centre is a tremendous honour and exciting opportunity. This award represents a critical investment in the research infrastructure at Cambridge, equipping us with the key laboratory and clinical research tools needed to advance the understanding and treatment of cancer.”

The Centre will act as a vital research hub for the Cancer Research UK centre network, drawing together expertise, encouraging collaborative research, and bridging the gap between innovative laboratory work and benefits for patients.

Dr Iain Foulkes, executive director for research funding at Cancer Research UK, said: “The development of these Major Centres will accelerate national and international collaborations and improve treatments for patients. In each location we are developing cutting-edge approaches in how we treat the disease, be that the detection of individual tumour cells in the blood that allow us to monitor the disease or precision radiotherapy. With these Centres the UK goes from strength to strength in supporting the best cancer research in the world.”

Adapted from a press release from Cancer Research UK.

A PhD student in cell biology at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, Guy Pearson draws a link between the pursuit of Fancy Day in Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree and the pursuit of scientific discovery.

Here he talks about this favourite book as part of ‘Novel Thoughts’, a series exploring the literary reading habits of eight Cambridge scientists. From illustrated children’s books to Thomas Hardy, from Star Wars to Middlemarch, we find out what fiction has meant to each of the scientists and peek inside the covers of the books that have played a major role in their lives.

‘Novel Thoughts’ was inspired by research at the University of St Andrews by Dr Sarah Dillon (now a lecturer in the Faculty of English at Cambridge) who interviewed 20 scientists for the ‘What Scientists Read’ project. She found that reading fiction can help scientists to see the bigger picture and be reminded of the complex richness of human experience. Novels can show the real stories behind the science, or trigger a desire in a young reader to change lives through scientific discovery. They can open up new worlds, or encourage a different approach to familiar tasks.

View the whole series: Novel Thoughts: What Cambridge scientists read.

Read about Novel Thoughts.

Is there a novel that has inspired you? Let us know! #novelthoughts

The educational charity recruits and trains PhD students and postdoctoral researchers to help students from underrepresented groups to develop the knowledge, skills and ambition they need to secure places at highly selective universities.

A third of places on The Brilliant Club’s Scholars Programme is reserved for pupils who have been eligible for Free School Meals in the last six years.
 
The six-week programme begins with a visit to a highly selective university, at which pupils meet current undergraduates, tour the facilities, hear from representatives of the university, and enjoy their first tutorial with their tutor, a PhD researcher.

Dr Mary Henes, The Brilliant Club’s Regional Director for London, says “Our tutorials aim to get our pupils as close as possible to a university experience - studying with a researcher, in small groups, at a highly selective university - at the very start of the programme. After this, the PhD tutors will visit the school to deliver tutorials.”

Over four days in June, six Cambridge colleges – Corpus Christi, Jesus, Newnham, St John’s, Emmanuel and Fitzwilliam– welcomed over 100 students (aged 11-17) from 16 non-selective state schools. Each college provided a uniquely inspiring learning environment - between them, they have nurtured over a dozen Nobel Prize winners and countless other influential academics, writers, scientists, politicians and actors.

Schools Liaison Officers for each college joined representatives from The Brilliant Club to give informative and confidence-building talks tailored to different year groups.

At Corpus Christi college, Year 7 and 8 students from Cromer Academy were encouraged to aim high, work hard and seize every opportunity to pursue their interests. A few days later, at Emmanuel College, Year 12s from schools in Suffolk, Essex and East London were advised to think hard about the courses they were applying for and to read around their subjects.

Katie Ruthven, Schools Liaison Officer at Newnham College, said

“Working with The Brilliant Club is one strand of the college’s many outreach activities which address the fact that there are bright students who may not realise that they have what it takes to apply to top universities. It's the best feeling when a student leaves here open to the possibility that Cambridge could be for them.”
 
In September, Cambridge colleges will host a series of Brilliant Club graduation ceremonies to congratulate students on completing the programme and submitting a 1,000-2,500 word assignment or ‘problem sheet’ based on the work done in their tutorials.

The Brilliant Club was set up in 2011 to widen access to highly selective universities for underrepresented groups by mobilising researchers to bring academic expertise into state schools. The Brilliant Club currently works with over 6,500 pupils per year nationwide.

