̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Peter Neyroud

Vice-Chancellor’s awards recognise the difference researchers make to society

cjb250 — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 10:44:35 +0000

̽��ֱ��announcement was made at a prize ceremony held at the Old Schools on 13 July. At the same event, one of Cambridge’s leading experts on EU law – and in particular, Brexit – received one of the Vice Chancellor’s Public Engagement with Research Awards for her work around the EU Referendum.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, says: “I would like to offer my warm congratulations to the recipients of our Impact and Public Engagement Awards. These are outstanding examples that reflect the tremendous efforts by our researchers to make a major contribution to society.”

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 - Dr Alexander Patto from the Department of Physics – receiving £2,000.

This year’s winners are:

Overall winner: Dr Alexander Patto (Department of Physics)

WaterScope

Using an open-source flexure microscope, spin-out company WaterScope is developing rapid, automated water testing kits and affordable diagnostics to empower developing communities. Its microscopes are being used for education, to inspire future scientists from India to Colombia. Its open-source microscope is supporting local initiatives, with companies such as STIClab in Tanzania making medical microscopes from recycled plastic bottles.

Elroy Dimson (Judge Business School)

‘Active Ownership’: Engaging with investee companies on environmental and social issues

‘Active Ownership’ refers to commitment by asset owners and their portfolio managers to engage with the businesses they own, focusing on issues that matter to all stakeholders and to the economy as a whole, including environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns. By providing evidence to guide ESG strategy, Professor Dimson’s research has had a substantial impact on investment policy and practice.

Professor Nick Morrell (Department of Medicine)

From genetics to new treatments in pulmonary arterial hypertension

Severe high blood pressure in the lungs, known as idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension, is a rare disease that affects approximately 1,000 people in the UK. ̽��ֱ��condition usually affects young women and average life expectancy is three to five years. Existing treatments improve symptoms but have little impact on survival. Professor Morrell has introduced routine genetic testing for this condition, and found that one in four patients carry a particular genetic mutation associated with more severe disease and worse survival. His research has identified new ways to treat the disease, the most promising of which is being commercialised through a university spin-out biotech company.

Professor Lawrence Sherman, Peter Neyroud, Dr Barak Ariel, Dr Cristobal Weinborn and Eleanor Neyroud (Institute of Criminology)

Cambridge Crime Harm Index

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Crime Harm Index is a tool for creating a single metric for the seriousness of crime associated with any one offender, victim, address, community, or prevention strategy, supplementing traditional measures giving all crimes equal weight. ̽��ֱ��UK Office of National Statistics credits the index as the stimulus to institute its own, modified version from 2017. Police use the Cambridge index to target highest-harm offenders, victims, places, times and days, differences in crime harm per capita differs across communities or within them over time, adding precision to decisions for allocating scarce resources in times of budget cuts.

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 cash prize and a trophy. This year’s winners are:

Professor Catherine Barnard (Faculty of Law)

In the run up to the EU membership referendum Professor Barnard developed a range of outputs to explain key issues at stake including migration, which forms the basis of her research, in addition to the wider EU law remit. Harnessing the timeliness of the political climate, Barnard’s videos, online articles, radio and TV interviews have supported her engagement across 12 town hall events from Exeter to Newcastle, an open prison and round-table discussions with various public groups. She has also provided a number of briefing sessions to major political party MPs and peers. She has become a trusted public figure, and researcher, on EU law, Brexit and surrounding issues, ensuring that the voices of those key to the research process are heard and listened to.

Dr Elisa Laurenti (Wellcome/MRC Stem Cell Institute and Department of Haematology)

Dr Laurenti has engaged over 2,500 people, at six separate events, with her Stem Cell Robots activity. She collaborated with a researcher in educational robotics to produce this robot-based activity, which maps a stem cell’s differentiation to become a specific cell type. ̽��ֱ��activity has provided a platform for children, families and adults to discuss ethics and clinical applications of stem cell research.

