̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - social impact

Vice-Chancellor’s awards showcase impact and engagement during the pandemic

ta385 — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 12:38:48 +0000

Now in their fifth year, the awards were made in five categories: collaboration, early career, established academic, professional service, online and remote.

̽��ֱ��winners of the collaboration category are Dr Michael Weekes from Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, and Dr Steven Baker from Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease. They collaborated to establish a comprehensive rapid turn-around COVID-19 testing platform for Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Hospitals healthcare workers, ̽��ֱ�� staff and students.

̽��ֱ��newly-established ‘online and remote engagement’ award goes to Dr Michael Ramage and team from the Department of Architecture for their HappyShield project. This involved developing, testing, and disseminating a novel open-source medical face shield to help tackle severe PPE shortages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, focussing in particular on production in Low and Middle Income Countries.

̽��ֱ��winner of the early career researcher award is Chioma Achi from the Department of Veterinary Medicine. Achi organised an engagement programme across Nigeria to strengthen the participation of poultry farmers in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.

̽��ֱ��winner of the established researcher award is Dr Duncan Astle from the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. Working in partnership with children’s charities, local education authorities, academy chains and local schools, Astle led an engagement programme providing teachers with robust evidence to help young people overcome cognitive and behavioural barriers to learning.

̽��ֱ��winner of the professional services award is Dr Rosalyn Wade from the Museum of Zoology. Wade reimagined the Museum’s learning and public programme following COVID-19 lockdown and the venue’s temporary closure. She designed and released a new blog and developed an innovative online festival (Zoology Live!).

̽��ֱ��awards were announced on 5th October by the ̽��ֱ��’s Public Engagement team on Twitter.

Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, says:

“ ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ��’s mission is to contribute to society. One of the ways we do it is by undertaking research with real social, cultural and economic impact.

“These awards celebrate research that best demonstrates social, cultural and economic impact through engagement. From advances in healthcare and industrial processes, to rapid responses to the global pandemic; from cultural activities that recognise diversity in our societies, to new knowledge that improves teaching and increases social mobility. This year’s panel of judges was inspired and uplifted by the quality of applications.”

̽��ֱ��Vice-Chancellor’s Research Impact and Engagement Awards were established to recognise and reward outstanding achievement, innovation and creativity in devising and implementing ambitious engagement and impact plans that have the potential to create significant economic, social and cultural impact from and engagement with and for research. Each winner is offered a bursary to support their project.

This year’s winners and runners up are:

Established Academic Award

Winner: Dr Duncan Astle (MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, School of Clinical Medicine) – Breaking barriers to learning in the classroom

Runners up: Dr Joseph Webster (Faculty of Divinity, School of Arts and Humanities) – Sectarianism in Scotland and the repeal of the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act

Professor Peter Hutchinson (with Professor David Menon) (Clinical Neurosciences / Medicine, School of Clinical Medicine) – Reshaping the treatment of traumatic brain injury

Early Career Researcher Award

Winner: Chioma Achi (Department of Veterinary Medicine, School of Biological Sciences) – Strengthening participation of poultry farmers in the fight against antimicrobial resistance

Runners up: Emma Soneson (Department of Psychiatry, School of Clinical Medicine) – Public health approaches to identifying and responding to mental health difficulties in children and young people

Dr Naures Atto (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies/Middle Eastern Studies, School of Arts and Humanities) – Endangered Middle Eastern Cultures and their Vulnerability in Migration Contexts

Dr Nicki Kindersley (Faculty of History, School of Humanities and Social Sciences) – Militarised political economies in South Sudan

Professional Services Award

Winner: Dr Rosalyn Wade (Museum of Zoology, School of Biological Sciences) – Learning and Public Programme of the Museum of Zoology: blending contemporary zoological research with active and online learning experiences for public audiences

Collaboration Award

Winner: Dr Michael Weekes and Dr Steven Baker (Cambridge Institute for Medical Research / Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease, School of Clinical Medicine) – A comprehensive COVID-19 screening programme for Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Hospitals healthcare workers, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� staff and students

Runners up: Dr Victoria Avery, Dr Melissa Calaresu and Dr Miranda Stearn (Fitzwilliam Museum / Faculty of History / Fitzwilliam Museum) – Feast & Fast: ̽��ֱ��Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800 Research Project

Online and Remote Engagement Award

Winner: Dr Michael Ramage and team (Department of Architecture, School of Arts and Humanities) – ̽��ֱ��HappyShield

Runners up: Centre for Geopolitics (Department of Politics and International Studies, School of Humanities and Social Sciences) – Centre for Geopolitics Coronavirus Response

Academics, students and professional members of staff from across the ̽��ֱ�� have been recognised in this year’s Vice-Chancellor’s Research Impact and Engagement Awards for their work in areas including COVID-19 testing, PPE production and online engagement.

