Childhood cancer expert Professor Sam Behjati has been announced as the new Head of the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Cambridge Children’s Research Institute at the planned new Cambridge Children’s Hospital.
It is an enormous privilege to be given the opportunity to lead child health research in CambridgeSam Behjati
Professor Behjati, a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, also holds positions as Honorary Consultant Paediatric Oncologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, and Group Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
“It is an enormous privilege to be given the opportunity to lead child health research in Cambridge, and I look forward to working and collaborating with individuals and stakeholders from around the campus,” said Professor Behjati.
Professor Patrick Maxwell, Regius Professor of Physic and Head of the School of Clinical Medicine at the University of Cambridge, said: “I am delighted that we have appointed Sam as Head of the Department of Paediatrics. He is an accomplished clinician scientist who has made important contributions to understanding cancers in childhood that have been recognised through prestigious awards.”
Originally from Germany, Professor Behjati read Medicine at Oxford University and pursued academic clinical training in London and Cambridge, including a PhD at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Funded by successive Wellcome Fellowships and then a Group Leader position at Sanger in 2018, he built a genomic research effort into the origins of childhood cancer.
His research is broad – it is tumour agnostic and technologically versatile – and combines DNA sequencing and single cell ‘omic’ methods. He retains a clinical practice as an Honorary Consultant Paediatric Oncologist and treats children with solid tumours outside the brain.
Alongside being Head of Department, Professor Behjati will be the Director of the Cambridge Children’s Research Institute, a key component of the new Cambridge Children’s Hospital. The Institute will embed research into Cambridge Children’s Hospital, bringing researchers and clinicians together in one place to create a collaborative and multi-disciplinary environment dedicated to improving the health of children and young people. It will work to understand the early origins of physical and mental health conditions, using this knowledge to intervene sooner, shifting from reactive care to prevention and early intervention, to mitigate or prevent onset of serious disease.
A University of Cambridge academic has been appointed to a new United Nations panel on Artificial Intelligence.
Anna Korhonen, a Professor of Natural Language Processing at the University, will be part of a panel of 40 members from across the world.
The Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence will bring together leading experts to assess how the technology is transforming our lives. One of its main duties will be to produce an annual report with evidence-based scientific assessments related to the opportunities, risks and impacts of AI, which will be presented at the United Nations Global Dialogue on AI Governance.
Based in the School of Arts and Humanities, Anna is Co-Director of the Institute for Technology and Humanity (ITH), Director of the Centre for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence (CHIA), and Co-Director of the Language Technology Lab (LTL) in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. She is also a Senior Research Fellow of Churchill College.
“I am honoured to be appointed to this panel, which serves as the first global scientific body on Artificial Intelligence,” Anna said.
“The appointment aligns closely with my research on developing responsible, human-centred AI and applying it to support global sustainable development.
“I am looking forward to taking up my place on the panel at its first meeting”.
Professor Sir John Aston, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Cambridge, congratulated Anna on her appointment.
“This appointment is recognition of Anna’s research focus around how to harness this incredible technology – Artificial Intelligence – for human good,” he said.
“She will be a fantastic representative not just for Cambridge but for UK research as a whole.”
University Marshal, Lucy Lewis, leads the procession into the Senate-House Credit: Tempest Photography
Eight distinguished individuals have been nominated for honorary degrees at the University of Cambridge. This year’s nominations recognise outstanding achievements in the fields of law, politics, science, the arts and music.
The former Federal Chancellor of Germany, Dr Angela Merkel, has been nominated for a Doctorate in Law, in recognition of her leadership and contribution to international relations. The first woman to hold the Chancellorship of a reunited Germany, Dr Merkel is renowned for her influence both in shaping European institutions and promoting unity and co-operation.
Also nominated to be a Doctor of Law is the lawyer and judge, Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill. Lady Chief Justice of England and Wales, and the first woman to be Head of the Judiciary and President of the Courts in England and Wales, Sue Carr is an alumna and Honorary Fellow of Trinity College and also the Visitor of Darwin College.
The barrister, academic and writer, ProfessorPhilippe Sands, is also proposed for a Doctorate in Law. He has extensive experience in international, environmental, criminal and maritime law as an advocate in the International Courts. An alumnus of Corpus Christi College and former Fellow of St Catharine’s College and Visiting Fellow at Jesus College, he is Professor of Law and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London.
A clinical medic and molecular biologist, Professor Yuk-ming Dennis Lo, has been nominated for a Doctorate in Medical Science. An alumnus and Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, Professor Lo is currently Vice-Chancellor and President of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research is widely recognised for its contributions to the development of non-invasive prenatal testing.
Dr Fabiola Gianotti, uniquely distinguished by two full terms as Director-General of CERN, has been proposed for a Doctorate in Science. Praised for her vision and rigour in the field of particle physics, Dr Gianotti is also known for her inspiring leadership of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider during the 2012 landmark discovery of the Higgs boson.
Nominated for a Doctorate in Letters, Sir Richard Eyre, is a former Artistic Director of the National Theatre. An alumnus and Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse Sir Richard has won a host of awards in both Britain and the United States for directing critically acclaimed plays, films, opera and television.
The artist, Dame Rachel Whiteread, was the first woman to win the Turner Prize in 1993. Proposed for a Doctorate in Letters, her thought provoking and highly praised work exploring such concepts as negative space and the imprint of daily life on objects has led to major public works, such as a resin-cast for the empty plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square and the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna. Dame Rachel is an Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College.
The composer and conductor, Sir George Benjamin, is nominated for a Doctorate in Music. An alumnus and Honorary Fellow of King’s College and Henry Purcell Professor of Composition at King’s College London, he has won numerous awards and is a celebrated figure in the world of contemporary music having had his compositions performed by orchestras worldwide.
Following the nominations by the University Council and after final approval by the Regent House (the University’s governing body) all eight individuals will be admitted to their degrees at a special Congregation on Wednesday, 24 June. The University’s Chancellor, Lord Smith of Finsbury, will preside at a ceremony attended by staff, students and alumni, as well as specially invited guests.
Artificial intelligence could help doctors detect serious heart valve disease years earlier, potentially saving thousands of lives, a new study suggests.
Researchers led by the University of Cambridge analysed heart sounds from nearly 1,800 patients using an AI algorithm trained to recognise valve disease, a condition that often goes undiagnosed until it becomes life-threatening.
The AI correctly identified 98% of patients with severe aortic stenosis, the most common form of valve disease requiring surgery, and 94% of those with severe mitral regurgitation, where the heart valve doesn’t fully close and blood leaks backwards across the valve.
The technology, which works with digital stethoscopes, outperformed GPs at detecting valve disease and could be used as a rapid screening tool in primary care. The results are reported in the journal npj Cardiovascular Health.
“Valve disease is a silent epidemic,” said Professor Anurag Agarwal from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who led the research. “An estimated 300,000 people in the UK have severe aortic stenosis alone, and around a third don’t know it. By the time symptoms appear, outcomes can be worse than for many cancers.”
Valvular heart disease affects more than half of people over the age of 65, with around one in ten having significant disease. In its early stages, it is often symptom-free. “By the time advanced symptoms develop, the risk of death can be as high as 80% within two years if untreated,” said co-author Professor Rick Steeds, from University Hospitals Birmingham. “The only current treatment is surgery to repair or replace the valve.”
Currently, diagnosis of valve disease relies on echocardiography, which is the gold standard, but is expensive and time-consuming. Wait times on the NHS can stretch to many months, meaning it cannot be used as a screening tool for the general population.
Doctors may listen to the heart using a stethoscope, but this is not routinely done in short GP appointments, and is known to miss many cases.
“Cardiac auscultation is a difficult skill, and it’s used less and less in busy GP surgeries,” said Agarwal. “That’s a big part of why so many cases of valve disease are being missed.”
The new study – a collaboration between engineers and cardiologists, research nurses and other clinicians from five NHS Trusts – used digital stethoscopes to record heart sounds from 1,767 patients. Each study participant also had an echocardiogram, which was used as a reference.
Rather than training the algorithm to recognise heart murmurs — the traditional diagnostic marker — the researchers trained it directly on echocardiogram results. This allowed the system to learn subtle acoustic patterns that humans might miss, including cases with no obvious murmur.
When tested against 14 GPs who listened to the same recordings, the algorithm outperformed every single one, and did so consistently. Individual GPs varied widely in their judgments, with some prioritising sensitivity and others specificity. The AI delivered reliable results every time and was particularly accurate for severe disease.
The system was designed to minimise false alarms, reducing the risk of overwhelming already-stretched echocardiography services. The researchers say that the technology is not intended to replace doctors, but could be a useful screening tool, helping doctors decide which patients should be referred for further investigation and treatment.
Only a few seconds of heart sound recording is needed, and the test could be carried out by staff with minimal training. “If you can rule out people who definitely don’t have significant disease, you can focus resources on those who need them most,” said Agarwal.
The researchers say that further trials, carried out in real-world GP settings with a diverse group of patients, will be needed before the device can be rolled out to the general population. In addition, they say that more moderate forms of valve disease are more difficult to detect.
However, they say that AI could help address growing pressures on the health service caused by an ageing population.
“Valve disease is treatable. We can repair or replace damaged valves and give people many more years of healthy life,” said Steeds. “But timing is everything. Simple, scalable screening tools like this could make a real difference by finding patients before irreversible damage occurs.”
The research was supported in part by the National Institute for Health Research, the British Heart Foundation, and the Medical Research Council (MRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Anurag Agarwal is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
An understudied group of bacteria in our gut microbiome appears to play a central role in keeping us healthy, according to researchers at the University of Cambridge.
These are a fundamental and underappreciated component of human health.Alexandre Almeida
In a huge global study led by University of Cambridge researchers, a single group of bacteria – named CAG-170 – has repeatedly shown up in high numbers in the gut microbiomes of healthy people.
CAG-170 is a group of gut bacteria known only from their genetic fingerprints – scientists have never been able to grow most of them in the lab.
Using diverse computational approaches, the team looked for CAG-170’s genetic fingerprint in gut microbiome samples from over 11,000 people across 39 countries.
They found the level of CAG-170 present was consistently higher in healthy people than those with diseases including inflammatory bowel disease, obesity and chronic fatigue syndrome.
Further analysis of CAG-170 revealed they have the capacity to produce high levels of Vitamin B12, and enzymes that break down a wide range of carbohydrates, sugars and fibres in our gut.
The researchers think it’s likely the Vitamin B12 supports other species of gut bacteria, rather than supporting the humans whose guts it is being produced in.
The findings mean that CAG-170 could, in the future, be used as an indicator of our gut microbiome health. They also open the door to developing new probiotics specifically designed to support and maintain healthy levels of CAG‑170 in the gut.