The collegiate University is committed to widening participation both at Cambridge itself and in higher education more generally. In 2013-14, the collegiate University delivered 4,000 access events which led to almost 200,000 interactions with young people and their teachers.

The University’s widening participation programme includes college and departmental open days, one of the UK’s largest residential summer schools, subject masterclasses, Higher Education Taster Days, a programme for young people in care and school visits. The University is committed to the principle that no UK student should be deterred from applying to Cambridge for financial reasons, and to this end has one of the most substantial bursary schemes in the UK. For more information, visit http://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk

The eminent economist, Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, will support Pope Francis’ call for action on poverty and the environment at a conference in Cambridge today (Monday, 29 June), arguing that natural resources must be dealt with from a moral perspective and not as “just another commodity”.

Professor Dasgupta was one of the co-authors of an appeal issued to religious leaders last year following a meeting with the Pope, in which scientists asked for help in mobilising public opinion to stop the unsustainable destruction of the world’s ecosystems.

Speaking on Monday, at a conference examining the Catholic Church’s new style of engagement under Pope Francis, Professor Dasgupta will praise the “sound economics and correct science” of the Pope’s new encyclical on the environment, released earlier this month. In it, the Pontiff warned of serious consequences if the world fails to act on climate change, and called for moral action on the environment and global poverty.

Echoing these views, Professor Dasgupta will say that humanity needs to adjust its relationship with the planet’s natural capital, arguing that it cannot be treated as a normal economic commodity. He will also suggest that ecology should be a fundamental part of children’s education from an early age in order to facilitate a shift in attitudes towards the natural world.

The conference, at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, where Professor Dasgupta is a Fellow, is being attended by an international group of theologians, social scientists, and academics specialising in the Church – among them the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams.

Speaking in advance of his plenary lecture about the encyclical, Professor Dasgupta said: “I understand where the Pope is coming from because to view the damage that we are doing to the planet as purely an economic issue about how we use these commodities is a limiting vision. Our attitude to natural capital needs to be different, just as many of us would not treat human capital as purely an economic issue either.”

“Natural capital has features that most commodities around which we build economic modelling – such as infrastructure, or the products of industrial activity – do not. Because it includes entities like seeds, insects, birds and water, natural capital has a tendency to move. The wind blows, water flows, birds and insects fly, even earthworms are known to move. It’s impossible to monitor what people do to entities for which mobility is an essential feature. The use of a resource that doesn’t move on its own account can be monitored, implying that it can in principle be protected. Preserving resources is hard if they have a natural tendency to move. We all become ‘free riders’ on their use.”

“The question that then arises is how to handle natural capital in a way that is consistent with the common good? The answer requires an approach in which we are minded to act with care for Nature and natural resources, even when nobody is watching. In this sense I think Pope Francis’ approach is right.”

Professor Dasgupta, who was knighted in 2002 for his services to economics, is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society, and a Member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Last week he was awarded the Blue Planet Prize – an international award that recognises scientific work that helps to address global environmental problems.

He is credited with having unified ideas of intergenerational equity and sustainable development in economic thought, and with having shown that poverty and the erosion of natural resources – or natural capital – are closely linked; a point echoed in the recent encyclical. His research has also challenged the notion that Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is an indication of a country’s economic activity, should also be used as an indication of its overall wealth, arguing that this fails to take into account the destruction of natural capital that may impoverish populations, or future generations, even as GDP rises.

Last year, Professor Dasgupta co-authored an article in the academic journal Science with the climate and atmospheric scientist, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, in which the two academics appealed to the Pope and other religious leaders to aid the mobilisation of public opinion to resolve the connected problems of unsustainable consumption, population pressure, poverty, and environmental degradation.

Their article, which followed a meeting with Pope Francis himself, said that religious leaders were capable of instigating “massive collective action” on environmental issues in a way that governments and scientists cannot. Several other leading scientists and commentators leant their support to the appeal, which, in bridging the long-standing divide between religion and science, was described by one as “a watershed moment”.

The Pope’s new encyclical reflects many of the points that the two scientists have raised, in particular by drawing attention to the ecological debt that developed countries owe the developing world by depleting their natural capital. It also stresses that the impact of climate change is one felt disproportionately by the world’s poorest people.