These awards celebrate research that best demonstrates social, cultural and economic impact through engagement

Stephen Toope

Happyshield

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Vice-Chancellor’s awards showcase Cambridge researchers' public engagement and societal impact

Anonymous — Mon, 09 Jul 2018 15:26:38 +0000

Hundreds of post-war peace settlements were trawled through by a team at Cambridge’s Lauterpacht Centre for International Law to build this innovative research tool. Outputs from the work have been used to assist mediators engaged with some of the world's most violent and tragic conflicts.

̽��ֱ��announcement was made at a prize ceremony held at the Old Schools on 9 July, during which a number of other awards were also presented to Cambridge researchers for projects that have made significant contributions to society – including work on prisons, pandemics, and pollution.

Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, says: “This award scheme, now in its third year, received nearly a hundred nominations from all areas of research within the ̽��ֱ��, which were of an extremely high calibre across the board.”

“Impact is at the heart of the ̽��ֱ��’s mission. Engaging the public is crucial to helping our ̽��ֱ�� deliver on its mission, and to be a good citizen in our city and community. Institutions such as ours have a vital role to play in restoring trust and faith in expertise and ways of knowing.”

Vice-Chancellor’s Impact Awards

̽��ֱ��Vice-Chancellor’s Impact Awards were established to recognise and reward those whose research has led to excellent impact beyond academia, whether on the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life. Each winner receives a prize of £1,000 and a trophy, with the overall winner – Prof Marc Weller from the Faculty of Law – receiving £2,000.

This year’s winners are:

Overall winner: Marc Weller (Faculty of Law)

Making and sustaining international peace

Drawing on a ten-year research programme addressing self-determination and ethnic conflicts, the Legal Tools of Peace-making project presents, for the first time, the vast practice revealed through peace agreements on an issue-by issue basis, making it instantly accessible to practitioners and academics.

̽��ֱ��project, led by Weller, uses this repository to derive realistic settlement options for use in actual peace-negotiations, and making these available to the United Nations, the African Union, the EU and other mediating agencies. ̽��ֱ��work has had immediate impact on on-going, high-level peace negotiations in the inter-ethnic negotiations in Myanmar, the UN-led negotiations on Syria, discussions on Catalonia, the independence of Kosovo, Sudan and South Sudan, Somalia and several others.

Marko Hyvönen (Department of Biochemistry)

Production of growth factors for stem cell research

‘Growth factors’ are proteins that regulate many aspects of cellular function – including proliferation. These complex proteins are essential for stem cell research, to differentiate stem cells into the specific cell types found in our bodies.

Hyvönen and colleagues have used their expertise as structural biologists to develop methods to efficiently produce growth factors in extremely high quality: reducing cost to the stem cell community locally, and facilitating world-class research. They have spun out a company to supply these proteins for researchers around the globe and secured an Innovate UK grant for the company.

Ryan Williams (Centre of Islamic Studies)

Re-imagining Citizenship

Williams’ research on Islam and society works on the borderlines of religious studies and criminology, challenging practitioners and policy-makers to think holistically about social inclusion and the role of religion in contemporary society.

His research has been incorporated into: guidelines on countering prison radicalisation, adopted by the European Commission in 2017; the evidence base for the Lammy Review on equality and implementing its recommendations; a course on the Good Life Good Society, adopted in 2016 in a high security prison. Read Ryan's This Cambridge Life here.

Florin Udrea (Department of Engineering)

Cambridge CMOS Sensors

Sensors that sniff the air can warn us of pollution in city streets, offices and homes. Breathe on these sensors and they can check our health. But they are normally big, heavy and drain batteries quickly.

Florin Udrea and his team set out to create environmental micro-sensors that are ultra-efficient and small enough for smart phones, watches and air purifiers in smart homes. Their spin-off, Cambridge CMOS Sensors, was acquired by AMS in 2016, which is now shipping products.

Julia Gog (Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics)

Harnessing mathematics to help control influenza

Predicting the evolution of the seasonal human influenza virus to better inform vaccination selection is critical to controlling the spread of influenza each year. Moreover, a rarer global outbreak pandemic would have severe consequences on loss of life and the economy, and is viewed by the UK government as a major threat to the UK due to both its high likelihood and severity of outcome.

Julia Gog worked with data gathered through the BBC’s Pandemic project to produce mathematical modelling that helps predict how UK populations move and interact, and consequently how and where a virus would spread.