Dr Alexandre Almeida, a researcher in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine who led the work, said: “Our work has revealed that CAG-170 bacteria – part of the ‘hidden microbiome’ – appear to be key players in human health, likely by helping us to digest the main components of our food and keeping the whole microbiome running smoothly.”
He added: “We looked at the gut microbes of thousands of people across 39 countries and 13 different diseases including Crohn’s and obesity. We consistently found that people with these diseases had lower levels of CAG-170 bacteria in their gut.”
The study builds on Almeida’s previous work to create a comprehensive reference catalogue of all the genomes in the human gut microbiome, called the ‘Unified Human Gastrointestinal Genome catalogue’. He used an approach called ‘metagenomics’ – essentially, analysing the genomes of all the microbes in the gut in one go, and then teasing these apart into the genomes of individual species.
This revealed over 4,600 bacterial species, including over 3,000 that hadn’t previously been seen in the gut before – indicating the extent of the ‘hidden microbiome’ waiting to be explored. The catalogue provided ‘reference genomes’ for each species, including CAG-170: these are like fingerprints that the researchers can now look for in other gut microbiome samples.
“Our earlier work revealed that around two-thirds of the species in our gut microbiome were previously unknown. No-one knew what they were doing there – and now we’ve found that some of these are a fundamental and underappreciated component of human health,” said Almeida.
Three lines of evidence
The team looked at over 11,000 samples of human gut bacteria from people across 39 countries – primarily in Europe, North America and Asia. These were from healthy people, and people with 13 different diseases including Crohn’s, colorectal cancer, Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis.
By comparing each sample to the Unified Human Gastrointestinal Genome catalogue the researchers noticed that CAG-170 bacteria are the part of the ‘hidden microbiome’ most strongly linked with health – and this is consistent across countries.
In a second approach, the team computationally analysed the full make-up of the gut microbiome of over 6,000 healthy people to investigate which species had the strongest potential to keep the gut ecosystem in check. Of all the bacteria in the ‘hidden microbiome’, CAG-170 were again most consistently associated with health.
In a third analysis they measured the level of CAG-170 present in the gut microbiomes of people with dysbiosis – a condition where the gut microbiome is out of balance. This revealed that lower levels of CAG-170 in the gut are linked with a higher likelihood of having a gut imbalance. Dysbiosis is linked with many long-term conditions including irritable bowel syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, and anxiety and depression.
Therapeutic possibilities
The billions of bacteria that make up our gut microbiome represent around 4,600 different species. The composition is different in all of us, but the function is the same: to keep our body running smoothly.
Scientists hope that by understanding more about what a healthy gut microbiome looks like, they can see how it changes in people with specific diseases – and try to correct it using approaches including tailored probiotics. The new study is an important step towards making this a reality.
“The probiotic industry hasn’t really kept up with gut microbiome research – people are still using the same probiotic species that were being used decades ago. We’re now discovering new groups of bacteria like CAG-170 with important links to our health, and probiotics aimed at supporting them could have a much greater health benefit,” said Almeida.
Until now, scientists studying the gut microbiome have focused their attention on the bacteria within it that can be grown, and therefore studied, in the lab. Most of the CAG-170 gut bacteria are not in this category – so scientists will need to figure out ways to grow and test them, in order to translate these findings into new potential therapeutics.
Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge and Professor Duncan Ivison, President and Vice-Chancellor of The University of Manchester Credit: The Cambridge x Manchester Partnership
Momentum is building behind the University of Cambridge’s groundbreaking partnership with The University of Manchester, with inaugural board meetings hosted across Manchester this week.
The agenda included a stakeholder meeting on The University of Manchester’s campus on Wednesday 4 February, and a creative roundtable in MediaCity on Thursday 5 February, hosted by University of Manchester Professor of Poetry, John McAuliffe, on the role of the creative economy in innovation.
Transport for Greater Manchester also hosted a meeting to showcase Manchester’s transport network, providing the chance to share learnings between the two cities, before the first partnership advisory board meeting was held at the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre.
The events were attended by both the mayors of Greater Manchester and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough respectively, Andy Burnham and Paul Bristow, and the Vice-Chancellors of the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge, Professor Duncan Ivison and Professor Deborah Prentice. Attendees also included the leaders of both city councils, Shaun Grady, UK Chair of AstraZeneca, and industry leaders from both regions.
The visit to Manchester follows on from the launch of the partnership and the initial stakeholder visit to Cambridge last year. £4.8 million in funding was awarded by Research England for the collaboration, which is the first cross-UK innovation partnership.
At the 2025 Innovate Cambridge Summit in October, the partnership announced its advisory board which brings together leaders from academia, industry and policy to guide the collaboration between the two cities.
Delivered by both Universities’ innovation capabilities, Innovate Cambridge and Unit M, the ambitious partnership was launched to boost UK economic growth and advance inclusive innovation, while supporting the delivery of industrial strategy and local growth plans.
The partnership is connected at every level: University to University, innovation ecosystem to ecosystem, council to council, Combined Authority to Combined Authority and business to business. This multi-layered connectivity allows ideas, talent, investment and opportunity to flow between places and organisations.
Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: “The Cambridge x Manchester partnership brings together two great universities and cities with complementary strengths and the will to work together. We are already showing how connected ecosystems can drive innovation, investment and inclusive growth. This week’s meetings underline the momentum behind our shared ambition and the firm foundations being laid for the next phase of work.”
Professor Duncan Ivison, President and Vice-Chancellor of The University of Manchester said: “Our unique partnership with Cambridge brings together expertise, ideas and resources to support innovation and impact in the UK. It has been valuable to spend time together at the University and across the city this week to reflect on our progress and discuss how we continue to build on the strengths of our two great universities and city regions.”
Kathryn Chapman, Executive Director, Innovate Cambridge, said: “Cambridge and Manchester have deep histories of innovation, with complementary strengths that span the full journey from discovery to scale. By combining Cambridge’s track record in transformational early-stage companies and attraction of capital with Manchester’s strength in development, application and deployment across markets, this partnership will help shape the UK’s future economic growth.”
• £36 million investment to increase the AI Research Resource supercomputing capacity at Cambridge sixfold by spring 2026. • More cutting-edge AI chips will be available free of charge to UK researchers and start-ups. • The supercomputer is already helping to deliver breakthroughs in areas like healthcare and environmental modelling.
In a boost for UK innovation and research, the University of Cambridge’s AI supercomputer is set to get six times more powerful thanks to a £36 million funding injection.
The investment builds on Cambridge’s position at the heart of the Oxford-Cambridge corridor – one of Europe’s most important centres for science, technology and innovation, home to globally-leading universities, research institutions, and fast-growing tech companies.
Already the supercomputer is having a real-world impact, having supported over 350 projects. Scientists have been using it to develop AI tools that could speed up personalised cancer vaccines, working out exactly which parts of a tumour the immune system needs to target. Others are using it to better understand the changing environment.
The extra AI power computing power will kick in as early as spring and will help create everyday benefits like: • Faster, more accurate tools that help doctors spot diseases much earlier • Smarter technology that cuts waiting times and makes public services easier to use • Better climate modelling to help communities prepare for extreme weather.
Professor Sir John Aston, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, University of Cambridge, said: “This investment marks an important milestone for the UK’s AI Research Resource, expanding the power of Cambridge’s supercomputer and strengthening our national computing ecosystem.
“It will give researchers, clinicians and innovators the tools they need to drive breakthroughs that improve public services. The University of Cambridge is proud to work with industry leaders such as Dell to ensure world class compute is available to those tackling society’s most complex challenges, helping the UK shape the next generation of AI for public good.”
Government Minister for AI Kanishka Narayan, said: “The UK is home to world-class AI talent, but too often our ambitious researchers and most promising start-ups have been held back by a lack of access to the computing power they need.
“This investment changes that – giving British innovators the tools to compete with the biggest players and develop AI that improves lives, from spotting diseases earlier to helping communities prepare for extreme weather, right across the country.”
High levels of testosterone in the blood have been linked to a greater risk of coronary artery disease in men, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Cambridge.
When there is a medical need to boost testosterone, the benefits are likely to outweigh the risks, but this might not necessarily be the case when taken to boost performanceEmily Morbey
The findings could have implications for the use of testosterone supplements, which while they have approved medical applications, are increasing in popularity, particularly among younger men who see testosterone as a way to fight ageing, enhancing performance or building strength.
Testosterone supplementation is an approved treatment for hypogonadism, a condition in which the body doesn’t make enough of the hormone, and which typically manifests with fatigue and sexual dysfunction. Evidence from randomised controlled trials has shown beneficial effects of testosterone supplementation on sexual function, lean mass and muscle strength. Low circulating testosterone – that is, testosterone in the blood – is also a risk factor for poor metabolic health.
Recent years have seen testosterone supplements being promoted increasingly on social media and by influencers, often aimed towards younger men to boost their testosterone levels for perceived benefits like muscle growth, strength, energy, and confidence.
However, questions remain about the long-term health impacts of testosterone levels.
Observational studies have linked low measured testosterone levels with an increased risk of coronary artery disease in men, but randomized controlled trials – the ‘gold standard’ for testing the effectiveness of treatments – have been inconclusive and often contradictory.
To address the question of the impact of testosterone supplements on coronary artery disease, a team led by scientists at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge turned to a technique known as Mendelian randomisation. Mendelian randomisation involves using genetic variants as a way of exploring causal links between exposures (often to environmental factors) and disease.
In this case, using data from more than 400,000 adults recruited to UK Biobank and over 1 million individuals recruited to CARDIoGRAMplusC4D, the researchers looked for genetic variants that lead to higher levels of testosterone in the blood and examined whether carriers of these variants were at a greater or lesser risk of coronary artery disease.
The results are published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.
The team found that for men, having genetically higher testosterone was linked to a 17% higher risk of coronary artery disease. Previous studies have suggested that an individual’s risk of coronary artery disease is 7.3% over their lifetime – testosterone supplementation would raise this to 8.5%. The increased risk seemed to be in part due to the fact that testosterone raises blood pressure.
The researchers argue that the reason this appears to contradict observational studies is most likely explained by other, confounding health factors such as diabetes and obesity. People with these conditions tend to have lower testosterone levels and greater risk of coronary artery disease.
The researchers found no clear link between testosterone and risk of coronary artery disease in women.
Emily Morbey, a PhD student at the MRC Epidemiology Unit and King’s College, University of Cambridge, said: “More and more men are taking testosterone supplements, in part because of greater awareness of hypogonadism in men, but also because of increased marketing and social media trends, particularly targeted at younger men.
“Our work indicates that high levels of testosterone in the blood increase the risk of coronary artery disease, which in turn can put people at risk of heart attack and heart failure. When there is a medical need to boost testosterone, the benefits are likely to outweigh the risks, but this might not necessarily be the case when taken to boost performance.”
