Public Map Platform supporting green transition secures major funding
Despite changes to the HM Treasury Green Book to encourage forms of valuation other than economic, local authorities are struggling to capture social, environmental and cultural value in a way that feeds into their systems and processes. The Public Map Platform project aims to make this easy by spatialising data so that it can be used as a basis for targeted hyperlocal action for a green transition.
Professor Flora Samuel said: “Climate change cannot be addressed without revealing and tackling the inequalities within society and where they are happening. Only when we know what is happening where, and how people are adapting to climate change can we make well informed decisions.”
“The aim of this pragmatic project is to create a Public Map Platform that will bring together multiple layers of spatial information to give a social, environmental, cultural and economic picture of what is happening in a neighbourhood, area, local authority, region or nation.”
In 2023, the project was awarded one of four new £4.625 million Green Transition Ecosystem grants. The second phase funding will enable to project to build on its impacts and benefits.
The project features at the Venice Architecture Biennale (until 28th Sept 2025) and at the Design Museum’s 'Future Observatory: Tools for Transition' display, in London, of work by all four Green Transition Ecosystem projects (12th Sept 2025 – Aug 2026). The Public Map Platform’s Rural Roaming Room structure will be on show outside the museum.
Flora Samuel’s team is presenting to the Welsh Government at the Sennedd in Cardiff on 30th September 2025. They have engaged with hundreds of children on the Isle of Anglesey and will be bringing the Public Map Platform to Cambridge working with the team in The Cambridge Room.
Green Transition Ecosystems (GTEs) are large-scale projects that focus on translating the best design-led research into real-world benefits. Capitalising on clusters of design excellence, GTEs address distinct challenges posed by the climate crisis including, but not limited to, realising net zero goals.
GTEs are the flagship funding strand of the £25m Future Observatory: Design the Green Transition programme, funded by the AHRC and delivered in partnership with the Design Museum.
The Public Map Platform is addressing the following overarching aims of the Green Transitions Ecosystem call: measurable, green transition-supportive behavioural change across sectors and publics; design that fosters positive behavioural change in support of green transition goals, including strategy and policy; region-focused solutions for example the infrastructure supporting rural communities and, lastly, designing for diversity.
To meet these aims the project will deliver a baseline model mapping platform for decision making with communities for use by Local Authorities (LoAs) across the UK and beyond. To do this a pilot platform will be made for the Isle of Anglesey to help the LoA measure its progress towards a green transition and fulfilment of the Future Generations Wales Act in a transparent and inclusive way.
The Isle of Anglesey/Ynys Môn in North Wales was chosen as the case study for this project largely because it is a discrete geographical place that is rural, disconnected and in decline, with a local authority that has high ambitions to reinvent itself as a centre of sustainable innovation, to be an 'Energy Island’ at the centre of low-carbon energy research and development. The bilingual context of Anglesey provides a particular opportunity to explore issues around multilingual engagement, inclusion and culture – a UK-wide challenge.
The project, a collaboration with the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (Wiserd) at Cardiff University and Wrexham Glyndwr University as well as several other partners is supported by the Welsh Government and the Future Generations Commission in Wales who are investigating ways to measure, and spatialise, attainment against the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act (2015), a world-leading piece of sustainability legislation.
The Public Map Platform will offer a range of well designed and accessible information to communities, local authorities and policy makers alike, as well as opportunities to contribute to the maps. The map layers will constantly grow with information and sophistication, reconfigured according to local policy and boundaries. And crucially, they will be developed and monitored with and by a representative cross section of the local community.
An accessible website will be designed as a data repository tailored to a range of audiences, scalable for use across the UK. Social, cultural and environmental map layers will be co-created with children and young people to show, for instance, where people connect, engage with cultural activities and do small things to adapt to climate change.
The community-made data will be overlaid onto existing census and administrative data sets to build a baseline Future Generations map of the Isle of Anglesey. The layers can be clustered together to measure the island’s progress against the Act but can also be reconfigured to other kinds of measurement schema. In this way the project will offer a model for inclusive, transparent and evidence based planning, offering lessons for the rest of the UK and beyond.
This award is part of the Future Observatory: Design the Green Transition programme, the largest publicly funded design research and innovation programme in the UK. Funded by AHRC in partnership with Future Observatory at the Design Museum, this £25m multimodal investment aims to bring design researchers, universities, and businesses together to catalyse the transition to net zero and a green economy.
Christopher Smith, Executive Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council said:
“Design is a critical bridge between research and innovation. Placing the individual act of production or consumption within the context of a wider system of social and economic behaviour is critical to productivity, development and sustainability.