Dr Nai-Chieh Liu (Department of Veterinary Medicine)

Dr Liu has developed a non-invasive respiratory function test for short-skulled dog breeds, including French bulldogs and pugs, which suffer from airway obstruction. She has engaged with dog owners by attending dog shows, dog club meetings and breeders’ premises to break down barriers between publics and veterinarians working to improve the health of these dogs. As a result of this engagement, the UK French bulldog club and the Bulldog Breed Council have adopted health testing schemes based on Dr Liu’s research.

Dr Neil Stott and Belinda Bell (Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation, Judge Business School)

Dr Stott and Miss Bell established Cambridge Social Ventures to embed research around social innovation into a practical workshop to support emerging social entrepreneurs. Since the first workshop in 2014, they have reached almost 500 people wanting to create social change by starting and growing a business. ̽��ֱ��team goes to considerable efforts to reach out to participants from non-traditional backgrounds and to ensure workshops are inclusive and accessible to a wide range of people by incorporating online engagement with work in the community.

Amalia Thomas (Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics)

Amalia Thomas researches photoelasticity, a property by which certain materials transmit light differently when subjected to a force. Amalia has developed an engaging exhibition for secondary school students comprising interactive elements, which uses photoelasticity to visualise force, work and power.

Dr Frank Waldron-Lynch, Jane Kennet and Katerina Anselmiova (Department of Medicine and Department of Clinical Biochemistry)

Since the commencement of their research programme to develop drugs for Type 1 Diabetes, Dr Waldron-Lynch, Ms Kennet and Ms Anselmiova have developed a public engagement programme to engage participants, patients, families, funders, colleagues, institutions, companies and the community, with the aim of ensuring that their research remains relevant to stakeholder needs. Amongst their outputs, the team has formed a patient support group in addition to developing an online engagement strategy through social media platforms. Most recently, they have collaborated with GlaxoSmithKline to offer patients the opportunity to participate in clinical studies at all stages of their disease.

An open source, 3D-printable microscope that forms the cornerstone of rapid, automated water testing kits for use in low and middle-income countries, has helped a Cambridge researcher and his not-for-profit spin-out company win the top prize in this year’s Vice-Chancellor’s Impact Awards at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Nithi Anand

I drink because I'm thirsty

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Crime: measuring by ‘damage to victims’ will improve policing and public safety

fpjl2 — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:31:17 +0000

A “menu of harm” that measures crime according to the price of damage inflicted on victims – rather than counting crimes as if they are all of equal seriousness – needs to be adopted worldwide to focus police resources on the worst criminal acts, say leading ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge criminologists.

They describe the UK’s current approach to crime metrics as a “paper-and-pencil legacy of the 19th century”, presenting crime in ‘grand totals’ that give equal weight to shoplifting and homicide, for example – an approach used to leverage ‘crime is down’ media reports, causing police to focus on minor yet high-volume offences that cause less harm than rarer but more serious crimes.

̽��ֱ��team, including Cambridge Institute of Criminology Director Professor Lawrence Sherman and his colleague Peter Neyroud, a former Chief Constable, are calling for a “meaningful measure of crime” grounded in the true societal cost: the harm done to its citizens.

Sherman, Neyroud and colleagues have devised the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (CHI), which they describe as essentially a crime version of the cost-of-living index – a classification system weighted by, in this case, the likely impact of an offence on victims. ̽��ֱ��first detailed outline of the Cambridge CHI is published today in the academic journal Policing.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge criminologists say that this simple, cost-neutral ratio of harmful crime, based on sentencing guidelines and numbers of ‘imprisonable’ days, will dramatically improve identification and policing of areas where the most damaging crime occurs, so-called ‘harm spots’, as well as the most dangerous repeat offenders – who often fall between cracks in current overview analyses.

In the Policing journal paper, the researchers provide a ten-year UK comparison between current crime metrics and the Cambridge CHI. While overall crime counts between 2002 and 2012 showed a drop of 37%, the harm index reveals that this is an overestimation in terms of public safety, as imprisonable days reflecting ‘harm caused’ only dropped 21%.

