̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)

Cambridge in the 2019 New Year honours list

plc32 — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 22:31:00 +0000

Professor David Klenerman, FRS was knighted for Services to Science and for the Development of High Speed DNA Sequencing Technology.

Professor Klenerman said: “I feel very humbled to be recognised in this way.”

Sir David is a professor of biophysical chemistry at the Department of Chemistry at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ's College. He is best known for his contribution in the field of next-generation sequencing of DNA, which subsequently resulted in Solexa, a high-speed DNA sequencing company that he co-founded.

“I also want to acknowledge and sincerely thank the highly talented people who have worked with me over the years and without whom my research would simply not have been possible. In particular the development of Solexa sequencing was the result of a massive team effort.”

Klenerman was educated at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge where he was an undergraduate student of Christ's College and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1982. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemistry in 1986 as a postgraduate student of Churchill College.

Sir David has received a string of honours for his work, including a 2018 Royal Medal from the Royal Society for his outstanding contribution to applied sciences. He was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015 and Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012.

Professor Madeleine Julia Atkins, who was first honoured as a CBE in 2011, has been promoted DBE for her Services to Higher Education.

Dame Madeleine, lately Chief Executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, has had a long and distinguished career in higher education, most recently providing outstanding leadership in ensuring a smooth transition between HEFCE and the new Office for Students and Research England. She has also been a Trustee and Board member for Nesta, and was until recently a Deputy Lieutenant in the West Midlands. She has been a Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Newcastle ̽��ֱ��, is a former Vice-Chancellor of Coventry ̽��ֱ��, and is now President of Lucy Cavendish College here at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��. She studied for a degree in law and history at Girton College and has a PhD from the ̽��ֱ�� of Nottingham.

Dame Madeleine said: “I am honoured to receive this award, which recognises the contribution of my former colleagues at HEFCE who worked so hard to make the transition to OfS and Research England both smooth and successful. I am delighted now to be bringing some of my experience in the higher education sector to support the students and Fellowship of Lucy Cavendish College”.

Professor John Frederick William Birney, FRS, the joint director, European Bioinformatics Institute was awarded a CBE For Services to Computational Genomics and to Leadership across the Life Sciences.

Professor Birney is Director of EMBL-EBI, Europe's flagship laboratory for the life sciences, and runs a small research group. He played a vital role in annotating the genome sequences of human, mouse, chicken and several other organisms. He led the analysis group for the ENCODE project, which is defining functional elements in the human genome. Birney’s main areas of research include functional genomics, assembly algorithms, statistical methods to analyse genomic information (in particular information associated with individual differences) and compression of sequence information.

Professor Birney, known as Ewan to his friends, family and colleagues, was educated at Eton, Oxford and St John’s College, Cambridge.

Dr Jennifer Mary Schooling, Director of the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC), ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge was awarded an OBE For Services to Engineering and to Digital Construction.

Dr Schooling is a Fellow of Darwin College and has been the Director of CSIC since April 2013. CSIC focuses on how better data and information from a wide range of sensing systems can be used to improve our understanding of our infrastructure, leading to better design, construction and management practices. CSIC has strong collaborations with industry, developing and demonstrating innovations on real construction and infrastructure projects, and developing standards and guidance to enable implementation. Dr Schooling is also Chair of the Research Strategy Steering Group for the newly formed Centre for Digital Built Britain. Dr Schooling is founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Smart Infrastructure and Construction Proceedings journal (ICE). She recently served as a member of PAS185 smart cities security standard steering group and of ICE’s State of the Nation 2017 ‘Digital Transformation’ Steering Group. Prior to joining CSIC, Dr Schooling worked for Arup, leading the firm’s Research Business, and before that for Edwards Vacuum (then BOC Edwards) as a manager for New Product Introductions. She has a PhD from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Andrew Nairne, Director of Kettle’s Yard, was awarded an OBE for Services to Museums and the Arts. Kettle’s Yard is the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s modern and contemporary art gallery.

Andrew Nairne said: “I am delighted to receive this recognition following the hugely successful reopening of Kettle’s Yard in 2018: a magnificent team effort.”

“As Director of one of the eight ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Museums, I believe museums have a vital role to play in the life of both the ̽��ֱ�� and the community.”