"That’s why design is the essential tool for us to confront and chart a path through our current global and local predicaments, and that’s why AHRC has placed design at the heart of its strategy for collaboration within UKRI.
"From health systems to energy efficiency to sustainability, these four Green Transition Ecosystem projects the UK are at the cutting edge of design, offering models for problem solving, and will touch on lives right across the UK.”
A team led by Professor Flora Samuel from Cambridge’s Department of Architecture has been awarded a further Green Transition Ecosystem grant of £3.12 million by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to create a Public Map Platform to chart the green transition on the Isle of Anglesey/Ynys Môn.
Climate change cannot be addressed without revealing and tackling the inequalities within society and where they are happeningFlora SamuelEllena McGuinness on UnsplashAnglesey beach crowded with people
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.
Britain’s economy boomed after the Romans, Aldborough study reveals
The Romans have long been credited with bringing industry to Britain involving large-scale lead and iron production. But it has been unclear what happened once the Romans left around 400 AD. It was generally assumed that industrial-scale production declined, as no written evidence for lead exploitation after the 3rd century exists.
To test this assumption, researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Nottingham examined a five-metre-long sediment core from Aldborough in Yorkshire, the Roman tribal town of the Brigantes and an important centre of metal production. Their findings, published in the journal Antiquity, confirm that metal production did not collapse immediately after the Romans left Britain.
Professor Martin Millett, from Cambridge’s Faculty of Classics and Fitzwilliam College, said: “This collaborative work which forms part of a long-term project at Aldborough adds a new dimension to our understanding of the history of this important Roman town in the immediately post-Roman period. It has significant implications for our wider understanding of the end of Roman Britain.”
The study’s findings indicate that metal production in Britain continued long after the end of the Roman period and did not decline until a sudden crash around 550-600 AD.
The researchers found low levels of lead and iron production in the 4th to the early 5th centuries AD, but a large continuous rise in iron – and to a lesser extent, lead smelting through the 5th to mid-6th centuries – with the same ore sources and use of coal as in the Roman period. This undermines the popular belief that post-Roman Britain was a ‘Dark Age’ in which industrial production regressed to pre-Roman levels.
The cause of the sudden crash remains uncertain, but textual evidence from the Mediterranean and modern-day France (from the mid-late 6th century) shows that this period saw multiple waves of bubonic plague, and perhaps smallpox. These findings combined with DNA evidence from Edix Hill cemetery in Cambridgeshire show that bubonic plague was killing people in eastern England from the 540s, and this period marked the point of transformation at Aldborough.
Lead author, Professor Christopher Loveluck from Nottingham’s Department of Classics and Archaeology, says the Aldborough sediment core “has provided the first unbroken continuous record and timeline of metal pollution and metal economic history in Britain, from the 5th century to the present day.”
The cylinder of slowly accumulated silts was extracted from a paleochannel of the River Ure. Previous metal pollution records have been extracted far from their sources – for instance upland peat cores or mountain and polar glaciers – but this data comes from the very epicentre of production.
The researchers analysed the core alongside excavation evidence and knowledge of landscape changes at Aldborough over the last two millennia. The study benefited from the expertise of Charles French, Emeritus Professor of Geoarchaeology at Cambridge, who applies archaeological techniques and micromorphological analytical techniques to the interpretation of buried landscapes.
The study indicates that lead and iron production was very active again before the Vikings arrived and expanded under their control. Textual and archaeological sources already suggest that there was a growing focus on domestic economies rather than international trade by that time. It has been difficult to prove this at a macro-scale, but the new results show a boom in raw metal production between the end of the 8th century and through to the 10th century, revealing regional-level economic growth, which has never been measured beyond single sites before.
The study goes on to show a decline in metal production through the 11th century with renewed large-scale growth in lead and iron production reflected again from the mid-12th to early 13th centuries. Results corroborate annual-written sources for increased Yorkshire and wider British lead production from the 1160s–1220, and comparable pollution increases attributed to Britain for these decades recovered previously from Swedish lakes and Alpine ice-core research from Switzerland.
Following a decline in the 14th century, the researchers found evidence of another recovery in production which was cut short by Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries from 1536-38.
“It became uneconomical to make fresh metal because it was ripped off all the monasteries, abbeys and religious houses,” Professor Loveluck explains. “Large-scale production resumed in the later 16th century to resource Elizabeth I’s Spanish and French wars.”