Professor Dasgupta will, however, suggest that one issue missing from the encyclical is the role that education must, in his view, play in correcting societal attitudes to the natural world. “Basic education was once founded on ideas about reading, writing and arithmetic; a modern education should treat ecology as one of its fundamental components,” he said. “Most children’s immediate experience of the world is now in an urban setting and we should be making it clear, from the word go, that we have a responsibility to maintain natural capital.”

The conference, “Making all things new?”, is taking place at St John’s College from Monday, 29 June until Wednesday, 1 July. It examines what organisers have described as “striking” changes in the tone of the Catholic Church since Pope Francis was elected. These are exemplified by his previous encyclical Evangelii Gaudium, issued in 2013, which contained condemnations of aspects of the institutional life of the Catholic Church and a strong commitment to serving the poor.

In the context of this, and the more recent statement on poverty and the environment, the conference will aim to gauge how far this represents a significant change in the tone, style and behaviour under Pope Francis’ leadership, and whether it may represent a force for renewal in the Catholic Church as a whole.

Inside a jet engine is one of the most extreme environments known to engineering.

In less than a second, a tonne of air is sucked into the engine, squeezed to a fraction of its normal volume and then passed across hundreds of blades rotating at speeds of up to 10,000 rpm; reaching the combustor, the air is mixed with kerosene and ignited; the resulting gases are about a third as hot as the sun’s surface and hurtle at speeds of almost 1,500 km per hour towards a wall of turbines, where each blade generates power equivalent to the thrust of a Formula One racing car.

Turbine blades made from ‘super’ materials with outstanding properties are needed to withstand these unimaginably challenging conditions – where the temperatures soar to above the melting point of the turbine components and the centrifugal forces are equivalent to hanging a double-decker bus from each blade.

Even with these qualities, the blades require a ceramic layer and an air cooling system to prevent them from melting when the engine reaches its top temperatures. But with ever-increasing demands for greater performance and reduced emissions, the aerospace industry needs engines to run even hotter and faster, and this means expecting more and more from the materials they are made from.

This, says Dr Cathie Rae, is the materials grand challenge. “Turbine blades are made using nickel-based superalloys, which are capable of withstanding the phenomenal stresses and temperatures they need to operate under within the jet engine. But we are running close to their critical limits.”

An alloy is a mixture of metals, such as you might find in steel or brass. A superalloy, however, is a mixture that imparts superior mechanical strength and resistance to heat-induced deformation and corrosion.

Rae is one of a team of scientists in the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre (UTC) at the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. The team’s research efforts are focused on extracting the greatest possible performance from nickel-based superalloys, and on designing superalloys of the future.

Current jet engines predominantly use alloys containing nickel and aluminium, which form a strong cuboidal lattice. Within and around this brick-like structure are up to eight other components that form a ‘mortar’. Together, the components give the material its superior qualities.

“Even tiny adjustments in the amount of each component can have a huge effect on the microscopic structure, and this can cause radical changes in the superalloy’s properties,” explains Dr Howard Stone. “It’s rather like adjusting the ingredients in a cake – increasing one ingredient might produce one sought-after property, but at the sake of another. We need to find the perfect chemical recipe.”

Stone is the Principal Investigator overseeing a £50 million Strategic Partnership on structural metallic systems for advanced gas turbine applications funded jointly by Rolls-Royce and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and involving the Universities of Birmingham, Swansea, Manchester, Oxford and Sheffield, and Imperial College London.

The researchers melt together precise amounts of each of the different elements to obtain a 5cm bar, then exhaustively test the bar’s mechanical properties and analyse its microscopic structure. Their past experience in atomic engineering is vital for homing in on where the incremental improvements might be found – without this, they would need to make many millions of bars to test each reasonable mixture of components.

Now, they are looking beyond the usual components to exotic elements, although always with an eye on keeping costs as low as possible, which means not using extremely rare materials. “The Periodic Table is our playground… we’re picking and mixing elements, guided by our computer models and experimental experience, to find the next generation of superalloys,” he adds.

The team now have 12 patents with Rolls-Royce. One of the most recent has been in collaboration with Imperial College London, and involves the discovery that the extremely strong matrix structure of nickel-based aluminium superalloys can also be achieved using a mixture of nickel, aluminium, cobalt and tungsten.