Sherman believes that adoption of the Cambridge CHI would help make optimal use of scarce resources through more targeted policing, which could, in turn, reduce prison populations.

In fact, the Cambridge CHI is already being trialled by police units in a number of UK forces, including Leicestershire, whose Assistant Chief Constable, Phil Kay, will lecture at Cambridge this week on how his force has used it to identify crime ‘harm spots’ and the offenders who cause most harm, and have re-allocated resources, patrol patterns and offender management approaches accordingly.

In another recent example of Cambridge CHI use, mapping the harm index onto patterns of domestic violence helped Suffolk Constabulary reveal that – of the 25,000 couples coming to police attention over six years, resulting in some 36,000 callouts – fewer than 2% of couples generated 80% of all harm to each other.

̽��ֱ��criminologists say that their approach need not replace the current system, but simply be added to it to help improve understanding of what the crime counts really mean.

“Not all crimes are created equal. Counting them as if they are fosters distortion of risk and accountability,” said Professor Sherman, Director of the Cambridge Institute and Honorary President of the 2,000-member Society of Evidence-Based Policing.

“If shoplifting drops while murder triples, crime is reported as ‘down’ – yet any common sense view of public safety cries out for some adjustment for seriousness.

“Currently, there is no meaningful ‘bottom line’ indicator of whether public safety is actually improving or declining in any given year or place. Measuring by the number of days in prison each crime could attract ensures that police, policy makers and the public are better informed on rates and trends of crime, the risks posed and resources required,” Sherman said.

Any new approach to measuring crime must pass a three-pronged test, says Sherman: cost, reliability and democracy (“reflecting the will of the people”).

̽��ֱ��Cambridge crime harm index uses a fixed scale based on the number of prison days an offence would receive at its lowest starting point for a previously unconvicted offender, with sentence severity reflecting harm caused by the crime. Former Chief Constable Peter Neyroud, now a Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer in Evidence-Based Policing, helped devise this approach as a former member of the Sentencing Council for England and Wales.

Where penalty guidelines are expressed in community service hours, the Cambridge Index converts them into days. Where the starting point is a fine, this is calculated by the number of hours/days needed to earn the fine at minimum adult wage.

Judicial attitudes can vary wildly depending on media panics and public mood, says Sherman. Relying only on the heavily-debated sentencing guidelines protects the Cambridge CHI from this instability, keeping it reliable, while retaining its basis in the democratically-authorised law of the land. This differs from other systems, such as Canada’s ‘crime severity index’, which rely on the “shifting sands” of actual sentencing practice.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge researchers say that their harm index can be easily calculated by citizens and officials alike, using data already published on a regular basis. “Policing budgets can ill afford to fund a new system of crime statistics, and we have shown they don’t have to,” said Sherman. “Our approach is essentially free of charge.”

Importantly, the Cambridge CHI distinguishes between crimes reported to the police and those “proactively generated” through enforcement – sidestepping what Sherman refers to as the “self-licking ice cream”: the idea that an unreported crime detected by police surveillance still counts as ‘one crime’, so police enforcement actually contributes to statistical crime increase.

Sherman uses the analogy of hedge funds to highlight the importance of a crime harm index: “Like police and justice agencies, investors have to achieve objectives such as growth and security, but face a vast array of choices about how best to invest their scarce resources.

“However, investors have one great advantage over police that makes their job much easier: a common currency. Now police can have a common currency as well, one that quantifies the true cost of all crime – the harm it causes.”

Reference:
Sherman, Lawrence et al. ̽��ֱ��Cambridge Crime Harm Index: Measuring Total Harm from Crime Based on Sentencing Guidelines. Policing; 4 April 2016;10.1093/police/paw003.

New Cambridge ‘crime harm index’ published today quantifies true cost of crime: damage caused to victims and society. Experts call on UK government to adopt low-cost metric for greater transparency of crime trends and risks. Some UK forces have already used approach with early successes in identifying ‘harm spots’.

Now police can have a common currency as well, one that quantifies the true cost of all crime – the harm it causes

Lawrence Sherman

Evan Wood

police

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