Senior author Professor Ken Ong, also from the MRC Epidemiology Unit, said: “The US Food and Drug Administration has already issued guidance on the potential cardiovascular risk associated with testosterone supplementation. In the UK, there is no national guidance on the potential cardiovascular risk of high levels of testosterone. Our results suggest there’s a need for more consistent warnings.”
The research was funded by the Medical Research Council, with additional support from the National Institutes for Health and Care Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.
In a career defined by constant questioning, self-doubt can become an occupational hazard. Now, for the first time, a group of Cambridge scientists reveal the personal struggles they’ve faced – and continue to face – as they strive for success.
Hidden behind every successful career story is the reality that progression isn’t often a smooth and easy path. Rejections, setbacks, and the doubts they seed are rarely shared – leaving us to believe that they don’t happen to other people the way they happen to us.
“Unless we’re part of the story, we don’t see the failures that line the path to success,” says Adrian Liston, Professor of Pathology at the University of Cambridge. “You don’t want to tell people that you feel like you’re failing, so you keep it inside and you think you’re the only one. But everyone around you is doing that too.”
Liston is a successful scientist who has run a research lab, together with Professor James Dooley, for almost twenty years. He’s come to see self-doubt as an occupational hazard of a scientific career, in a world where people are working at the boundaries of knowledge and constantly trying to disprove their ideas.
“Science is a very weird career in that we’re judged entirely on those rare successful days, the journal publications, which might come after years of failure. From the outside, people simply look at our successful days and celebrate those,” says Liston.
“But a scientific career is all about trying to understand the unknown, and 95% of the time our experiments will fail. This can be very disorientating when all you see of other people is their success,” he adds.
In a new book published today Liston has brought together personal tales, including his own, to reveal the insecurities and fears felt by scientists at various stages of their careers.
The accounts – from past and present members of his lab group – are honest, surprising, and could help us all.
“Over and over again during my mentoring and tutoring I hear worries like: ‘what if everyone else is smarter than me? What if I can’t do it?’,” says Liston, who is also Equalities Fellow and Postgraduate Welfare Tutor at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge.
Some of the stories he shares in the book are inspirational: written by people who overcame seemingly insurmountable challenges to become scientists, from chronic health issues to restrictive cultural norms. Others are contributed by people earlier in their careers who are still grappling with doubts about their abilities – but refuse to give up.
“I’d love it if people got inspiration from some of these stories,” says Liston. “But the most important thing for me is that people realise they’re not alone when they’re doubting their abilities – it’s a common part of the scientific experience, you just learn to deal with it.”
Liston’s experience is in biomedical sciences, but he suspects the problem of self-doubt is much more widely experienced. Like everyone else, he’s had his share of challenges and failures. Unlike others, he – and his fellow scientists – are willing to share them.
Among those who share their personal stories are:
Professor James Dooley, Department of Pathology
Following a childhood of mental and physical abuse Dooley lived in foster care for over a decade, and slept rough on the streets of Seattle, before trying to get into college without having finished high school.
“I want to show people that you can come from a place where you don’t have any advantages in life and still be successful. While my doubts and desire to be invisible have become quieter over time, they’ve never fully gone away. But now I know how to keep going in spite of them.”
“You have to put the effort in, but once you take the first step it might not be as hard as you think. I met people who saw more potential in me than I saw in myself – I think if people see you’re trying, they want to help.”
Dr Ntombizodwa Makuyana, Postdoctoral Scientist, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and Jesus College
Makuyana grew up in rural Zimbabwe and was expected to prioritise learning how to run a house, in preparation for marriage, over her education. But at school she became fascinated by science and resolved to forge a different future for herself. She shares the doubts she had about taking her own path, and how she balanced these with the drive to change her situation – which led to opportunities she’d never known existed.
“The majority of my female friends got married before we finished secondary school – it’s just how society is where I come from. I want young girls to know that you don’t have to give in to your doubts. You can challenge yourself and be much more than people expect of you.”
“From a young age I often questioned myself, and while I still do at times, I have improved in managing my doubts. Being in Cambridge and seeing women achieve remarkable things is always encouraging and serves as a reminder of my potential and what is possible for me.”
Stavroula Piliou, PhD student, Department of Pathology and Lucy Cavendish College
Following a family move to the UK from Greece when she was young, Piliou’s poor English meant she struggled at school, and later, the challenge of dealing with a chronic autoimmune condition pushed her to question her ability to follow a scientific path. Yet she absolutely refused to quit and now holds a Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarship, awarded to the most talented students from around the world.
“I think it’s important not to let your disability or your background define you. Being diagnosed with a chronic condition can make young people think they need to stop working, or can’t achieve their dreams.”
“I still regularly ask myself if I can do this, but it’s very important not to quit. If you really try, and you don’t give up, you can achieve great things and contribute to society.”
Dr Lydia Makaroff, Chief Executive, Multiple Sclerosis International Federation
Makaroff says when she was finally awarded PhD, that moment of success hid a drawn-out struggle – with an unsupportive supervisor, lack of research funding, and minimal guidance on her work. Her move to a new lab in a different country, and the camaraderie she found there, helped her realise that self-doubt was actually a strength in a scientific career.
“We keep self-doubt to ourselves because we think it’s a sign of weakness, or it means we’re not suited to science. It’s a bit taboo to talk about it in a place like Cambridge where it seems so easy for everyone else. But we all have struggles, and we do all belong.”
“People carry their own insecurities, and often project them outward. When someone tells you that you fall short, it may say as much about their own fears as about your work.”
World-class scientists, like the rest of us, face challenges, failures and rejections throughout their careers. What makes a person successful is that they learn to deal with their doubts, and don’t give up on their ambitions.
“Isolation is one of the most harmful aspects of self-doubt, but fortunately it’s the one we can most easily act on – we just need to share our stories,” says Lison. His book, ‘Self-Doubt: An Anthology of Experiences in the Biomedical Sciences’, is published on 30 January 2026 and available from Amazon and The Great British Bookshop.
Published 29 January 2026
Illustration (top) by Natalie Ng. Photographs by Jacqueline Garget.
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Seven Cambridge researchers have been appointed Fellows of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences. The inaugural cohort of 100 Fellows brings together the UK’s strongest mathematicians across academia, education, business, industry, and government to help solve some of the UK’s biggest challenges.
Included among the Fellowship are winners of the Fields Medal, business leaders, distinguished teachers and academics, science communicators, and pioneers of computing and machine learning. They will collaborate on tackling challenges, including pandemic preparedness, economic transformation, national security, and safe AI
Much like Fellows of the other National Academies (Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering, British Academy and the Academy of Medical Sciences), the Fellows of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences have been recognised as leaders in their fields, through fundamental discoveries, exceptional work in education, or driving the application of mathematics across society.
The new Cambridge Fellows are:
Professor Sir John Aston FRS is the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Cambridge. He is the Harding Professor of Statistics in Public Life and a Fellow of Churchill College. John leads research into the use of quantitative evidence in public policymaking. He works with those in public life to ensure they use the best methods. He aims to improve the use of statistics and quantitative evidence in public policy. He was Chief Scientific Adviser and Director-General for Science, Technology, Analysis, Research and Strategy at the Home Office from 2017 to 2020. He was a founding director of the Alan Turing Institute. John was knighted in 2021 for services to statistics and public policymaking.
Professor Anne-Christine Davis OBE is the Emeritus Professor of Mathematical Physics (1967) at Cambridge and Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. She was the first female Professor in the Faculty of Mathematics at Cambridge. She has held positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, CERN, Imperial College and Durham University. Her work over a number of years has been in the area of dark energy and theoretical cosmology. She was awarded an OBE in the King’s Birthday honours in 2024.
Professor Richard Samworth FRS is Professor of Statistical Science and a Fellow of St John’s College. Since 2017, he has also been Director of the Statistical Laboratory. His main research interests are in statistical methodology and theory (particularly nonparametric and high-dimensional statistics), as well as the statistical foundations of AI. He received the COPSS Presidents’ Award in 2018, was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021 and was awarded the David Cox Medal for Statistics and the Royal Statistical Society Guy Medal in Silver in 2025.
Professor Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb is Professor of Applied Mathematics, Head of the Cambridge Image Analysis group and a Fellow of Jesus College. Her current research interests focus on variational methods, partial differential equations and machine learning for image analysis, image processing and inverse imaging problems, and the mathematical foundations of machine learning. Her research has been acknowledged by scientific prizes, among them the LMS Whitehead Prize 2016, the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2017, the Calderon Prize 2019, a Royal Society Wolfson fellowship in 2020, and an ELLIS fellowship in 2025. She convened the European Women in Mathematics Association between 2016 and 2020 and chaired the Committee for Applications and Interdisciplinary Relations (CAIR) of the European Mathematical Society from 2021 to 2025.
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Cambridge, and a Fellow of Churchill College. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, which aimed to improve the way that statistical evidence is used by health professionals, patients, lawyers and judges, media and policymakers. He has authored several bestselling books and hosted multiple BBC4 documentaries. His career highlights include appearing on Desert Island Discs in 2022 and, in 2011, coming 7th in an episode of BBC One’s Winter Wipeout. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005, awarded an OBE in 2006, and knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics. He was President of the Royal Statistical Society for 2017-2018, and has been a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority since 2020.
Professor Jack Thorne FRS is a pure mathematician with research interests at the intersection of number theory, representation theory, and algebra, particularly in the Langlands programme and arithmetic statistics. For his contributions to the subject, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2020. Jack received his PhD from Harvard University in 2012, when he was elected a Clay Research Fellow, and has held positions at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. He is currently Kuwait Professor of Number Theory & Algebra at Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College.
Professor Wendelin Werner is Rouse Ball Professor at Cambridge since 2023. Prior to that, he had been a professor at University of Paris-Sud (1997-2013) and ETH Zürich (2013-2023). For his research in Probability Theory, he has received a number of awards, including the Fields Medal in 2006. He is an Honorary Fellow of Gonville & Caius College.
Lord Vallance KCB FRS FMedSci FRCP HonFREng, Minister for Science, Innovation, Research and Nuclear in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), said:
“Mathematics sits at the heart of the UK’s scientific and technological strength and is essential to the development of the industries of the future, in exciting fields like AI and quantum.
“The Academy for the Mathematical Sciences’ inaugural Fellows represent the very best of this national capability, and I commend the Academy for bringing them together. Their expertise strengthens our security, boosts productivity and supports high‑quality jobs across the country, so it is only right that they are celebrated.”
Dr Chris Macdonald’s groundbreaking Virtual Reality public speaking platform won the Technological Innovation of the Year category at the Times Higher Education Awards 2025.
Those who use the VR platform can practise in a stadium in front of 10,000 animated spectators, with loud noises, stadium lights, and flashing cameras.
Dr Chris MacDonald
Dr Macdonald – a Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College – was among a number of University staff recognised for their innovative contribution to research and academia during a ceremony at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.