“Instead of the cake being flavoured with two main ingredients, we can make it with four,” Stone explains. “This gives the structure even better properties, many of which we are only just discovering.”

“We’ve also been looking at new intermetallic reinforced superalloys using chromium, tantalum and silicon – no nickel at all. We haven’t quite got the final balance to achieve what we want, but we’re working towards it.”

Stone highlights the importance of collaboration between industry and academia: “New alloys typically take 10 years and many millions of pounds to develop for operational components. We simply couldn’t do this work without Rolls-Royce. For the best part of two decades we’ve had a collaboration that links fundamental materials research through to industrial application and commercial exploitation.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Dr Justin Burrows, Project Manager at Rolls-Royce: “Our academic partners understand the materials and design challenges we face in the development of gas turbine technology. Improvements like the novel nickel and steel alloys developed in Cambridge are key to helping us meet these challenges and to maintaining our competitive advantage.”

The Cambridge UTC, which was founded by its Director Professor Sir Colin Humphreys in 1994, is one of a global network of over 30 UTCs. These form part of Rolls-Royce’s £1 billion annual investment in research and development, which also includes the Department of Engineering’s University Gas Turbine Partnership. Rolls-Royce and EPSRC also fund Doctoral Training Centres in Cambridge that help to ensure a continuing supply of highly trained scientists and engineers ready to move into industry.

The UK aerospace industry is the largest in Europe, with a turnover in 2011 of £24.2 billion; worldwide, it’s second only to that of the USA. Meanwhile, increasing global air traffic is estimated to require 35,000 new passenger aircraft by 2030, worth about $4.8 trillion.

For the researchers, it’s fascinating to see global engineering challenges being solved from the atom up, as Rae explains: “The commercial success of a new engine can be dependent on very small differences in fuel efficiency, which can only be achieved by innovations in materials and design. There’s something really exciting about working at the atomic scale and seeing this translate into innovation with big powerful machines.”

Inset image: Thermo cycling.

Having decided to become a doctor at the age of 10, Professor Carol Brayne’s love of the novels of Charles Dickens and George Eliot fired up her determination to tackle social inequalities in healthcare. Today she is Director of the Cambridge Institute of Public Health. 

Here she talks about this favourite book as part of ‘Novel Thoughts’, a series exploring the literary reading habits of eight Cambridge scientists. From illustrated children’s books to Thomas Hardy, from Star Wars to Middlemarch, we find out what fiction has meant to each of the scientists and peek inside the covers of the books that have played a major role in their lives.

‘Novel Thoughts’ was inspired by research at the University of St Andrews by Dr Sarah Dillon (now a lecturer in the Faculty of English at Cambridge) who interviewed 20 scientists for the ‘What Scientists Read’ project. She found that reading fiction can help scientists to see the bigger picture and be reminded of the complex richness of human experience. Novels can show the real stories behind the science, or trigger a desire in a young reader to change lives through scientific discovery. They can open up new worlds, or encourage a different approach to familiar tasks.

View the whole series: Novel Thoughts: What Cambridge scientists read.

Read about Novel Thoughts.

Is there a novel that has inspired you? Let us know! #novelthoughts

Inside our bodies are billions of immune cells known as T cells that protect us from infection, fighting off attacks from invading bacteria and viruses, and also from cancer. One teaspoon full of blood alone is believed to have around 5 million T cells. But these cells can also do harm, mistaking our own cells for invaders and attacking them, leading to autoimmune diseases such as lupus, Crohn’s disease and type 1 diabetes.

Among these T cells are CD8 T cells, the ‘foot soldiers’ that go into battle and kill unwanted invaders. As with any army, in the face of a huge attack they can become ‘exhausted’ – in the case of the immune system, by inhibitory signals – and no longer fight effectively. Whether they become exhausted depends on both the size of the battle (or amount of invading ‘antigen’) and the amount of supporting signals they receive from a second type of cell, known as a CD4 helper T cell. These are the ‘generals’ in the immune system, which coordinate our immune response. Exhaustion can affect the performance of the immune system and allow chronic infections, such as hepatitis C or HIV, to persist.