The Aldborough Roman Town Project, directed by Dr Rose Ferraby – an author of the new study – and Professor Martin Millett, from Cambridge’s Faculty of Classics, has carried out nearly 120 hectares of magnetometry inside the town and beyond, to establish a landscape scale view of the sub-surface archaeological remains of the town, its defences, road system and extra-mural areas. It has also used Ground Penetrating Radar more selectively within the town to reveal details and depths of the Roman buildings. Since 2016, a number of excavations have been carried out, re-examining earlier trenches.
Funding
The research was funded by The British Academy and the University of Cambridge.
Reference
C. P. Loveluck, M. J. Millett, S. Chenery, C. Chenery, R. Ferraby, C. French, ‘Aldborough and the metals economy of northern England, c. AD 345–1700: a new post-Roman narrative’. Antiquity (2025). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2025.10175
Britain’s industrial economy did not collapse when the Romans left and went on to enjoy a Viking-age industrial boom, a new study finds, undermining a stubborn ‘Dark Ages’ narrative.
It has significant implications for our wider understanding of the end of Roman BritainProfessor Martin MillettD. Powlesland and V. HerringAerial photograph of Aldborough showing the extent of the walled town and the location of the sediment core
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.
England’s forgotten first king deserves to be famous, says Æthelstan biographer as anniversaries approach
A groundbreaking new biography of Æthelstan marks 1,100 years since his coronation in 925AD, reasserts his right to be called the first king of England, explains why he isn’t better known and highlights his many overlooked achievements. The book’s author, Professor David Woodman, is campaigning for greater public recognition of Æthelstan’s creation of England in 927AD.
Family fortunes founded on slavery: introducing the Sandbach Tinne Collection
Records unearthed by a Cambridge PhD student expose the kinship and brutality behind one of Britain’s most powerful slave-trading dynasties, as revealed in a new book and digital collection.
A Cambridge legal expert on the ICJ's landmark climate opinion
A Cambridge professor and counsel team member for Vanuatu gives his initial views on the ICJ Advisory Opinion.
British Academy elects twelve Cambridge researchers to Fellowship in 2025
They are among 92 distinguished scholars to be elected to the fellowship in recognition of their work in fields ranging from medieval history to international relations.
The Cambridge academics made Fellows of the Academy this year are:
Professor Jeremy Adelman (Faculty of History; Global History Lab; Darwin College)
Professor Anthony Bale (Faculty of English; Girton College)
Professor Annabel Brett (Faculty of History; Gonville and Caius College)
Professor Hasok Chang (Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science; Clare Hall)
Professor Jennifer Howard-Grenville (Cambridge Judge Business School; Trinity Hall)
Professor Barak Kushner (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; Corpus Christi College)
Professor Marta Mirazón Lahr (Dept. of Archaeology, Clare College)
Professor Yael Navaro (Dept. of Social Anthropology; Newnham College)
Professor Joanna Page (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics; Centre of Latin American Studies; Robinson College)
Professor Clare Pettitt (Faculty of English; Emmanuel College)
Professor Diane Reay (Faculty of Education)
Professor John Robb (Dept. of Archaeology; Peterhouse)
Founded in 1902, the British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. It is a Fellowship consisting of over 1700 of the leading minds in these subjects from the UK and overseas.
Current Fellows include the classicist Professor Dame Mary Beard, the historian Professor Sir Simon Schama and philosopher Professor Baroness Onora O’Neill, while previous Fellows include Dame Frances Yates, Sir Winston Churchill, Seamus Heaney and Beatrice Webb. The Academy is also a funder of both national and international research, as well as a forum for debate and public engagement.
In 2025, a total of 58 UK Fellows, 30 International Fellows and four Honorary Fellows have been elected to the British Academy Fellowship.
Professor Marta Mirazón Lahr said: “I am honoured and delighted to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy. As a native of South America who has been welcomed and encouraged throughout my career in the UK, I feel particularly privileged to join the academy. My work spans anthropology and archaeology and it is pleasing to see inter-disciplinarity recognised. Research in human origins is very dependent upon official and community support across many countries, and I am deeply grateful to the people of Brazil, India, Libya, Melanesia and specially Kenya who have made my work possible (and so enjoyable!), and I look forward to contributing to the Academy’s global mission.”
Professor Joanna Page said: “I am deeply honoured to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and I look forward to supporting its mission. It is more important than ever to uphold the value of the humanities and interdisciplinary approaches in forging more just and sustainable futures. Learning from the perspectives and experiences of other regions, including Latin America, is essential to that work. I would particularly like to thank the vibrant community of Latin Americanists at Cambridge – staff and students, past and present – who have made this such a stimulating place to do research.”