̽��ֱ��Honours list, which dates back to around 1890, recognises notable services and contributions to Britain.

Members of collegiate Cambridge recognised for outstanding contributions to society in science, education, engineering and art

“I feel very humbled to be recognised in this way.”

Professor Sir David Klenerman

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Major funding for new crop sciences research centre that will be ‘centrepiece’ of industrial collaboration

cjb250 — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 15:54:26 +0000

With the global population estimated to reach nine billion people by 2050, ensuring all people have access to sufficient food is one of this century’s greatest challenges.

Today, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) is announcing funding for the creation of a new Cambridge Centre for Crop Science (3CS) in collaboration with the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB). ̽��ֱ��new centre will provide a major boost to the ̽��ֱ��’s existing research initiatives around global food security.

With £16.9m from the HEFCE-managed UK Research Partnership Investment Fund as well as some £14.5m from the NIAB Trust, the 3CS will focus on impact: working with industrial partners to translate the ̽��ֱ��’s strong fundamental plant research into outputs for the farmer, processor and consumer.

“3CS innovations will generate new crops and new ways of growing crops for food, fuels, industrial feedstocks and pharmaceuticals,” said Professor Sir David Baulcombe, head of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences and the project lead for the ̽��ֱ��.

“We envisage that new 3CS crop technologies will enable higher crop yields and lower environmental impact for crop-based food production – as well as contributing to improved dietary health.”

̽��ֱ��project leads say the 3CS will be uniquely well positioned to contribute to growth and innovation due to the partnership at its core: connecting the multidisciplinary research of the ̽��ֱ�� with NIAB’s pipeline to the end-users in farming and food industries.

“ ̽��ֱ��delivery of both public goods and economic growth is an essential agenda for today’s plant scientists, with the need to produce sufficient healthy nutritious food without harming the environment being at the top of the international agenda,” said NIAB’s CEO and Director Dr Tina Barsby.

“Creating the facilities to bring together NIAB and the ̽��ֱ�� in 3CS presents an extraordinary opportunity for impacting this agenda through the development of world-class science and translation.”

̽��ֱ��funding from HEFCE will allow the 3CS to be housed in a state-of-the-art research laboratory at NIAB’s Cambridge site, where it will be led by a newly-appointed Professor of Crop Science. ̽��ֱ��Centre will involve researchers from Plant Sciences and other ̽��ֱ�� departments, NIAB, the Cambridge Sainsbury Laboratory, and other UK and international research institutes.

3CS is already establishing connections with major industry partners, as well as agricultural supply chain networks such as the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Potato Growers Research Association.

In addition to the Cambridge Centre, the funding will also provide new field stations and offices at NIAB’s Histon site, as well as new glasshouses with full environmental controls.

̽��ֱ��Eastern region is a rich area for plant science, and benefits from the Agri-Tech East research and business network. 3CS will allow for closer collaboration with other regional institutes, including the John Innes Centre in Norwich and Rothamsted Research – both of whom have welcomed the establishment of the new centre.

Young researchers will be central to the success of 3CS, says Baulcombe, and the best will be recruited from around the world to be trained in interdisciplinary science, including the latest in plant genetics, bioinformatics, computational modelling and statistics.

Strong links with the agricultural industry through NIAB will mean that 3CS researchers will learn to understand how societal value and industry requirements feed into research design and translation.

While 3CS will make significant contributions to the main globally-traded crops such as wheat and rice, there will be a focus on advances in the genetics and agronomy of other UK crops, such as potato and legumes, and so-called ‘orphan crops’: those that lag behind in technological advances but are vital for smallholder farmers across the developing world.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, the ̽��ֱ��’s Vice-Chancellor, said: “3CS will be unlike anywhere else in Europe because it connects a world-leading ̽��ֱ�� directly to growers, breeders and other sectors of industry associated with crops. ̽��ֱ��opportunity could be compared to the potential for advances in healthcare when a research-active medical school co-locates with a hospital and pharmaceutical company.

“ ̽��ֱ��3CS will be the centrepiece of what will be significant new collaborations, and an exemplar of what can be achieved by bringing together interested parties to focus on sustainable crop production – essential for food security, resilience to climate change, and the growing bio-economy.”