Cambridge’s PROFILE trial team were shortlisted in the Research Project of the Year: STEM category, for their transformative work on early biologic therapy for newly diagnosed Crohn’s disease. And Technician Development Advisor John Nicolson was shortlisted for Outstanding Technician of the Year, for his leadership and commitment to the technical community.
Dr Macdonald’s free, first-of-its-kind platform provides Virtual Reality (VR) training environments, as well as support from an AI coach, to build confidence in people with public speaking anxiety and transform them into skilled and confident presenters.
He said: “Prior to a presentation, most students tend to practise on their own, in a highly controlled environment – normally in their bedrooms – to an audience of zero. As a result, it will feel like a significant step up when they present to even a small group of people, and even a subtle audience gesture can throw them off.
“By contrast, those who use my VR platform can practise in a different venue every night to a wide range of increasingly distracting audiences and fear-inducing scenarios. They can, for example, practise in a stadium in front of 10,000 animated spectators, with loud noises, stadium lights, and flashing cameras. Accordingly, a subsequent presentation to a small group can feel like a step down. I call this overexposure therapy. It could be thought of as psychological weight training. And it has been shown to build extra adaptability, grit, and resilience.”
He added: “The goal in my lab is simple but ambitious: build high-impact transformational tools and make them free to all. By working with truly visionary philanthropists, I believe we can make that a reality and transform millions of lives.”
Researchers have achieved a new level of control over the atomic structure of a family of materials known as halide perovskites, creating a finely tuned ‘energy sandwich’ that could transform how solar cells, LEDs and lasers are made.
Due to their remarkable ability to absorb and emit light, and because they are cheaper and can be configured to convert more of the solar spectrum into energy than silicon, perovskites have long been touted as a potential replacement for silicon in solar cells, LEDs and quantum technologies.
However, their instability and durability have, so far, largely limited perovskite devices to the laboratory. In addition, scientists have struggled to precisely control the thickness of perovskite films, and control how different perovskite layers interact when stacked together – an important step in building functional, multi-layered structures.
Now, a team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge has found a new way to grow ultra-thin layers of perovskite films so their atoms line up perfectly, which could enable more powerful, durable and efficient devices.
The researchers used a vapour-based technique to grow three-dimensional and two-dimensional perovskites one layer at a time, which enabled them to control the thicknesses of the films down to fractions of an atom. Their results, reported in the journal Science, could open the door to usable perovskite devices that can be produced at scale, using a process like that used to make commercial semiconductors.
Each layer in a semiconductor ‘sandwich’ does a different job in moving electrons and their positively-charged counterparts – called holes – around and determines how the semiconductors absorb or emit light. Together, the layers act like one-way streets that guide the electric charges in opposite directions, preventing them from bumping back into each other and wasting energy as heat.
In other widely used semiconductors, such as silicon or newer materials such as gallium nitride, the properties of the individual layers can be fine-tuned using various methods. But perovskites, despite their excellent performance, have so far proved difficult to control in layered devices, due in part to their ‘chaotic’ atomic structure.
“A lot of perovskite research uses solution processing, which is messy and hard to control,” Professor Sam Stranks from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, who co-led the research. “By switching to vapour processing — the same method used for standard semiconductors — we can get that same degree of atomic control, but with materials that are much more forgiving.”
The researchers used a combination of three-dimensional and two-dimensional perovskites to create and control their atomically-tuned stacks, a phenomenon known as epitaxial growth. This fine control let the team directly observe how the light given off by the material changes depending on whether it’s a single layer, a double layer, or thicker.
“The hope was we could grow a perfect perovskite crystal where we change the chemical composition layer by layer, and that’s what we did,” said co-first author Dr Yang Lu from Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology and Cavendish Laboratory. “It’s like building a semiconductor from the ground up, one atomic layer after another, but with materials that are much easier and cheaper to process.”
The researchers also found they could engineer the junctions between the layers to control whether electrons and holes stayed together or apart — a key factor in how efficiently a material emits light.
“We’ve reached a level of tunability that wasn’t even on our radar when we started,” said Professor Sir Richard Friend from the Cavendish Laboratory, who co-led the research. “We can now decide what kind of junction we want — one that holds charges together or one that pulls them apart — just by slightly changing the growth conditions.”
The researchers found they could tune the energy difference between the layers by more than half an electron volt, and in some cases, extend the lifetime of electrons and holes to over 10 microseconds: far longer than usual.
The team says this level of precision could pave the way for scalable, high-performance devices that use light in new ways, from lasers and detectors to next-generation quantum technologies.
“Changing the composition and performance of perovskites at will – and probing these changes – is a real achievement and reflects the amount of time and investment we’ve made here at Cambridge,” said Stranks. “But more importantly, it shows how we can make working semiconductors from perovskites, which could one day revolutionise how we make cheap electronics and solar cells.”
The research was supported in part by the Royal Society, the European Research Council, the Simons Foundation, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Richard Friend is a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. Sam Stranks is a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.
For more information on energy-related research in Cambridge, please visit the Energy IRC, which brings together Cambridge’s research knowledge and expertise, in collaboration with global partners, to create solutions for a sustainable and resilient energy landscape for generations to come.
The University of Cambridge has been recognised for the work it does to ensure care experienced students are supported while studying for their degrees. The University has received the Quality Mark from the National Network for the Education of Care Leavers (NNECL) in recognition of its plans to improve student experience and outcomes throughout their time with the University.
The University recognises that this work is ongoing
Mike Nicholson
Mike Nicholson, Director of Recruitment, Admissions and Participation welcomed the news:
“The University is delighted to receive the NNECL Quality Mark in recognition of the valuable activity that takes place across the collegiate University to support students from care experienced backgrounds navigate their time at Cambridge. The University recognises that this work is ongoing, and is grateful that making this application has both identified those areas where we already have strengths in the support we offer whilst also helping us see scope for further action and improvement.”
The NNECL Quality Mark enables institutions to assess their current practice, identify gaps in provision and establish areas for further development. Several Universities and FE Colleges have been awarded it over recent years.
Sian Edwards, Programme Manager at the NNECL, praised the University’s approach:
“We are delighted to award the University of Cambridge the NNECL Quality Mark in recognition of their commitment to supporting students from care experienced and estranged backgrounds. Navigating the complexities of a devolved college model presents unique challenges, yet the University has demonstrated dedication to developing and embedding consistent, inclusive practices across the institution. Their whole-university approach ensures that care experienced and estranged learners are supported to achieve positive outcomes. Congratulations to everyone at the University of Cambridge on this well-deserved recognition.”
Students attending the university who are care-experienced, or estranged from family, are entitled to the maximum level of financial support available through the Cambridge Bursary Scheme. With other grants and awards added, this can amount to more than £8,000 a year. Colleges will also provide accommodation all year round as these students often do not have homes to return to out of term-time.
In 2018, the University of Cambridge was one of the first signatories to the government’s Care Leaver Covenant which commits partners to providing educational and career opportunities to young people exiting the care system.
Around 38 care experienced students were admitted to an undergraduate degree course or to the University’s Foundation Year in 2025 but the true number might be higher as this figure is based on students who declare their status at registration and might not include all those who are estranged from family.
The Principal of Homerton College, Lord Simon Woolley, was brought up by foster parents in the 1960s and 70s. He has spoken at a number of events and conferences aimed at breaking down barriers for care experienced teenagers:
“It is imperative that both the University and the Colleges recognise the challenges for those who have been in care and have had the amazing journey to be here at Cambridge. We need to acknowledge them but also ensure we have an infrastructure in place that helps them go from A to B and on to further success. The NNECL Quality Mark is a recognition that we are on the right track.”
Widening participation co-ordinator, Kirstyn Kedaitis, accepted the Quality Mark on behalf of the University. She says:
‘The action plan we submitted in our NNECL Quality Mark application maps out our goals for improvement over the next three years. We have already started a staff project centred around best practice in supporting students from highly under-represented groups, including backgrounds of care experience and estrangement. In January, we will complement this by establishing a working group focused specifically on addressing our Quality Mark action plan. This working group will include representation from Cambridge’s care experienced and estranged student community.’
More information about the NNECL’s Quality Mark can be found here.
Information and guidance on the support available to students at Cambridge who are care experienced or estranged from family can be found here.
An ancient plant-fungus partnership has been revealed using advanced microscopy imaging, providing evidence of the mutually beneficial relationship that enabled plants to adapt to life on land.
Our new technique is opening an exciting new window on life’s earliest chapters.
Raymond Wightman
Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Natural History Museum, London have identified a new species of ancient symbiotic fungus preserved within a 407-million-year-old plant fossil from Scotland. The discovery provides unprecedented three-dimensional insight into one of the earliest known plant–fungus partnerships, known as mycorrhiza.
Gardeners and farmers know mycorrhizae are vital for plant health – with these fungi living symbiotically inside plant roots, extending their reach to absorb water and nutrients like phosphorus. This mutually beneficial partnership underpins the majority of plant life today and is one of nature’s most successful relationships.
Studying this partnership, which dates back to when plants first colonised land, is allowing scientists to discover new information about how plant-fungi partnerships shaped ecosystems for hundreds of millions of years.
The advanced microscopy techniques used to distinguish the fungus from the surrounding plant cells open a powerful new way to identify fossilised life forms. By analysing the fossils’ unique light signatures – a kind of natural fingerprint preserved through time – scientists can detect traces of organisms long after their DNA has vanished.
Published today in the journal New Phytologist, the paper describes a new species of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus, Rugososporomyces lavoisierae, forming a symbiotic relationship with the early land plant, Aglaophyton majus – the second fungal species known to have been hosted by this plant.
The fossil from the Windyfield Chert, Scotland provides the most detailed evidence to date that early land plants engaged in complex symbiotic relationships with multiple fungal species over 400 million years ago.
The implications of this discovery extend far beyond the immediate findings.
“This is just the start. By applying these methods to the fossilised remains of different organisms, we now have a powerful new tool to tell apart structures that may look similar but differ in their fine ultrastructure, for example ancient arthropods, plants and fungi,” said Professor Sebastian Schornack, Group Leader at the Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University, who co-led the study.
He added: “This technique adds a new dimension to how we identify, describe and discriminate fossilised ancient life, using the unique light signals these materials emit as a kind of fingerprint. Although the original biological material is fossilised and no DNA remains, these optical signatures preserve vital clues to their identity.”
Using these techniques with other fossils from the Windfield and nearby Rhynie cherts, researchers aim to understand how early symbioses evolved and how plants and fungi first learned to coexist.
The fossil analysis brought together specialists from the Natural History Museum – who found the new fungus and conducted brightfield microscopy and confocal microscopy with the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris; the Sainsbury Laboratory Microscopy Core Facility – who conducted confocal, fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) and Raman imaging; and the Cambridge Graphene Centre, responsible for Raman spectroscopy.