In research published today in the journal Nature, scientists from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research looked at patterns of genes that were turned on and off in patients with autoimmune diseases and found similarities with those seen in people with chronic infection, such as hepatitis C, and cancer: in other words, they have shown that the same process of T cell ‘exhaustion’ known to be involved in the immune response to chronic infection and cancer is also important in many autoimmune diseases.

However, the researchers found a key difference: an exhausted immune response toward infection results in worse outcome – the infection persists; for autoinflammatory diseases, the opposite is true – an exhausted immune response results in a milder course of the disease, with fewer relapses.

Dr Eoin McKinney, a Wellcome Trust-Beit Research Fellow from the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, first author of the study, explains: “We know that the way our bodies respond to infection and to autoimmune diseases differs between individuals. In part, we believe this is due to a process known as T cell exhaustion. For effective treatment, we need to exhaust our T cell responses in autoimmune diseases – and hence limit the attack on our body – and to reverse exhaustion when the fight is against unwanted invaders, such as viruses or cancer.”

During chronic infection, blocking the inhibitory signals can restore CD8 cells to begin fighting again and clear chronic infection. The researchers were able to show in vitro that, by enhancing the same inhibitory signals, CD8 cells could be made exhausted, which should limit damage to the body that characterises autoimmune disease.

The team believe their discovery could help doctors better target medicines at patients with autoimmune disease. At the moment, when a patient presents with such a disease for the first time, doctors have no way of predicting what their long-term future holds. Patients whose T cells exhibit signs of exhaustion early in the course of disease have a better long-term outcome, and thus might require less treatment. Conversely those with ‘non-exhausted’ T cells at diagnosis do badly in the long term, and may benefit from more intensive or novel therapy. The team at the Department of Medicine has commenced a trial, supported by the Wellcome Trust, that applies this approach to patients with inflammatory bowel disease to see whether it can guide their treatment and improve their clinical outcome.

Professor Ken Smith, lead author of the study and Head of the Department of Medicine, says: “We believe the clinical implications of this study could be profound. A test based on the concept is soon to enter the clinic, and we are exploring new treatments for autoimmunity based on manipulating T cell exhaustion. A focus on T cell exhaustion in cancer has led to a revolution in treatment and a multi-billion dollar industry. We now implicate the same pathways in determining long term patient outcome in autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, which afflict up to one in ten of the population over the course of their lives.”

The research was supported by the National Institute of Health Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre and funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Lupus Research Institute.

Reference
McKinney, EF et al. T-cell exhaustion, co-stimulation and clinical outcome in autoimmunity and infection. Nature; 29 June 1015

A new species of ‘super-armoured’ worm, a bizarre, spike-covered creature which ate by filtering nutrients out of seawater with its feather-like front legs, has been identified by palaeontologists. The creature, which lived about half a billion years ago, was one of the first animals on Earth to develop armour to protect itself from predators and to use such a specialised mode of feeding.

The creature, belonging to a poorly understood group of early animals, is also a prime example of the broad variety of form and function seen in the early evolutionary history of a modern group of animals that, today, are rather homogenous. The results, from researchers at the University of Cambridge and Yunnan University in China, are published today (29 June) in the journal PNAS.

The creature has been named Collinsium ciliosum, or Hairy Collins’ Monster, named for the palaeontologist Desmond Collins, who discovered and first illustrated a similar Canadian fossil in the 1980s. The newly-identified species lived in what is now China during the Cambrian explosion, a period of rapid evolutionary development around half a billion years ago, when most major animal groups first appear in the fossil record.

A detailed analysis of its form and evolutionary relationships indicates that the Chinese Collins’ Monster is a distant early ancestor of modern velvet worms, or onychophorans, a small group of squishy animals resembling legged worms that live primarily in tropical forests around the world.

“Modern velvet worms are all pretty similar in terms of their general body organisation and not that exciting in terms of their lifestyle,” said Dr Javier Ortega-Hernández of Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, one of the paper’s lead authors. “But during the Cambrian, the distant relatives of velvet worms were stunningly diverse and came in a surprising variety of bizarre shapes and sizes.”