Over £30m has been announced for a new Cambridge Centre for Crop Science that will focus on linking with farming and food industries to translate research into real world impact.

3CS will be unlike anywhere else in Europe because it connects a world-leading ̽��ֱ�� directly to growers, breeders and other sectors of industry associated with crops

Leszek Borysiewicz

Carl Davies, CSIRO

Canola crop with wheat crop in background at Wallandbeen, NSW.

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Ten thousand reasons to celebrate Open Access at Cambridge

sjr81 — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 08:58:45 +0000

̽��ֱ��10,000th submission, reporting on the impact of eating a Mediterranean diet on the risk of developing cardiovascular disease in a UK population, was deposited by Signe Wulund at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, on behalf of Dr Nita Forouhi, Programme Leader in Nutritional Epidemiology at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, and several co-authors.

̽��ֱ��Open Access movement has been growing in strength in academia for many years, and it is increasingly being mandated by funding bodies and government.

Dr Forouhi said: “Through open access our research can reach a worldwide audience. It would be a huge pity if interested researchers, practitioners or policy makers could not read about new research, such as our latest findings on the link between the Mediterranean diet and cardiovascular health in a non-Mediterranean setting, because of something as simple as lacking a journal subscription.

“Open access enables wider dissemination of research findings, and in turn, facilitates better research and evidence-based policy and clinical practice.”

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Open Access Service was established within the ̽��ֱ�� Library in 2013 in response to Research Councils UK (RCUK) making Open Access mandatory for anyone accepting their funding. Many other major funders, including the Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation, have similar policies.

In 2014, the Higher Education Funding Council for England announced that Open Access would be compulsory for any article included in the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise. This policy came into force on April 1, 2016, effectively meaning that all research in UK institutions now has to be made freely available.

Since its inception in 2013, the Open Access service has processed 10,000 manuscripts, across all ̽��ֱ�� faculties and departments and worked with 3,000 different members of staff. 6,000 of the papers were covered by the HEFCE open access policy; 4,000 acknowledged RCUK funding and 1,900 COAF (many papers fall into multiple categories, and some into none). More than £5.4 million of Open Access grants from funding bodies have also been distributed.

Meeting these requirements is a major task for the ̽��ֱ��, and one it has tried to make as simple as possible for researchers. Authors are simply required to upload their manuscript to www.openaccess.cam.ac.uk when it’s accepted for publication, and the Open Access team advise them on what they need to do to comply with funder requirements, eligibility for any funding body grants, and handle depositing the article into Apollo, the ̽��ֱ��’s institutional repository.

Ten thousand manuscripts have now been received in this way, and the vast majority of them have been able to be made Open Access, free for anyone who wants to read and benefit from them.

The 10,000th article: ‘Prospective association of the Mediterranean diet with cardiovascular disease incidence and mortality and its population impact in a non-Mediterranean population: the EPIC-Norfolk Study’ in BMC Medicine. [DOI:10.1186/s12916-016-0677-4] can be seen here: http://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-016-0677-4

̽��ֱ��Open Access team at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is part of the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC), within the ̽��ֱ�� Library. As well as assisting researchers with Open Access and Open Data compliance, it advises on scholarly communication tools, techniques, policies and practices, and provides training. For more details, visit www.osc.cam.ac.uk.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has received its 10,000th Open Access submission – highlighting its commitment to making research freely available to anybody who wants to access it, without publisher paywalls or expensive journal subscriptions.

Through open access our research can reach a worldwide audience.

Nita Forouhi

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Dementia: Catching the memory thief

cjb250 — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 07:07:53 +0000

You may have heard of the ‘dementia tsunami’. It’s heading our way. As our population ages, the number of cases of dementia is set to rocket, overwhelming our health services and placing an enormous burden on our society.

Only, it’s not quite so simple. A study published last year by Professor Carol Brayne from the Cambridge Institute of Public Health suggested that better education and living standards meant people were at a lower risk of developing the disease than previously thought and so, despite our ageing population, numbers were likely to stabilise – and could even perhaps fall slightly.