Tim Cox (Department of Medicine)

Innovative Treatments for Lysosomal diseases

Niemann-Pick C, Tay-Sachs, Sandhoff and Gaucher diseases are genetic lysosomal diseases that affect several organs, including the brain, resulting in painful symptoms, neurological complications and early death. Tim Cox is a leading UK clinical investigator for Lysosomal diseases, exploring the rebalancing of excess production of the toxic sphingolipids, which cause these diseases.

His work has developed effective treatments that have been introduced into the clinic, improving patient outcomes. This research has also identified a definitive correction of the cruel children’s condition, Tay-Sachs disease, through gene transfer. After successful preclinical work, a ̽��ֱ�� spin-out, Cambridge Gene Therapy, is accelerating the clinical programme for this disease.

Vice-Chancellor’s Public Engagement with Research Awards

̽��ֱ��Vice-Chancellor’s Public Engagement with Research Awards were set up to recognise and reward those who undertake quality engagement with research. Each winner receives a £1000 personal prize and a trophy. This year’s winners are:

Sophie Seita (Faculty of English)

Seita produced a collaborative multi-media creative project that combined experimental performances, lecture performances, poetry, publications, and installations; both emerging from and feeding back into research. Presented as star-gazing conversations with a number of Enlightenment writings in English, French, and German, from tragedies, melodramas, philosophical treatises to proto-romantic romances of the period, the work investigates which aspects of the Enlightenment still speak to us today, and was performed at the ̽��ֱ��’s Festival of Ideas.

Anna Spathis and Stephen Barclay (Department of Public Health and Primary Care)

Fatigue, an extreme tiredness that affects the mind as well as the body, is the single most common and distressing symptom experienced by teenagers and young adults with cancer. Spathis and Barclay worked with these young patients to co-design a treatment for fatigue that meets their unique needs. Read Anna and Stephen discuss how public involvement contributed to the research outcomes here.

Charlotte Payne (Department of Zoology)

Working together with farmers and scientists at every stage, Payne developed a participatory research project on the sustainable use of edible caterpillars in southwestern Burkina Faso, and has explained the methods, aims and results to a variety of public audiences of all ages and backgrounds. Read Charlotte discussing edible insects on the BBC here.

Ragnhild Dale (Scott Polar Research Institute)

Dale was a researcher and assistant dirtector on a three-day staging of a mock trial version of the ground-breaking lawsuit where Norwegian environmental organisations Greenpeace and Nature and Youth are suing the Norwegian Government for allegedly allowing unconstitutional oil exploration in the Barents Sea. ̽��ֱ��project inviting expert witnesses from academia, industry and NGOs to testify in our production in Kirkenes, bringing the drama of the trial directly to the people who live and work in the north.

̽��ֱ��first major repository of legal practices for mediators and conflict parties to draw on when negotiating peace has won the top prize in this year’s Vice-Chancellor’s Impact Awards at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Impact is at the heart of the ̽��ֱ��’s mission

Stephen Toope

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Cultural heritage after conflict

bjb42 — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Cultural heritage is frequently damaged or destroyed during periods of war and violence. But this is not always an accidental by-product – in some cases, sites of cultural heritage have been deliberately targeted as a means of inflicting pain and societal trauma. A community’s shared sense of belonging is often rooted in its heritage sites and landscapes, giving such places particular social significance. And the impact on society doesn’t stop with the breaking down, destruction, defaming or neglecting of such sites; it continues post-conflict, through the political and psychological impacts of the decisions made during reconstruction.

̽��ֱ��complexities of the relationship between post-conflict scenarios, heritage and identity are increasingly recognised, but with this recognition has come an awareness of how little we actually understand about its nature. What role does cultural heritage play during post-conflict reconstruction? What is the impact of reclaiming and rebuilding on people’s sense of identity? By investigating these relationships, we might learn more about how heritage can be harnessed to both personal and political agendas. On this basis, research in this area can help to guide crucial decisions by policy makers and regional practitioners regarding the reconstruction of cultural heritage.

CRIC

A four-year interdisciplinary project on Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict (CRIC), now midway through its research programme, aims to shed light on these issues.

Dr Marie Louise Stig Sørensen in the Department of Archaeology leads the €1.2 million project, which is funded through the European Union Seventh Framework Programme and brings together researchers in Spain, France, Sweden, Germany, Cyprus, Bosnia and the UK. Her research interests and those of her team in Cambridge – archaeologist Dr Dacia Viejo Rose and social anthropologist Dr Paola Filippucci – lie in examining the link between heritage, identity and social memory. Collectively, the project is drawing on strengths in archaeology, social anthropology, history, human geography, sociology, political sciences and psychology.