The combined use of advanced imaging and spectroscopy applied for the first time to a fossil plant enabled the team to distinguish fossilised fungal and plant tissues based on their unique light signatures, marking a breakthrough that could transform how scientists’ study ancient life in the future.
“By combining confocal fluorescence lifetime imaging with Raman spectroscopy, we can chemically identify ancient microscopic life forms with remarkable precision. Our new technique is opening an exciting new window on life’s earliest chapters,” said Dr Raymond Wightman, Manager of the Sainsbury Laboratory Microscopy Core Facility who led the FLIM imaging work.
The fossil, held at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, was prepared and studied by the Natural History Museum’s scientific associate Dr Christine Strullu-Derrien, who co-led the study.
“Mycorrhizas are very rare in the fossil record and have never been found in the Windyfield Chert before. The presence of the arbuscule shows that the fungus wasn’t parasitising on the plant or feeding on it after death – instead, there was a symbiotic association. The fungus would have provided minerals like phosphorus in return for sugars from the plant in a way that benefits them both,” said Dr Christine Strullu-Derrien.
This fossilised relationship was found to closely resemble modern arbuscular mycorrhizal associations that continue to play a vital role in plant nutrition and soil health today.
The UK’s drive to net zero won’t succeed on wind turbines and solar farms alone. The real bottleneck is moving that clean electricity from remote fields and offshore platforms to the homes, cities and industries that need it.
However, a report co-authored by researchers from the University of Cambridge highlights a technology that could change the game: high-temperature superconducting (HTS) cables.
The UK is a world leader in offshore wind. But transmitting electricity from the North Sea to the Midlands and south, without losing much of it along the way, is a growing technological and political challenge.
With their ultra-high power density and near-zero losses, HTS cables could be a solution. They can carry vast amounts of electricity underground, quietly, and efficiently, without the need for overhead transmission lines.
“The real attraction of superconducting transmission is that it allows us to carry more electricity, over longer distances, without wasting energy or disrupting the environment,” said Professor Tim Coombs from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, a co-author of the report, commissioned by the Institute of Physics (IOP).
Traditional aluminium cables strung from pylons lose between 5% and 10% of the electricity they generate as heat. For the UK, that adds up to 25 terawatt hours a year — energy worth around £3.75 billion annually.
HTS cables, cooled by liquid nitrogen, have no electrical resistance. They can deliver electricity generated hundreds of miles away without waste, turning what is currently a massive cost into a massive saving.
Additionally, a single buried HTS cable can carry the same amount of power as multiple aluminium or copper overhead or underground lines. In urban areas where land is scarce, this density makes a huge difference: far fewer trenches or rows of pylons are needed. And because the cables can be buried, the visual impact on the countryside is minimal.
For consumers, this means preserving landscapes while still connecting to renewable power. For industry and government, it means removing bottlenecks that threaten the grid as different sources of energy come online.
“Grid bottlenecks sometimes force operators to curtail generation, wasting clean power,” said Coombs. “HTS cables could act as low-loss ‘superhighways’ to move renewable energy exactly where it’s needed. They could also be used to feed the output of large solar farms straight into the grid, without the need for long new transmission lines. HTS makes every unit of clean electricity count — reducing reliance on fossil fuels and easing the need for costly new power stations.”
Although initial investment costs for HTS cables are higher than for aluminium lines, the savings from reduced energy losses, greater grid reliability, and avoidance of new fossil-fuel generation more than offset these expenses over time.
Coombs and his colleagues specialise in turning the theory of superconductivity into viable engineering designs. They have worked on the fabrication of defect-free HTS tapes, improved cryogenic cooling systems, and developed new methods for integrating HTS with existing high-voltage alternating and direct current (HVAC and HVDC) grids.
“Cambridge research has always combined fundamental discovery with practical application,” said Coombs. “In superconductivity, that means moving from the lab bench to systems that can really carry the nation’s power.”
Other nations are already demonstrating HTS technology at scale: projects in Germany (AmpaCity), the US, Japan and China have shown that superconducting cables can operate reliably in live grid environments.
With electricity demand expected to rise sharply due to the electrification of transport and heating, the UK risks being left behind unless it acts quickly to move from research prototypes to substantial field trials.
The IOP report highlights the need for major UK demonstration projects — a buried HTS transmission link capable of handling real grid demands. Such a trial would not only prove performance and reliability but also help establish standards and build supply chains for this emerging industry.
“This should be treated as a national priority,” says Coombs. “A field trial on British soil would place us at the forefront of a technology set to grow globally over the next half-century. The benefits are not just environmental — they are industrial and strategic too, helping the UK bridge the gap between promising prototypes and full-scale deployment.”
If the UK develops HTS transmission technology successfully, there may be opportunities to supply components and expertise to international projects, such as the European Supergrid and Asian renewable networks.
British-made superconducting cables, fault current limiters, and associated cryogenic systems could find niche markets abroad, supporting high-value jobs and the UK’s manufacturing base.
As countries expand renewable energy and look to reduce carbon emissions, demand for efficient, low-loss transmission is expected to grow. HTS technology could offer solutions and potential new markets over the coming decades.
For the government, HTS represents a way to meet climate targets more affordably by reducing the need for additional generating capacity. For the electricity supply industry, it promises greater efficiency and resilience in the face of rising demand. And for the public, it means protecting landscapes while cutting bills and carbon.
“Superconducting transmission is not a futuristic dream — it is a practical solution to today’s challenges,” said Coombs. “By investing now, we can secure energy security, lower costs, and ensure the UK leads in a technology the world will soon need.”
Tim Coombs is a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Cambridge researchers have developed a new way to measure the impact of our food production on other species’ survival around the world.
It reveals nuances that could guide national agricultural policies – and perhaps also influence our personal dietary choices.
How does your dinner affect the risk of 30,875 species of land-dwelling animal going extinct?
Dr Thomas Ball can tell you. Depending on what you’re eating he can calculate the likelihood of the global demise of every mammal, bird, amphibian and reptile over the next 100 years. He’ll tell you that not all dinners are equal.
“Every time anyone eats anything, it has an impact on the other species we share the planet with,” says Ball, a postdoctoral researcher in the Conservation Science Group in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.
“Rearing the cattle for one kilo of beef needs a huge amount of land, which displaces a lot of natural habitat. On average, that has a much bigger impact on species’ survival than growing one kilo of vegetable protein like beans or lentils.”
Of the many ways that our appetites harm biodiversity, land-use change and habitat destruction for farming are the most damaging.
In the past six decades almost a third of the global land surface has been altered for agriculture.
Halting species extinctions arising from this is a key policy concern.
Ball isn’t just concerned with what we eat, but where it comes from. Beef imported to the UK from Australia and New Zealand – more common since Brexit – can drive up the environmental impact of our meat-eating because those countries are home to a much greater variety of species than the UK.
And while we can choose to buy locally reared beef, many of our everyday favourites like coffee, chocolate, and bananas can’t be grown in Britain at all. They’re produced in tropical regions, which are far richer in biodiversity than Britain, where converting tropical natural habitat to agricultural land impacts many more species.
To add even more complexity, the same food crop grown in different locations can affect species extinction risk differently. Choose coffee grown in Costa Rica, for example, and your caffeine boost might be ten times worse for biodiversity than if you’d chosen coffee grown in Brazil.
“The coffee you choose to buy can really impact the likelihood of species going extinct,” says Ball.
“This is not only because of the species being displaced to produce it, but also because farmers get very different yields from different coffee bean varieties for the same area of land,” he adds.
Quantifying food’s impact
Ball is part of a Cambridge-led team putting real numbers on the biodiversity impacts of the food system. He’s using the ‘LIFE’ (‘Land-cover change Impacts on Future Extinctions’) metric, developed by the team to calculate how changes in land use, such as deforestation or habitat restoration, are likely to affect the extinction risk of 30,875 terrestrial vertebrate species worldwide.
Dr Alison Eyres, a postdoctoral researcher in the Conservation Science Group in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, used the metric to generate two maps showing the changes in the probability of terrestrial species extinction across the world in two scenarios. In the first, all remaining natural habitat is converted to farmland, and in the second all existing farmland is restored to its natural state.
While neither scenario is likely, at least in the short-term, the maps highlight the places in the world where mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles would suffer or benefit the most from these land-use changes – and it’s not evenly spread.
Hotspots show up in areas that are rich in biodiversity or because they are important for a particularly threatened or rare species.
“Some areas of the world, like northern Australia and New Guinea, have lots of endemic species and are largely untouched by human development. Other areas like Borneo have already suffered extensive forest loss. If people start clearing land for agriculture in those areas there will be a much bigger likelihood of driving species to extinction than clearing land in a place that’s relatively biodiversity poor, like Britain,” says Eyres.
She adds: “Although land restoration is important, the LIFE maps show the greater importance of preserving existing natural habitats to protect biodiversity, which can have bigger global-scale impacts than restoring areas we’ve already damaged.”
The novelty of the LIFE approach is that it measures extinction risk for all species.
Though species already heavily impacted by habitat loss are more vulnerable to further declines, unlike other approaches LIFE also considers species currently thought to be doing well.
The high resolution and scalability allow users to calculate the impacts of land-use change across areas from 0.5 to over 1,000 square kilometres.
LIFE also takes a long-term perspective – forecasting impacts over a 100-year timeframe to account for the way species populations slowly die out, or rebound, following human-driven changes to the way land is used.
Guiding policy decisions
While we may have a degree of choice over what we eat as individuals, the UK government is making big decisions about where to source the foods that appear in our shops.
Ball’s work with Dr Jonathan Green at the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) has resulted in the LIFE metric becoming part of the UK Government’s toolkit for measuring the global environmental impacts of the UK’s consumption of agricultural commodities.
They’ve pulled together national data on the consumption and provenance of 140 food types, and integrated this with the LIFE metric to quantify the impact that different trade and agricultural policies might have on global species extinction risk – the first time this has ever been done.
“When it comes to decisions about producing food it’s not enough to focus on one country in isolation,” says Ball.
“We have a UK agricultural policy that incentivises farmers to set aside more land for nature, and reduce food production. But if that means we’re making up the shortfall by relying on imports from more biodiverse places, it could cause far more damage to the species on our planet in the long run.”
In the UK our food ‘extinction footprint’ is almost entirely due to imports.
For example, beef produced in Australia and New Zealand, which is now being imported to Britain in much bigger quantities since Brexit, is thirty to forty times more likely to lead to species extinctions than beef produced in the UK and Ireland.
By considering the productivity of any piece of land, Ball can figure out the ‘per kilogramme impact’ of each commodity per year. He says that eating more vegetables and less meat, and cutting down on ‘luxury’ crops like chocolate and coffee, could free up significant areas of land for restoration and save hundreds of the world’s species from extinction.