Of course, even this more optimistic outlook does not hide the fact that millions of people worldwide will be diagnosed with dementia each year and millions are already living with the condition. An effective treatment for the 'memory thief' still seems like a distant prospect.

“Dementia isn’t one disease: it’s a constellation of changes in an individual’s brain, with many underlying causes,” says Brayne. “Most people, by the time they’re in their eighties or nineties, have some of these changes in their brains, regardless of whether or not they ever develop dementia.”

For this reason, Brayne believes we need a radical approach to tackling brain health throughout the course of our lifetime, with a greater emphasis on reduction in the risk of dementia achieved through measures in society that are related to better health in general, such as social and lifestyle changes, in addition to the focus on early therapeutic approaches to preventing or treating the disease through a pharmaceutical approach.

By far the most common and well-known form of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease. Symptoms include memory problems, changes in behaviour and progressive loss of independence.

At a biological level, the disease sees a build-up of two particular types of proteins in the brain: fragments of beta-amyloid clump together in ‘plaques’ between nerve cells, and twisted strands of tau form ‘tangles’ within the nerve cells. These plaques and tangles lead to the death of nerve cells, causing the brain to shrink.

Clinical trials of Alzheimer’s drugs are always going to be difficult, in part because trial participants are patients with advanced stage disease, who have already lost a significant number of nerve cells. But Professor Chris Dobson, who recently helped secure £17 million from the Higher Education Funding Council for England for a new Chemistry of Health Building, including the Centre for Misfolding Diseases, believes that most of the trials to date were destined to fail from the start because of a fundamental lack of understanding of the mechanisms that lead to Alzheimer’s.

Understandably, most of the researchers tackling Alzheimer’s approach the disease as a clinical – or at least a biological – problem. Dobson instead sees it as also being about chemistry and physics. He argues that the protein tangles and plaques – collectively known as aggregates – are demonstrating a physical property similar to the way in which crystals precipitate out of, say, salty water: all they need is a ‘seed’ to kick off the precipitation and the process runs away with itself. “In essence,” he says, “biology is trying to suppress molecules behaving in a physical way.” For his contributions, Dobson has been awarded the 2014 Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics.

In 2009, Dobson, together with colleagues Professors Tuomas Knowles and Michele Vendruscolo, published a study that broke down the aggregation process into a combination of smaller steps, each of which could be tested experimentally. It became apparent to the team that drugs were failing in trials because they were targeting the wrong steps. “And this is still happening,” says Vendruscolo. “Companies are still putting small molecules into clinical trials that, when we test them using our methods, we find stand no chance.”

They believe there may be a role to play for ‘neurostatins’, which could do for Alzheimer’s what statins already do to reduce cholesterol levels and prevent heart attacks and strokes. In fact, they may have already identified compounds that might fit the bill.

Professor Michel Goedert from the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology admits that there is a gap between our understanding of Alzheimer’s and our ability to turn this into effective therapies.

“We know much about the causes of inherited forms of Alzheimer’s disease, but this knowledge has so far not led to any therapies,” he says. “It’s clear now that abnormal protein aggregation is central to Alzheimer’s disease, but we don’t know the mechanisms by which this aggregation leads to neurodegeneration.” Goedert himself played an instrumental part in studies that implicated the aggregation of tau protein in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases, work that led to him being awarded the 2014 European Grand Prix from the Paris-based Foundation for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease.

“I don’t think we should talk of a cure,” says Goedert. “At best, we will be able to halt the disease. Prevention will be much more important.” Part of the problem, he says, lies in the fact that there is no absolute way of identifying those at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

̽��ֱ��market for an Alzheimer’s drug is massive, which is why pharmaceutical companies are racing to develop new drugs. Goedert doesn’t believe we will ever find a single ‘magic bullet’, but will need to use combination therapies – in the same way that we treat other diseases, such as HIV – with each drug targeting a particular aspect of the disease.

Professor David Rubinsztein from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research agrees with Goedert that we need to look at preventing Alzheimer’s rather than just focusing on treating the disease. He, too, believes in the concept of neurostatins. “These compounds would be safe, well tolerated by most people and generally good for you; you could take them for many years before the onset of disease,” he says. “Then we wouldn’t need to worry about identifying people at highest risk of the disease – everyone could take them.”