The pattern of diverse ancestors leading to relatively unvaried modern relatives has been observed in other groups in the fossil record, including sea lilies (crinoids) and lamp shells (brachiopods). However, this is the first time that this evolutionary pattern has been observed in a mostly soft-bodied group.

Ortega-Hernández and his colleagues identified a remarkably well-preserved fossil from southern China, which included details of the full body organisation, the digestive tract, even down to a delicate coat of hair-like structures on the front end. Their analysis found it to be a new species – an eccentric ancestor of an otherwise straight-laced group.

The Chinese Collins’ Monster had a soft and squishy body, six pairs of feather-like front legs, and nine pairs of rear legs ending in claws. Since the clawed rear legs were not well-suited for walking along the muddy ocean floor, it is likely that Collinsium eked out an existence by clinging onto sponges or other hard substances by its back claws, while sieving out its food with its feathery front legs. Some modern animals, including bamboo shrimp, feed in a similar way, capturing passing nutrients with their fan-like forearms.

Given its sedentary lifestyle and soft body, the Chinese Collins’ Monster would have been a sitting duck for any predators, so it developed an impressive defence mechanism: as many as 72 sharp and pointy spikes of various sizes covering its body, making it one of the earliest soft-bodied animals to develop armour for protection.

The Chinese Collins’ Monster resembles Hallucigenia, another otherworldly Cambrian fossil, albeit one which has been the subject of much more study.

“Both creatures are lobopodians, or legged worms, but the Collins’ Monster sort of looks like Hallucigenia on steroids,” said Ortega-Hernández. “It had much heavier armour protecting its body, with up to five pointy spines per pair of legs, as opposed to Hallucigenia’s two. Unlike Hallucigenia, the limbs at the front of Collins’ Monster’s body were also covered with fine brushes or bristles that were used for a specialised type of feeding from the water column.”

The spines along Collinsium’s back had a cone-in-cone construction, similar to Russian nesting dolls. This same construction has also been observed in the closely-related Hallucigenia and the claws in the legs of velvet worms, making both Collinsium and Hallucigenia distant ancestors of modern onychophorans. According to Ortega-Hernández, “There are at least four more species with close family ties to the Collins’ Monster, which collectively form a group known as Luolishaniidae. Fossils of these creatures are hard to come by and mostly fragmentary, so the discovery of Collinsium greatly improves our understanding of these bizarre organisms.”

The fossil was found in the Xiaoshiba deposit in southern China, a site which is less-explored than the larger Chengjiang deposit nearby, but has turned up fascinating and well-preserved specimens from this key period in Earth’s history.

“Animals during the Cambrian were incredibly diverse, with lots of interesting behaviours and modes of living,” said Ortega-Hernández. “The Chinese Collins’ Monster was one of these evolutionary ‘experiments’ – one which ultimately failed as they have no living direct ancestors – but it’s amazing to see how specialised many animals were hundreds of millions of years ago. At its core, the study of the fossil record seeks answers about the evolution of life on Earth that can only be found in deep time. All the major biological events responsible for shaping the world we inhabit, such as the origin of life, the early diversification of animals, or the establishment of the modern biosphere, are intimately linked to the complex geological history of our planet.”

The research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the Templeton World Charity Foundation. 

The ever-increasing demand for air travel while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions constitutes a huge engineering challenge. Greater efficiency requires engines to run hotter and faster, but today’s best materials are already running close to their limits.

The metals inside a jet engine must operate in a gas stream about a third as hot as the sun’s surface while enduring centrifugal forces equivalent to hanging a double-decker bus from each turbine blade.

At the University of Cambridge, researchers are designing new alloys that are able to withstand even more extreme conditions of stress and temperature, as Dr Cathie Rae at the Cambridge Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre (UTC) explains: “In jet engines, we currently use special metals called superalloys that are created by mixing together nickel with other elements.

“They are called superalloys because they exhibit exceptional high-temperature mechanical properties and resistance to corrosion. In fact, they actually get stronger as we heat them up. We’re trying to make materials that are even better than these superalloys!”

Visitors to the Engineering Atoms exhibit at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition from 30 June until 5 July will be able to see how the atomic structure of materials affects their properties, and will be able to handle real jet engine components.