A versatile tool
Thanks to its scalability, the LIFE metric can provide information to inform a huge range of actions – from individual dietary choices, to national policies, to global initiatives like the recent international commitment to conserve 30% of land area by 2030.
By combining LIFE with trade and economic data, it can help assess the extinction footprint of specific products or businesses, and the consequences of trade decisions.
Eyres has been working with conservation charities who are excited about using the metric to help them prioritise sites for conservation and analyse the impact of their work.
“Before we created the LIFE metric, if someone wanted to quantify the impact of a land-use change they’d have to do a very complicated, bespoke analysis requiring a lot of computational power and a lot of expertise.”
“Now it’s very simple to put a figure on the global change in extinction risk. It makes the information accessible to a huge diversity of people,” says Eyres.
Meanwhile, Ball says the biggest lever for changing our impact on species extinctions is what we eat.
If global land-use for agriculture doesn’t change, between 700 and 1,100 species of vertebrate are likely to go extinct in the next 100 years – and this is certainly an underestimate.
“LIFE tells us that eating beans and lentils is 150 times better for biodiversity than eating ruminant meat,” he says. “If everyone in the UK switched to a vegetarian diet overnight, we could halve our biodiversity impact.”
Reframing company accounts for people, planet and profit
By Kate Coghlan
The Centre for Climate Engagement (CCE) at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge, is partnering with Social Value International (SVI) to support the True & Fair Project, bringing academic rigour to help directors, investors, and accounting bodies integrate sustainability into financial reporting.
Every day, businesses rely on natural and social resources like carbon, water and labour, many of which impose hidden costs on people and the planet. Yet financial accounts rarely reflect these externalities, leaving a gap between what a company is really costing society and what its balance sheet shows.
To bridge this gap, the True & Fair Project, led by SVI, aims to challenge the way financial profit is calculated by ensuring that dependencies and negative impacts (hidden costs) are recognised within financial statements, rather than being confined to a non-financial report. Now, CCE is joining forces with SVI to deepen the project’s legal, governance, and practical foundations.
Research focus
SVI’s True & Fair initiative began with a legal opinion (issued by George Bompas KC in 2024) that explored whether UK company directors already have a duty to incorporate sustainability considerations into accounts when such information is material.
The finding: yes, in many cases they do.
This implies that rather than just a “nice to have” in non-financial reporting, sustainability-related information may be essential to core financial statements. The collaboration with CCE explores how this principle intersects with the duties of directors, investors, accounting bodies, and regulators.
CCE brings legal, governance, and policy expertise, helping translate complex theory into practical guidance. As part of the collaboration, SVI and CCE are developing in-depth analysis and tailored guidance to inform key stakeholders, including directors, investors, accountants and lawyers to explore how the true and fair requirement applies to their work in the context of sustainability.
Key results
SVI has already published a guide for UK company directors on how to apply the “true & fair” requirement in the context of the company’s carbon emissions.
The new collaboration extends the agenda: CCE and SVI are co-developing deeper analysis and tailored guidance examining the role of other stakeholders including investors, accounting bodies, and legal advisors.
Together, they are considering how a range of legal obligations interact with the core ‘true and fair’ requirement, exploring how to leverage these obligations to better reflect sustainability issues in financial accounts.
“We are excited to support SVI’s campaign to ensure sustainability is integrated in financial reporting … and contribute to practical resources which help businesses and investors navigate legal and governance complexities.”
Nick Scott Manager of the Law and Climate Programme at CCE
Photo of Nick Scott
Challenges, Next Steps, and Impact
One challenge is bridging legal theory and boardroom practice. Directors may struggle to know when sustainability is material and how to represent it. The true and fair requirement applies not only in the UK but also in the EU, most Commonwealth countries, and beyond. Another challenge, therefore, is to ensure that the guidance is practically relevant across different sectors and jurisdictions.
Next steps include producing detailed stakeholder-specific guidance, mapping engagement opportunities with accounting bodies and regulators, and creating case studies to prove the concept. CCE and SVI will also communicate widely, to boards, auditors, investors, and others, to raise awareness of the true and fair requirement and the True & Fair Project’s aims.
This collaboration could shift the rules of corporate accountability — making sustainability disclosures a norm in core financial statements. It could better align board incentives with sustainability goals, aid investors in risk assessment, and embed climate considerations into the foundation of corporate governance.
It’s been decades since we came up with new treatments for these pervasive conditions. The ones we have can bring unwanted effects. For some people, existing treatments don’t work at all.
Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy (PAT) offers a new approach. Its 50-60% early success rates are remarkably high. This is a different kind of treatment, where patients explore underlying trauma in intensive therapeutic sessions – but do not need daily medication.
PAT is now providing hope for treating conditions we currently have limited options for, like treatment-resistant depression, severe post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anorexia or substance use disorders.
Researchers are coming together to explore this early promise: determining which therapies and compounds work best for different conditions, and unpicking the biological mechanisms behind their profound effects.
Here is Dr Liliana Galindo (Lili). She is Colombian born, softly spoken, and infinitely curious.
Lili is an Affiliated Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Principal Investigator of the CPRG. She splits her time between medical research and her clinical role as a Consultant Psychiatrist for the local NHS trust.
“I’ve always been fascinated by our mind’s capability to generate altered states,” says Lili. “Minds allow us to perceive the world, to be creative and to dream. But they can also create nightmares and distortions of reality.”
Lili started to study psychoactive substances, including psychedelics, in Spain. When she arrived in Cambridge in 2018, she was interested in how psychedelics might help us overcome mental challenges. But to start answering these questions, she needed a team.
Testing the safety and efficacy of psychedelic substances is a big operation. You need therapists, medics, psychiatrists, pharmacists, nurses and clinical research practitioners.
Lili helped gather these experts into what became the CPRG, a three-way partnership between the University, the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
After obtaining their Home Office license to study psychoactive substances in 2023, the group set up their first trial for PTSD.
Since then, the group has moved to develop a wide range of trials. This year will see the group trialling psilocybin-assisted therapy for generalised anxiety disorder and treatment-resistant depression.
Across all the trials so far, Lili’s group reports that the treatments are well tolerated, with no risks or reports of substance misuse afterwards.
The clinical approach appears to be working. But how are these treatments so powerful, and what do they involve?
It’s time to meet the group’s most mysterious members: the psychedelic compounds.
Meet the molecules
Empathogens, such as MDMA, promote empathy and compassion. They can be a useful method for revisiting past traumas without fear and anxiety, offering a different point of view – hence their usefulness in tackling PTSD.
Where patients feel overwhelmed by fear and pain, empathogens can let them reframe and reprocess trauma. They might feel a new compassion for themselves, or come across unlikely positive reflections, such as ‘this painful experience made me stronger’.
Evidence suggests that psychedelics may also be neuroplastogens – meaning they promote neuroplasticity and flexible cognition. As such, substances like LSD, 5 -MeO-DMT and psilocybin seem a good fit for escaping the rigid negative mindset of depression or anxiety.
Lili says, “Our thoughts and feelings affect how we perceive the world. Mental health conditions constitute an undue narrowing of experience. These molecules help people increase the number of ways they can perceive reality.”
Some have compared the effects of psychedelics to religious or spiritual transcendence.
These immunological changes are what the CPRG’s Dr Mary-Ellen Lynall and PhD student Richard Dear are currently investigating, in their study with psilocybin.
Richard says, “Psilocybin affects the immune system, and the immune system is involved in mental illness, so perhaps immune effects will help explain why psychedelic assisted therapy is so effective. It is very exciting to be one of the first groups to investigate this hypothesis.”
“It is so exciting to see work in this area take off in Cambridge.”
Professor Tamsin Ford, Head of the Department of Psychiatry
Your guide to Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy
PAT is delivered over 3 phases.
The preparation phase with a trained therapist can last a few hours. It includes a conversation covering the patient’s history, what they are aiming to address, and what their symptoms are.
This session prepares people for what they might experience during the psychedelic phase. It gives them tools for how to cope with any adverse emotional or physical effects, and helps them avoid becoming overwhelmed. The psychologist also sets down the rules and boundaries of the session, to ensure the patient’s safety.
Next up is the dosing session, where the patient is supervised under the effects of the drug.
For this phase, Lili and her team have transformed a clinical room in Addenbrooke’s Hospital into a welcoming, relaxing space.
The dosing room in the NIHR Clinical Research Facility at Addenbrooke’s Hospital.
This comforting setting helps to increase the likelihood of a positive experience. Patients will be in there a while – depending on the compound, sessions can last between 6 to 8 hours. For all that time, they are under medical supervision and accompanied by a trained therapist.
In many of the current trials, Lili’s team uses ‘inner directed therapy’. Here, the therapist is more like a co-pilot than a guide, letting the patient direct the session in a way that feels right to them.
Lili says, “I’ve had the opportunity to be the therapist in these sessions. It’s really intense and beautiful. Our job in that scenario is not to intervene, but to listen and support.”
Finally, and crucially, comes the integration session. These typically take place the day after dosing, giving the patient time to process and consolidate the experience.
“In these sessions, we sit with the patient and go through what happened,” Lili says. “We support them while they make sense of their experience. They can then integrate these insights into the life they return to.”
Reflecting on their experience of PAT, one participant in an empathogen trial said, “I’d looked at the proposed psychedelic drug trials with apprehension, but was eager to be involved with experiencing a less intensive psychoactive substance.
“Moving through different phases of the study gave me a chance to better explore ‘inner directed therapy’. One of my biggest takeaways is how critical the integrative aspects of PAT will be for future participants to fully experience the neuroplastic effects of these substances.”
Making connections
More people are starting to recognise PAT’s incredible potential.
Earlier this year, CPRG held their first research day, with over 150 people attending. The day was open to academics, clinicians and psychedelic experts from across the UK.
Speakers and attendees at the Cambridge Psychedelic Research Day 2025. Credit: William Blakesley-Herbert.
Speakers and attendees at the Cambridge Psychedelic Research Day 2025. Credit: William Blakesley-Herbert.
Speakers and attendees at the Cambridge Psychedelic Research Day 2025. Credit: William Blakesley-Herbert.
Benjamin Illingworth, PhD student, psychiatrist and CPRG member says, “We want to make sure that these treatments are available to everyone who could benefit. If we don’t create open, expert spaces in which to discuss them, that won’t happen.”
Lili goes further: “Psychedelic therapy shouldn’t be something available only to an elite few who can afford it. These treatments can effectively alleviate mental suffering.
“We are looking for ways to integrate them into the public health system. Our guiding principle is: how can we bring these treatments to the people who need them the most?”
The CPRG are building an evidence base to begin this integration. More clinical trials are in the pipeline for 2026, including a trial of group therapy – where multiple people can receive PAT at the same time.