Rubinsztein is the academic lead for Cambridge’s new Alzheimer’s Research UK Drug Discovery Institute, part of a £30 million Drug Discovery Alliance that also includes the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford and ̽��ֱ�� College London. This state-of-the-art institute will fast-track the development of new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. In particular, the Alliance will look at promising drug targets, assess their validity and develop small molecules that target them. These could then be taken up by pharmaceutical companies for clinical trials, removing some of the risk that results in most ‘promising’ drug candidates failing early on.

Rubinsztein is optimistic about our chances of fighting Alzheimer’s. “If you could delay the onset of Alzheimer’s, even by three to five years, that discovery would be transformative and massively reduce the number of people getting the disease,” he says. “We’re not asking to stop the disease, just to delay it. It’s really not such a big ask.”

Cambridge Neuroscience plays a key role in coordinating dementia research across the large and diverse community of neuroscientists in Cambridge, helping scientists and clinicians to work together.

It's over a hundred years since the first case of Alzheimer’s disease was diagnosed. Since then we’ve learned a great deal about the protein ‘tangles’ and ‘plaques’ that cause the disease. How close are we to having effective treatments – and could we even prevent dementia from occurring in the first place?

I don't think we should talk of a cure. At best, we will be able to halt the disease. Prevention will be much more important.

Michel Goedert

Dementia: Catching the memory thief

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Cambridge's Chemistry of Health programme awarded £17 million in funding

sc604 — Wed, 25 Mar 2015 14:04:29 +0000

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� has been awarded more than £17 million in funding to support research into the molecular origins of human disease, particularly neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, and to accelerate the development new diagnostic and therapeutic methods of treating them.

̽��ֱ��funding has been awarded from the fourth round of the UK Research Partnership Investment Fund (UKRPIF). Seven university research projects from across the UK will receive over £100 million of investment in 2016-17, to drive innovation and economic growth.

̽��ֱ��projects will promote the development of world-leading research in a range of subject areas, from semiconductors to neuroscience, and have collectively attracted £350 million of private investment, in addition to the £100 million of UKRPIF funding.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge funding will be used to support the construction of a new £22 million Chemistry of Health building, expected to be completed by March 2017, which will provide world-class facilities for chemistry-based fundamental research in neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

̽��ֱ��new building will promote the translation of fundamental research into clinical and commercial applications by providing the infrastructure required for new academic-industrial partnerships, which will have both immediate and long-term benefits for human health and the UK economy.

“As a ̽��ֱ�� and a Department we have a huge responsibility to make sure that our research gets translated into real benefits for society,” said Professor Daan Frenkel, Head of the ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Chemistry. “This is particularly true in the area of health: the dramatic increase in age and lifestyle related diseases calls not just for ground-breaking chemical discoveries, but for private-public partnerships that will translate those discoveries into treatments. ̽��ֱ��Chemistry of Health building will be the embodiment of this philosophy. It will be a game changer.”

̽��ֱ��building will house the Centre for Protein Misfolding Diseases, the Chemistry of Health Incubator, and the Molecular Production and Characterisation Centre.

̽��ֱ��new building will enable the Centre for Protein Misfolding Diseases - directed by Professor Christopher Dobson, Professor Michele Vendruscolo and Dr Tuomas Knowles - to effect a step change in basic and translational research on molecular approaches to combat modern pandemics such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and type II diabetes.

̽��ֱ��Chemistry of Health Incubator will be at the core of this vision, where research scientists from industrial partners and start-up companies will occupy laboratory and desk space alongside researchers from Cambridge and collaborating institutions.

̽��ֱ��Molecular Production and Characterisation Centre will provide support and access to state-of-the-art instrumentation for in-house and UK-wide academic and industrial users.

“There have been really major breakthroughs within the Chemistry Department here in Cambridge in the context of human health, and particularly in understanding the fundamental origins of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, which are becoming frighteningly common in the modern world,” said Dobson. “These breakthroughs have come from the collaborative activities of a number of research groups working together in Cambridge, and with other partners, to understand the underlying nature of these conditions. ̽��ֱ��Chemistry of Health building will enable us to make a giant step forward in translating this work into future treatments to combat these rapidly proliferating and truly devastating conditions.”