Case by case

Five case studies provide the backbone of CRIC. Each focuses on physical cultural heritage – from landscapes to monuments, churches to bridges – damaged during civil war, ethnic violence and World War. Geographically, the studies cover Spain, Bosnia, France, Cyprus and Germany, and give insight into the recovery of rural landscapes as well as urban centres or whole towns. ̽��ֱ��project covers historical scenarios that range from recent conflicts in Bosnia and Cyprus, to the planting of forest over the First World War battlefield of Verdun in France, with its muted metaphors of covering and healing.

In Bosnia and Cyprus, case studies highlight the importance of comparing processes of destruction and reconstruction. Although both are ethnic conflicts, the fate of cultural heritage within the two areas differs substantially. In Bosnia, heritage is being re-shaped, as exhibitions and monuments are given new interpretations. Different agencies have sponsored the rebuilding of religious buildings and, in the process, have altered the traditional cultural landscape. Denominations of churches have changed, new minarets have been added to mosques – all representing departures from local architectural and cultural history. In Cyprus, on the other hand, differences in the intensity of development on either side of the divided city of Nicosia have resulted in substantial variation in the preservation of traditional buildings. In the north of the city, little has changed; yet in the south, old buildings have either been replaced by modern development or have seen changes in use.

̽��ֱ��case studies also illustrate different types of urban reconstruction projects, with Dresden in Germany exemplifying the faithful, apparently accurate, reconstruction of selected parts of the city centre, bombed during the Second World War, within an otherwise much-modernised city. In Spain, reconstruction of the Basque town of Gernika, bombed in the Spanish Civil War, exemplifies Franco’s architectural vision of the ‘New’ Spain. This vision was based on an idealised version of historic Spain and brought together several architectural forms and elements to be used throughout the country in its reconstruction.

In all, the CRIC project looks back over almost a century of European history. Each study has been designed to track the sequences of historical events that led to the destruction of cultural heritage, to investigate what effect this has had on communities and their sense of identity, and to identify how different perceptions of the event emerge and are affected by the form of the reconstruction. This makes it possible to trace specific examples of reconstruction as they unfold, pinpointing similarities and differences among them.

Memorials and meaning

When efforts are made to reconstruct cultural heritage, a new fabric of meaning and memory can be woven into the result. ̽��ֱ��findings of the research project are helping to identify what factors are important for understanding the impact of reconstruction, including how they can change the way that events are perceived, or can even become yet another means of conflict.

One thread of the research has therefore been the recording and analysis of anniversary events, both archival and current. This has demonstrated how the staging of memorials can manipulate the manner in which past events are remembered and what they are used for. A reconstruction of the sequence of commemoration events that have happened on 13th February, the anniversary of the 1945 bombing of Dresden, include those under the communist regime and following the recent appearance of neo-fascist groups. This reconstruction has shown how, even from very early on, the memorial events involved both those who mourned and those who used the anniversary for political ends.

In Gernika, the 26th April anniversary of the 1937 bombing first became a public event after the death of Franco. ̽��ֱ��project has traced the acceleration in the anniversary’s international status, and the tensions and competition for control between local groups and regional government, as well as between the church and secular groups. Even recently established anniversary events, such as those at the Srebrenica memorial site in Bosnia and Herzegovina, appear far from uncomplicated, as some groups see the anniversary as a provocation or a reminder, whereas others see it as an opportunity to mourn and simultaneously express rights.

Anniversary events are only part of the equation. CRIC research shows that contributing to the complex mix are also such factors as the role of national and international communities involved in reconstruction, and how memories are transmitted from one generation to the next. Symbols too play an important role, both at the mundane level of mass culture and as part of public rituals. This is seen for example in Gernika, where the traditional symbol of the oak tree represents the historic civil liberties bestowed on the region since the Medieval period. ̽��ֱ��current tree – propagated through generations – still stands on the same spot, but the symbol also appears today in many other contexts such as advertisements.

Societal impact

̽��ֱ��CRIC research programme provides a much-needed understanding of the main characteristics of post-conflict reconstruction processes and their implications for society. Not only does this help us to understand how we behave socially and culturally, but it is also highly relevant to policy makers and organisations invol

ved with reconstruction efforts. Too often, despite the best intentions, reconstruction efforts have been found to prolong conflicts and tensions simply because their impacts are not properly understood.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Marie Louise Stig Sørensen (mlss@cam.ac.uk) at the Department of Archaeology, or Ben Davenport, CRIC Administrator (bkd20@cam.ac.uk) or visit www.cric.arch.cam.ac.uk/). Images collected as part of the CRIC project are stored at DSpace (www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/), the institutional repository of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

A collaborative study led by Cambridge is examining the impact on society of the destruction and reconstruction of cultural heritage.

̽��ֱ��CRIC research programme provides a much-needed understanding of the main characteristics of post-conflict reconstruction processes and their implications for society.

Kim-Michael Sørensen

Case de Juntas, Gernika

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