There are reasons to think PAT will be cost effective for public health systems. Instead of administering existing treatments (therapy and antidepressants) for years, with questionable success rates, PAT is an intense, shorter intervention that tackles the root problem instead of just the symptoms. The hope is that people can fully recover. And if people can join PAT in groups, the clinical team can support many people at once.
Elsewhere in the CPRG, PhD student Anya Ragnhildstveit is collecting experiences and data from people around the world who have received PAT. By bringing together this early evidence, she aims to inform the development of future treatments and shape the design of clinical trials.
“There are so many exciting developments coming,” Lili says.
Lili’s enthusiasm is mirrored by Professor Tamsin Ford, Head of the Department of Psychiatry, who says: “It is so exciting to see work in this area take off in Cambridge.”
These fledgling connections are just the start. With its world-renowned neuroscientists, clinicians and psychiatrists, Cambridge provides the perfect meeting place for experts to refine their ideas and shape the treatments of the future.
If you’d like to support the CPRG in providing MDMA-assisted treatments to wounded veterans, you might like to consider making a donation.
Published on 29 October 2025.
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Members of the Business and Trade Select Committee visited Cambridge on 27 October, at the start of their annual programme of engagement around the UK, which this year is focused on identifying priorities for driving economic growth.
It’s people that drive world-leading innovation, and create a system that drives through into creating the companies for the future that are not just scale-ups, but world-beaters.Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP
Liam Byrne MP, Chair of the Business and Trade Committee, and his colleagues Charlie Maynard MP (Witney), John Cooper MP (Dumfries and Galloway), Sarah Edwards MP (Tamworth) and Cambridge MP Daniel Zeichner drew on expertise in the room to develop potential areas of focus for their programme of work in 2026.
The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Deborah Prentice, welcomed the Committee to Cambridge and reflected on the new government announcements highlighting the Oxford to Cambridge Corridor as a key focus for strengthening the UK’s global position as a leader in science and technology.
Hosted at the Ray Dolby Centre, home of the Cavendish Laboratory, Committee members met with around 30 senior academics, business leaders, and investors representing a range of sectors across the Cambridge innovation ecosystem. The session provided an opportunity for open discussion about what is needed to keep the UK at the forefront of global research and enterprise.
Business and Trade Select Committee visit Cambridge1 of 3
A central theme of the discussion was how to attract and retain world-class talent. Participants emphasised the importance of investing in opportunities for the best global graduates to undertake PhDs in the UK, supported by a competitive and welcoming visa system. Access to finance was another key focus, with contributors exploring how to help spin outs and scale-ups grow through improved access to capital and foreign direct investment. Attendees also underlined the critical role of infrastructure, from housing and transport to water and energy systems, in ensuring regions like Cambridge can continue to grow sustainably and support frontier industries.
Overall, the session conveyed strong optimism about the opportunities presented by high-growth sectors such as life sciences, technology, and advanced manufacturing. It also highlighted Cambridge’s position as a global leader in transformative fields including artificial intelligence and quantum engineering.
Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP, Chair of the Business and Trade Committee said, “We had a brilliant first session in Cambridge with lots of people from across this extraordinary innovation ecosystem – they’ve got a lot of things right here, not least the Innovate Cambridge model.
“The big overriding issue that’s come out today is making sure that the UK, including through places like this, is a place where you can access world class talent – because of course it’s people that drive world-leading innovation, and create a system that drives through into creating the companies for the future that are not just scale-ups, but world-beaters.”
Jonny Davidson, Senior Business Development Manager, of Riverlane said, “I was delighted to meet with members of the Business and Trade Committee, alongside partners in the city, to hear about the success, and opportunities, here in Cambridge. We discussed how Riverlane, a global leader in quantum error correction technology, is a national success story, driving advances in quantum computing, and economic growth. For companies like Riverlane, continued investment in science and infrastructure and a financial system that rewards long-term growth will be key to helping Cambridge and the wider UK remain a world leader in advanced technologies.”
Is your ultra-high-definition television really worth it? Do you need a 4K or an 8K screen to get the best viewing experience at home?
According to researchers at the University of Cambridge and Meta Reality Labs, the human eye has a resolution limit: in other words, there are only so many pixels the eye can see. Above this limit, a screen gives our eyes more information than they can detect.
To calculate the resolution limit, the researchers conducted a study that measured participants’ ability to detect specific features in colour and greyscale images on a screen, whether looking at the images straight on or through their peripheral vision, and when the screen was close to them or further away.
The precise resolution limit depends on a number of variables, including the size of the screen, the darkness of the room, and the distance between the viewer and the screen. However, for an average-size UK living room, with 2.5 metres between the TV and the sofa, a 44-inch 4K or 8K TV would not provide any additional benefit over a lower resolution Quad HD (QHD) TV of the same size.
Any consumer buying a new TV is bombarded with technical information from manufacturers, all trying to persuade them that the display resolution of their screens – whether Full HD, 4K or 8K – offers them the best viewing experience.
And display resolution is considered equally important for the many other screens we use, on our phones or computers, whether we’re using them to take pictures, watch films or play video games, including games in virtual or augmented reality. Even car manufacturers are offering higher and higher resolutions for in-car information displays and satnav screens.
“As large engineering efforts go towards improving the resolution of mobile, AR and VR displays, it’s important to know the maximum resolution at which further improvements bring no noticeable benefit,” said first author Dr Maliha Ashraf from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology. “But there have been no studies that actually measure what it is that the human eye can see, and what the limitations of its perception are.”
“If you have more pixels in your display, it’s less efficient, it costs more and it requires more processing power to drive it,” said co-author Professor Rafał Mantiuk, also from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology. “So we wanted to know the point at which it makes no sense to further improve the resolution of the display.”
The researchers created an experimental set-up with a sliding display that allowed them to measure exactly what the human eye can see when looking at patterns on a screen. Instead of measuring the specifications of a particular screen, they measured pixels per degree (PPD): a measurement of how many individual pixels can fit into a one-degree slice of your field of vision. Measuring PPD helps answer a more useful question than ‘how high is the resolution of this screen?’ Instead, it answers the question ‘how does this screen look from where I’m sitting?’
The widely accepted 20/20 vision standard, based on the Snellen chart that will be familiar to anyone who has ever had their vision checked, suggests that the human eye can resolve detail at 60 pixels per degree.
“This measurement has been widely accepted, but no one had actually sat down and measured it for modern displays, rather than a wall chart of letters that was first developed in the 19th century,” said Ashraf.
Participants in the study looked at patterns with very fine gradations, in shades of grey and in colour, and were asked whether they were able to see the lines in the image. The screen was moved towards and away from the viewer to measure PPD at different distances. PPD was also measured for central and peripheral vision.
The researchers discovered that the eye’s resolution limit is higher than previously believed, but that there are important differences in resolution limits between colour and black-and-white. For greyscale images viewed straight on, the average was 94 PPD. For red and green patterns, the number was 89 PPD, and for yellow and violet, it was 53 PPD.
“Our brain doesn’t actually have the capacity to sense details in colour very well, which is why we saw a big drop-off for colour images, especially when viewed in peripheral vision,” said Mantiuk. “Our eyes are essentially sensors that aren’t all that great, but our brain processes that data into what it thinks we should be seeing.”
The researchers modelled their results to calculate how the resolution limit varies across the population, which will help manufacturers make decisions that are relevant for the majority of the population: for example, designing a display which has retinal resolution for 95% of people rather than an average observer.
Based on this modelling, the researchers developed their online calculator, which enables people to test their own screens or help inform future buying decisions.
“Our results set the north star for display development, with implications for future imaging, rendering and video coding technologies,” said co-author Dr Alex Chapiro from Meta Reality Labs.
The United Nations has selected a University of Cambridge student as a Young Leader for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Every two years, the United Nations Youth Office recognises 17 exceptional young changemakers who are driving solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges and whose leadership is helping to advance the achievement of the SDGs.
Tanatswa Amanda Chikaura, 26, from Zimbabwe, is a Hughes Hall PhD candidate under the supervision of Dr Elizabeth Weir and Professor Tamsin Ford. Her research interests are centred on autism, mental health and suicide prevention. In addition to her academic pursuits, Tanatswa is the Founder and Director of Ndinewe Foundation, a mental health organisation in Zimbabwe.
Tanatswa said: “Young people are everywhere and sometimes it takes a fellow youth to understand another’s needs. “We have the ideas, solutions, creativity and so much more to add to the development of our nations. Youth leadership gives hope and inspiration to all. We are not only the future of tomorrow but the leaders of today.”
Her supervisor Dr Weir said: “I’m delighted that Tanatswa has been selected as one of 17 Young Leaders for the SDGs. There were over 33,000 applicants for the cohort from more than 150 countries and Tanatswa will work with the UN over the next two years in this role. “She has been selected for this prestigious cohort on the basis of her impactful PhD scholarship on the relationship between trauma and suicidality among autistic people, as well as her ongoing work as the founder of the Ndinewe Foundation in Zimbabwe.”
The announcement was made on United Nations Day, on 24 October, which marks the date when the United Nations officially came into being.
Hundreds of experts working on AI in education gathered for the first ever Connecting Cambridge event at Cambridge University Press & Assessment’s headquarters on 21 October.
Helena Renfrew Knight, Chief Strategy Officer of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, and Professor Bhaskar Vira, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education at Cambridge University, welcomed teams working on AI to share knowledge and innovation, and identify areas for future collaboration.
Experts across Cambridge are navigating the opportunities and challenges of AI-enabled technology in education and publishing, underpinned by a human-first approach to transformation and a shared commitment to delivering on the University’s mission to contribute to society.
Caretaker and senior woman using digital tablet at nursing home – stock photo Credit: Maskot (Getty Images)
Problems with the brain’s waste clearance system could underlie many cases of dementia and help explain why poor sleep patterns and cardiovascular risk factors such as high blood pressure increase the risk of dementia.
Treating high blood pressure or encouraging people to stop smoking would be an achievable way to helping the glymphatic system work betterHugh Markus
A study led by researchers at the University of Cambridge found that impaired movement of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) – the clear liquid that cushions and cleans the brain – predicted risk of dementia later in life among 40,000 adults recruited to UK Biobank. Their findings are published today in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association and are being presented at the World Stroke Congress 2025 in Barcelona.
In the healthy brain, the so-called glymphatic system serves to clear out toxins and waste materials, keeping the brain healthy. Only discovered as recently as 2012, this system functions by flushing CSF through the brain along tiny channels around blood vessels known as perivascular spaces. It collects waste then drains out of the brain, helping keep it clean and healthy.
The glymphatic system is thought to be important in protecting against many of the common forms of dementia, which are often characterised by the build-up of toxic substances in the brain – for example, Alzheimer’s disease sees amyloid ‘plaques’ and tau ‘tangles accumulate in brain tissue.