For projects to be eligible for a UKRPIF award universities are required to secure at least double the amount of government investment from businesses or charities: these seven successful projects have between them secured more than three times the amount of public funding in investment from non-government sources.

To date, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), which manages the UKRPIF programme, has allocated over £500 million to 34 projects running between 2014-17, attracting £1.3 billion of investment from business and charities. A further £400 million of funding was announced for UKRPIF in last week’s budget for the period to 2021.

“ ̽��ֱ��UK Research Partnership Investment Fund has enabled universities to develop world-leading facilities and opportunities to deliver exceptional research, as well as attracting in more than £1.3 billion of private investment,” said Professor Madeleine Atkins, Chief Executive of HEFCE. “I am delighted that we are able to support these seven projects, and the budget announcement of additional funding for UKRPIF is excellent news. UK universities tackle major national and global challenges, and make a significant contribution to economic growth. ̽��ֱ��funding offers a further opportunity to enhance the nation’s research infrastructure and develop partnership work.”

New funding will support fundamental research into the molecular processes underlying human disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, and enable new ways to combat them.

As a ̽��ֱ�� and a Department we have a huge responsibility to make sure that our research gets translated into real benefits for society

Daan Frenkel

ZEISS Microscopy

Brain showing hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease (cropped)

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Reading closely: Faculty of English

bjb42 — Sat, 01 May 2010 14:17:12 +0000

̽��ֱ��Faculty of English boasts one of the largest concentrations of research activity in the discipline in the UK. ‘Perhaps we could be accused of being overambitious but we’d like to think that, across the 100 or so Faculty members here, our combined research areas gather together all the threads that make up the fabric of English,’ said Professor Adrian Poole, Head of the Faculty.

Research ranges chronologically from the 7th to the 21st centuries; linguistically from Classical to French and German literary traditions; geographically from colonial America to post-colonial India; thematically from early Christian music to 21st-century environmentalism; intellectually from the history of the language to the history of moral philosophy; even alphabetically from Aaron’s Rod to Louis Zukofsky.

‘To some extent, what we’re doing is preserving and keeping alive the great heritage of English Literature,’ added Professor Poole. ‘Of course this might take a multitude of different forms, whether it’s constructing arguments for the importance of a certain poet, bringing a fresh perspective to a genre, or drawing comparisons between contemporary literature and screen media.’

Founded in 1919, the Faculty was the first in the country to encourage the study of English literature up to the present day and to approach the discipline from a ‘literary’ point of view, rather than as a product of the history of the language. In 2004, a new chapter began, with the opening of a £15 million building funded by the ̽��ֱ��, external donors, including major gifts from Garfield Weston Foundation, ̽��ֱ��Kirby Laing Foundation and ̽��ֱ��Atlantic Philanthropies, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).

For the first time in the history of the Faculty, its research and teaching, a drama studio and 80,000 library books were together, as well as the closely linked Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC) and the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics (RCEAL).

A close read

Great importance is attached to the ability to read literary texts closely and attentively, combining this with detailed historical research. New vistas in understanding writers and their work can be opened up by unpicking the rich historical patchwork that influences them, as Professor Helen Cooper, expert in medieval and Renaissance literature, is finding.

Professor Cooper’s most recent research, due to be published later this year, investigates Shakespeare and the medieval world. ‘Although we think of him as quintessentially belonging to the English Renaissance, Shakespeare’s world was still largely a medieval one,’ she explained. ‘ ̽��ֱ��cityscape of London was still medieval, his ideas about what could be staged and how it was done were carried forward from the late days of the Mystery Cycles, and half his plays have medieval roots. We can only measure what he achieved, or even see it clearly, when we recognise how much the underlying culture of the Middle Ages shaped the world’s greatest playwright.’

Working in a very different period, Dr Ben Etherington, a newly arrived Faculty-funded Research Fellow, also brings together close reading with an awareness of historical context. His research focuses on post-colonial and international literatures in English, a fast-growing research area in Cambridge and elsewhere. Studying literary primitivism in the early 20th century, and reading the work of writers and intellectuals from the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, Britain, West Africa and France, Dr Etherington is interested in the spread of primitivist modes of writing and what this can tell us about colonialism in the early to mid-20th century.