In the Rolls-Royce UTC, scientists work in close collaboration with one of the world’s leading engine manufacturers, Rolls-Royce plc, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to design and make new high-temperature materials. To achieve this, they need to understand everything from the shape and design of the component right down to the behaviour of individual atoms in the metal. By engineering the arrangement of the atoms, varying their type, position and size, researchers can radically change how these metals perform.

This involves the use of powerful microscopes that use electrons instead of optical light to examine materials on the atomic scale. By using these electron microscopes, researchers can look at individual rows of atoms and identify their composition. The Engineering Atoms stand will have a working scanning electron microscope, the Phenom ProX, so visitors will be able to look at alloys on the micrometre scale.

Engineering Atoms will also be exhibiting amazing materials that ‘remember’ their original shape after they’ve been deformed. These ‘shape-memory’ alloys, made from titanium and nickel, can be used to control and optimise airflow in jet engines where conventional hydraulic or electrical control systems would be difficult to operate.

The Summer Science Exhibition will be open to the public from 30 June to 5 July 2015.  

The programmes reflect the long term commitment of AstraZeneca to the science base in the UK and the shared dedication of the company and the University of Cambridge to developing the next generation of world-class scientists.

The schemes are as follows:

• AstraZeneca will fund a minimum of nine scholarships annually, divided across the departments of chemistry, biochemistry and pharmacology, with each running for a four-year period. AstraZeneca will also have the possibility of enrolling up to two of its employees annually as PhD students in one or more of the departments.
• MedImmune, AstraZeneca’s global biologics research and development arm, together with the School of Clinical Medicine and the School of the Biological Sciences at the University of Cambridge have established a collaborative PhD programme  which will  focus on both clinical and translational research, supporting up to six scholarships annually, with students spending equal amounts of time at the University and MedImmune’s laboratories in Cambridge.
• AstraZeneca and MedImmune will fund one PhD scholarship and two academic clinical lectureships annually for four years under the University’s new Experimental Medicine Initiative. Each post will run for up to four years with the opportunity for placements within AstraZeneca or MedImmune.

All three schemes will start in the autumn. Students will be appointed by the University of Cambridge and will be supported by an academic supervisor from the University and an industrial supervisor from AstraZeneca or MedImmune to ensure that basic scientific research is closely aligned with real-world challenges of drug discovery and development. Joint Steering Committees comprising senior representatives from the University, AstraZeneca and MedImmune will oversee the schemes.

Mene Pangalos, Executive Vice President, Innovative Medicines and Early Development at AstraZeneca, said: “For the UK to remain at the cutting edge of life science, it’s essential that we continue to invest in developing the next generation of scientists who can combine outstanding basic research with an understanding of its translation into new medicines for patients. These new scholarships are a great way to train young translational scientists and reinforce the shared commitment of AstraZeneca and the University of Cambridge to create an open, collaborative research environment where investigators can work side by side to push the boundaries of science.”

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Cambridge, said:  “The new PhD schemes further strengthen the partnership between AstraZeneca and the University, supporting the development of a cadre of Cambridge scientists who can continue to compete with the very best in the world. Under the new schemes, Cambridge students will have a unique opportunity to develop their scientific knowledge across academia and industry.”

Adapted from a press release from AstraZeneca

The second set of UK universities to be externally evaluated for the HR Excellence in Research Award have retained the HR Excellence in Research Award from the European Commission.

This brings the total to 21 institutions in the UK to have undertaken and retained the Award at this four year stage.

The Award demonstrates a university's commitment to improving the working conditions and career development for research staff, which will in turn improve the quantity, quality and impact of research for the benefit of UK society and the economy.”

Speaking from Brussels, Fabienne Gautier, Head of Unit, ERA Policy and Reform in DG Research and Innovation, European Commission said: “Creating an open and supportive environment for researchers is a critical contribution to achieving the European Research Area and ensuring our future prosperity and growth through research and innovation.”

A total of 226 European organisations now hold the Award which also commits them to a programme of internal and external evaluation.

The external review requires institutions to highlight key achievements and progress they have made since they gained the Award four years ago and to outline the focus of their strategy, success measures and next steps for the next four years.

Vitae, which led the evaluation process, is an international programme led and managed by CRAC, a not-for-profit registered UK charity dedicated to active career learning and development.