One of the most common forms of dementia is vascular dementia, caused by reduced blood flow to the brain. The most common cause of this type of dementia is cerebral small vessel disease, which affects the small blood vessels in the brain. But the impact of cerebral small vessel disease is even greater because it also interacts with other dementias making them worse; for example, a study of nuns in the US found that among those nuns whose brains showed signs of Alzheimer’s disease post mortem, only around a half exhibited symptoms of dementia – but this increased to around nine in 10 if they also had cerebral small vessel disease.
Professor Hugh Markus and colleagues at the University of Cambridge wanted to see whether cerebral small vessel disease and other cardiovascular risk factors damage the glymphatic system – and whether this in turn increases the risk of dementia.
Until recently, it has only been possible to study glymphatic function in mice, but recent advances in MRI scanning have made it possible to study it indirectly in humans. Even so, it was only possible to do this practically in relatively small numbers, but Yutong Chen, while a medical student at the University of Cambridge, developed machine learning algorithms capable of assessing glymphatic functions from MRI scans at scale.
The team applied the algorithm to MRI scans taken from around 40,000 adults in UK Biobank. They found three biomarkers – biological signatures – associated with impaired glymphatic function assessed at baseline, predicted the risk of dementia occurring over the subsequent decade. One of these was DTI-ALPS, a measure of the diffusion of water molecules along the perivascular spaces. Another was the size of the choroid plexus, where the CSF is produced. The third measure reflected the flow velocity of CSF into the brain.
Yutong Chen, from the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at Cambridge, said: “Although we have to be cautious about indirect markers, our work provides good evidence in a very large cohort that disruption of the glymphatic system plays a role in dementia. This is exciting because it allows to ask: how can we improve this?”
Further analysis showed that several cardiovascular risk factors impaired glymphatic function – and hence increased dementia risk, and that this was partly via causing cerebral small vessel disease, which is visible in the MRI scans.
First author Hui Hong, now a radiologist at the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, said: “We already have evidence that small vessel disease in the brain accelerates diseases like Alzheimer’s, and now we have a likely explanation why. Disruption to the glymphatic system is likely to impair our ability to clear the brain of the amyloid and tau that causes Alzheimer’s disease.”
The research suggests possible approaches for reducing dementia risk. One is to look at strategies for improving glymphatic function. Sleep plays an important role in glymphatic function, and so disrupted sleep patterns are likely to impair its ability to clear toxins. Alternatively, there may be existing medicines that could be repurposed, or new ones that could be developed, to improve glymphatic function.
Another possible approach is to treat vascular risk factors such as high blood pressure. This is supported by recent studies: the SPRINT MIND trial, for example, showed that intensive blood pressure control (maintaining a systolic blood pressure of less than 120 mm Hg) led to a 20% reduction in cognitive decline or dementia compared to participants in the standard treatment group.
Professor Markus, who leads the Stroke Research Group at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, said: “We already know the importance of cardiovascular risk factors when it comes to dementia, and our findings further emphasise this link.
“At least a quarter of all dementia risk is accounted for by common risk factors like blood pressure and smoking. If these impair glymphatic function, then we can intervene. Treating high blood pressure or encouraging people to stop smoking would be an achievable way to helping the glymphatic system work better.”
Professor Bryan Williams, Chief Scientific and Medical Officer at the British Heart Foundation, said: “This study offers us a fascinating glimpse into how problems with the brain’s waste clearance system could be quietly increasing the chances of developing dementia later in life. By improving our understanding of the glymphatic system, this study opens exciting new avenues for research to treat and prevent dementia. It also emphasises the importance of managing known cardiovascular risk factors, such as high blood pressure, for reducing dementia risk.”
The research was funded by the British Heart Foundation, with additional support from the National Institute for Health and Care Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.
The 10 organisations in Great Britain that carry out the highest number of animal procedures – those used in medical, veterinary and scientific research – have released their annual statistics today.
Animal research… is an essential step in the development of new medicines, vaccines and treatments for both humans and animals.Jon Simons
The statistics for the University of Cambridge are available on our website as part of our ongoing commitment to transparency and openness around the use of animals in research.
This coincides with the publication of the Home Office report on the statistics of scientific procedures on living animals in Great Britain in 2024.
The 10 organisations are listed below alongside the total number of procedures they carried out on animals for scientific research in Great Britain in 2024. Of these 1,379,399 procedures, more than 99% were carried out on mice, fish, rats, and birds and 82% were classified as causing pain equivalent to, or less than, an injection.
This is the tenth consecutive year that organisations have come together to publicise their collective statistics and examples of their research.
Organisation
Number of Procedures (2024)
The Francis Crick Institute
200,055
University of Oxford
199,730
University of Cambridge
190,448
UCL
175,687
Medical Research Council
140,602
University of Edinburgh
136,862
King’s College London
106,300
University of Glasgow
99,509
University of Manchester
81,252
Imperial College London
48,954
TOTAL
1,379,399
In total, 72 organisations have voluntarily published their 2024 animal research statistics.
All organisations are committed to the ethical framework called the ‘3Rs’ of replacement, reduction and refinement. This means avoiding or replacing the use of animals where possible, minimising the number of animals used per experiment and optimising the experience of the animals to improve animal welfare. However, as institutions expand and conduct more research, the total number of animals used can rise even if fewer animals are used per study.
All organisations listed are signatories to the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research in the UK, which commits them to being more open about the use of animals in scientific, medical and veterinary research in the UK. More than 130 organisations have signed the Concordat, including UK universities, medical research charities, research funders, learned societies and commercial research organisations.
Wendy Jarrett, Chief Executive of Understanding Animal Research, which developed the Concordat on Openness, said: “Animal research remains a small but vital part of the quest for new medicines, vaccines and treatments for humans and animals. Alternative methods are increasingly being phased in, but, until we have sufficient reliable alternatives available, it is important that organisations that use animals in research maintain the public’s trust in them. By providing this level of information about the numbers of animals used, and the experience of those animals, as well as details of the medical breakthroughs that derive from this research, these Concordat signatories are helping the public to make up their own minds about how they feel about the use of animals in scientific research in Great Britain.”
Professor Jon Simons, Head of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Cambridge, said: “Animal research remains critical for understanding complex biological systems and is an essential step in the development of new medicines, vaccines and treatments for both humans and animals. We are committed to continuing to reduce the number of animals used in biomedical research, and our scientists are actively working on new methods and techniques that will provide robust scientific alternatives.”
CASE STUDY: Mice are vital in the search for effective new dementia treatments
Cambridge researchers are leading drug discovery to develop safer, more effective treatments for the millions of people affected by Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
“Dementia has often been viewed as something that happens normally as people age, but it’s not. It’s a disease that we need to treat, so that people can live well and stay independent in later life,” said David Harrison. “But many pharmaceutical companies have lost confidence in working in this area because the risk of failure is too great.”
With expertise in drug discovery, Harrison’s team at Cambridge’s ALBORADA Drug Discovery Institute is designing and making chemical molecules – the basis of future drugs – and testing whether they work on novel targets in the body. The aim is to develop these ideas to the point where pharmaceutical partners can more confidently take things forward.
While the team routinely uses test-tube and computer-based models, animal models are vital in understanding how the many different cell types in the brain interact together in disease.
They’re also vital in understanding how potential drugs are metabolised and distributed throughout the body, and in looking for any adverse effects that may occur in other tissues.
Harrison said: “Almost one million people are estimated to be living with dementia in the UK. We need to find better treatment options. The animals we use are an essential part of the drug discovery process – they could help us change people’s lives.”
The Cambridge Innovation Hub has received cornerstone Government funding of at least £15 million to maintain the city’s position as a global leader in innovation.
The world is coming to Cambridge for science. Government support means that work will now start at pace to make the Innovation Hub a reality.Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor
Designed to drive UK growth, the Hub will connect entrepreneurs, investors, corporates, and researchers on a 2.7-acre site in Hills Road, in the centre of Cambridge, as the UK’s answer to Boston’s Lab Central and Paris’s Station F. The new facility will support science start ups to grow and compete on the world stage.
The announcement was made as the annual Innovate Cambridge Summit brings together entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers and political leaders this week, and is part of a £500 million growth package for new homes, infrastructure and business space for the Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor.
It follows a new report that reveals the Cambridge area is now the most investible hub for science, and has had the highest growth of any UK region outside the capital in the last decade.
According to the new report from Beauhurst, Cambridge Enterprise, Innovate Cambridge and Cambridge Innovation Capital, Cambridge is a national economic asset where early-stage life sciences and deep tech companies have raised £7.9billion since 2015. International investors are now involved in nearly 40% of all deals, up from just 7% a decade ago.
Cambridge’s innovation ecosystem has grown by almost 80% in the past decade, from 473 active companies in 2015 to 848 in 2025. Its spinout companies, born from University research, are powering this momentum, with spinouts accounting for 27.9% of all equity raised in the region. Total spinout investment has grown from £46 million in 2015 to £879 million in 2024, with life science spinouts raising an average of £8.4 million each in 2024, the highest for any UK city.
This growth and success have been embodied by Cambridge-born success stories, including CellCentric, a leading clinical-stage biotech developing novel cancer therapeutics; CuspAI, an AI-driven materials discovery company; and Featurespace, a world leader in adaptive behavioural analytics for financial crime prevention.
Science Minister and Oxford-Cambridge Innovation Champion, Lord Vallance, said: “Cambridge is one of the world’s most fertile grounds for innovation to take root, and blossom into opportunities for investment, job creation, and progress in fields ranging from life sciences to deep tech.
“As impressive as these figures are, there is still more potential here for us to unleash. This is precisely why we are backing the Cambridge Innovation Hub, as part of our programme of work across Government to boost the entire Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor, and fulfil its promise as an economic engine the whole nation benefits from.”
Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: “Fast-tracking the Innovation Hub will help drive UK growth. It will connect entrepreneurs, investors, corporates, and our world-class researchers. It will quickly become Europe’s leading destination for early-stage deep tech and life sciences companies, and means Cambridge will continue to be a global leader in research and innovation. The world is coming to Cambridge for science. Government support means that work will now start at pace to make the Innovation Hub a reality.”
Professor Andy Neely OBE, Chair of Innovate Cambridge, said: “Cambridge’s science and innovation ecosystem is one of the UK’s greatest economic assets. The data shows that the world is increasingly looking to Cambridge to find the breakthrough ideas that can change lives and drive global progress.”
Dr Kathryn Chapman, Executive Director, Innovate Cambridge, said: “The Summit is a chance to demonstrate how Cambridge continues to lead on innovation worldwide. Recognition as the fastest-growing UK hub for science investment, combined with cornerstone funding for a new international innovation hub, reflects the success of our unified vision and commitment to building a truly global innovation economy.”
This latest report follows Dealroom data published earlier this year which showed Cambridge was #1 in Europe for deep tech VC per capita, and was second globally to only the Bay Area when it came to unicorns per capita.