Embracing a digital age

Members of the Faculty have been in the vanguard when it comes to embracing the changing landscape brought about by digital advances. ̽��ֱ��recently completed Scriptorium project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, has assembled a digital archive of medieval and early modern manuscripts, and teamed this up with a fully interactive online course to help scholars learn how to read these notoriously difficult texts.

A computational approach is being taken in a groundbreaking collaborative research programme in RCEAL called English Profile, supported by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press and Cambridge ESOL. ‘ ̽��ֱ��idea is to understand how English is acquired as a second language and then apply this knowledge to improving textbooks and testing,’ explained Dr Henriëtte Hendriks, Acting Director of RCEAL and one of its Principal Investigators. A corpus of 26 million words taken from test sheets for speakers representing over 100 different languages is being analysed by linguists and computational linguists for the common developmental paths that learners of English follow over time. This study is just one of several RCEAL projects that are helping to solve practical problems involving the English language – in language teaching, textbook publishing and even medical diagnosis.

A pioneering study by Professor Peter de Bolla could have implications for transforming research methodologies of the future. In a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, Professor de Bolla has been mapping how an idea, or concept, develops through literature. Rather than attempting the impossible task of reading many thousands of books, letters and manuscripts, Professor de Bolla has taken the innovative step of searching for and counting the incidence of sets of keywords in the huge digital archives that have only recently become available to scholars. It’s new territory for scholars of English, forging a methodology that has the potential to reap significant academic dividends.

Anglo-Saxon gold

Recent headlines might give the impression that to strike Anglo-Saxon gold you need a metal detector but, as ASNC academics Professor Simon Keynes and Dr Rosalind Love discovered, there’s still plenty awaiting the historians and literary scholars who depend on texts.

When a 14th-century compilation of historical materials that had lain undiscovered in the library of the Earl of Devon for centuries went under the hammer at Sotheby’s, an eagle-eyed expert (and former ASNC graduate student) spotted that it contained a copy of a much older and incredibly rare text. It was the Encomium Emmae Reginae, a highly charged polemic written on behalf of Queen Emma, wife of King Æthelred the Unready and then of King Cnut, in 1041. But, unlike the only other surviving copy, it was preserved here in a version with a different ending, added after the accession of her son Edward the Confessor in 1042. Coincidentally, a related discovery was made in Oxford, where papers of a 16th-century antiquary were found to include a long-lost section from a biography of King Edward, written soon after his death in 1066.

Both ‘new’ texts have now been studied closely at ASNC, and interpreted in relation to each other. ‘ ̽��ֱ��variant ending of the Encomium is rather explosive in its implications for our understanding of how Edward’s accession was perceived by contemporaries, spinning it as the longed-for restoration of the Anglo-Saxon royal line,’ explained Professor Keynes. ‘And it provides the perfect context for understanding a poem, now fully recovered, which describes a magnificent ship given to Edward at precisely that time,’ added Dr Love.

̽��ֱ��word in the world

̽��ֱ��newest initiative for the Faculty of English has been the launch of the Centre for Material Texts, which will foster the next generation of research and teaching relating to texts of any form, from spoken words to celluloid, from manuscript to XML. As any academic in the Faculty will attest, text is the product both of its creator and a mass of worldly circumstances; unravelling how texts of many kinds have been embodied and circulated is becoming one of the most exciting areas of humanities research today, and continues a tradition at the Faculty of English of getting close to the written word.

For more information about research at the Faculty of English, please visit www.english.cam.ac.uk/

ASNC: www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/

Close scrutiny of text is the bedrock of a research culture that spans practically the whole range of contemporary English studies.

To some extent, what we’re doing is preserving and keeping alive the great heritage of English Literature.

Professor Adrian Poole

Dr Jason Scott-Warren and Dr Andrew Zurcher

English collage

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Dr Carenza Lewis

bjb42 — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��chance discovery of an ichthyosaur vertebra on the East Anglian farm she grew up on set Dr Lewis on the path to becoming an archaeologist at the young age of seven. Her enthusiasm for unearthing archaeological evidence of rural medieval settlements has resulted in a career that combines research within the Department of Archaeology, with media and broadcasting – most notably as part of Channel 4’s award-winning Time Team – and outreach to secondary schools. Conveying the excitement of ‘getting your hands dirty’ has led naturally to her new enterprise – the Higher Education Field Academy (HEFA;www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca). HEFA is a ground-breaking initiative within the Department of Archaeology that is funded by Aimhigher, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the European Social Fund (ESF). From digging square metre test-pits in their back gardens to introducing them to ̽��ֱ�� life, HEFA is all about encouraging young people to get a flavour of academia through their own hunt for history beneath their feet.

And the icing on the cake for Dr Lewis and the schoolchildren is that their hard work and achievements are recognised in research publications – each of the 10–30 test-pits that have been dug in each of 20 villages across six counties is contributing to a ‘scatter-effect’ analysis of medieval occupation that is overturning previous assumptions. For Dr Lewis, outreach and research have become symbiotically linked.

What would others be surprised to learn about you?

Most of the people I meet through work are usually quite surprised to discover that I juggle my career with three children, who span quite an age range: 5, 11 and 15! Also that I’ve had a huge suite of medical problems – I was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 33, had a double mastectomy and then three years later I was told it was a mistake. It was a very difficult time. So on the outside I probably look very capable, with a career that looks like it’s been a fantastically smooth progression, but it hasn’t all been plain sailing.

Who or what inspires you?

What I find inspiring is that sudden moment when you discover that something really has potential. When you have an idea and you realise: ‘I don’t think anyone has really thought like this before.’ It’s like when you see through a crack in the door and there’s a whole world out there, when things suddenly come together and you think: ‘Yes, this will work.’ Increasingly, working as I do with young people, my inspiration also comes from the enjoyment and excitement that they get out of the time they spend with us.

Have you ever had a Eureka moment?

In a way, my Eureka moment came with the idea for the Academy, combining aspiration-raising work with young people with original research on villages, both of which need to be done on a large scale. I realised that we could give children the vital enthusiasm, confidence AND skills they need to succeed in fulfilling their academic potential by getting them involved in independent new archaeological research, where their contribution is as valuable to us as it is to them. By digging and analysing their own archaeological test-pit, they’re creating one part of a huge jigsaw – the more pieces we have, the clearer and more accurate is the picture. We’ve got all these young people who need to do something really challenging, but who will also really value developing their abilities, interest and confidence. Uncovering, recording and interpreting new archaeological discoveries can do this.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

I always say to the young people we work with that it’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it that makes the difference to what you can achieve, and I think that’s so true – just like with university admissions, it’s not what someone knows that’s crucial, but what they’re capable of learning. Another thing I learned very quickly from doing television is not to be too worried about being wrong, so long as your reasoning is right, otherwise it can be a huge obstacle to ever attempting anything. Ultimately you just have to get on with it and take a little bit of a risk.

If you could wake up tomorrow with a new skill, what would it be?

̽��ֱ��ability to create an extra number of hours in the day and to have the energy to use them to do all the things I want to!

What motivates you to go to work each day?

̽��ֱ��excitement of novelty and new discoveries; the fact that there’s always something new to do. I just really love what I do – every day is different, the people and challenges are different and you don’t know what’s going to come next. It’s also great seeing the way the work we do affects the kids. That’s REALLY worth getting out of bed for.

What will the future look like in 2050?

As an archaeologist I have a particular time-deep view of this sort of thing. Society today is very unusual when you look at it in terms of past history, particularly the unparalleled rate at which we consume and our awareness of each other’s lives – locally, nationally and worldwide – through the media. I think it’s creating unprecedented stresses and potential for conflict, and I just hope the generation that is growing up today will be able to find solutions to these problems.

A passion for communicating the thrill of the dig and for uncovering evidence of lives long gone is what inspires archaeologist Dr Carenza Lewis. Her latest endeavour is to raise educational aspirations among schoolchildren through involvement in excavation - a venture that is unearthing new information on rural medieval settlements.

By digging and analysing their own archaeological test-pit, they’re creating one part of a huge jigsaw – the more pieces we have, the clearer and more accurate is the picture.

Dr Carenza Lewis

Eastern Daily Press

Dr Carenza Lewis

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