Professor Barak Kushner said: “It is an honour to be recognised by the British Academy, though also a bit daunting to be put on par with scholars I have looked up to for years. Recognition of this kind brings more attention to the importance of transnational history when researching East Asia and the need to look beyond national borders.”
Professor Yael Navaro said: “I feel truly honoured to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy. It couldn't be a more important time to mobilise the social sciences and humanities to address some of the most critical issues of our era."
Welcoming the Fellows, Professor Susan J. Smith PBA, new President of the British Academy, said: “One of my first acts as the incoming President of the British Academy is to welcome this year’s newly elected Fellows. What a line-up! With specialisms ranging from the neuroscience of memory to the power of music and the structural causes of poverty, they represent the very best of the humanities and social sciences. They bring years of experience, evidence-based arguments and innovative thinking to the profound challenges of our age: managing the economy, enabling democracy, and securing the quality of human life.
“This year, we have increased the number of new Fellows by nearly ten per cent to cover some spaces between disciplines. Champions of research excellence, every new Fellow enlarges our capacity to interpret the past, understand the present, and shape resilient, sustainable futures. It is a privilege to extend my warmest congratulations to them all.”
Twelve academics from the University of Cambridge have been made Fellows of the prestigious British Academy for the humanities and social science
It couldn't be a more important time to mobilize the social sciences and humanities to address some of the most critical issues of our eraYael NavaroThe British AcademyThe exterior of the British Academy in London
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.
British Academy elects twelve Cambridge researchers to Fellowship in 2025
They are among 92 distinguished scholars to be elected to the fellowship in recognition of their work in fields ranging from medieval history to international relations.
The Cambridge academics made Fellows of the Academy this year are:
Professor Jeremy Adelman (Faculty of History; Global History Lab; Darwin College)
Professor Anthony Bale (Faculty of English; Girton College)
Professor Annabel Brett (Faculty of History; Gonville and Caius College)
Professor Hasok Chang (Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science; Clare Hall)
Professor Jennifer Howard-Grenville (Cambridge Judge Business School; Trinity Hall)
Professor Barak Kushner (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; Corpus Christi College)
Professor Marta Mirazón Lahr (Dept. of Archaeology, Clare College)
Professor Yael Navaro (Dept. of Social Anthropology; Newnham College)
Professor Joanna Page (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics; Centre of Latin American Studies; Robinson College)
Professor Clare Pettitt (Faculty of English; Emmanuel College)
Professor Diane Reay (Faculty of Education)
Professor John Robb (Dept. of Archaeology; Peterhouse)
Founded in 1902, the British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. It is a Fellowship consisting of over 1700 of the leading minds in these subjects from the UK and overseas.
Current Fellows include the classicist Professor Dame Mary Beard, the historian Professor Sir Simon Schama and philosopher Professor Baroness Onora O’Neill, while previous Fellows include Dame Frances Yates, Sir Winston Churchill, Seamus Heaney and Beatrice Webb. The Academy is also a funder of both national and international research, as well as a forum for debate and public engagement.
In 2025, a total of 58 UK Fellows, 30 International Fellows and four Honorary Fellows have been elected to the British Academy Fellowship.
Professor Marta Mirazón Lahr said: “I am honoured and delighted to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy. As a native of South America who has been welcomed and encouraged throughout my career in the UK, I feel particularly privileged to join the academy. My work spans anthropology and archaeology and it is pleasing to see inter-disciplinarity recognised. Research in human origins is very dependent upon official and community support across many countries, and I am deeply grateful to the people of Brazil, India, Libya, Melanesia and specially Kenya who have made my work possible (and so enjoyable!), and I look forward to contributing to the Academy’s global mission.”
Professor Joanna Page said: “I am deeply honoured to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and I look forward to supporting its mission. It is more important than ever to uphold the value of the humanities and interdisciplinary approaches in forging more just and sustainable futures. Learning from the perspectives and experiences of other regions, including Latin America, is essential to that work. I would particularly like to thank the vibrant community of Latin Americanists at Cambridge – staff and students, past and present – who have made this such a stimulating place to do research.”
Professor Barak Kushner said: “It is an honour to be recognised by the British Academy, though also a bit daunting to be put on par with scholars I have looked up to for years. Recognition of this kind brings more attention to the importance of transnational history when researching East Asia and the need to look beyond national borders.”
Professor Yael Navaro said: “I feel truly honoured to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy. It couldn't be a more important time to mobilise the social sciences and humanities to address some of the most critical issues of our era."
Welcoming the Fellows, Professor Susan J. Smith PBA, new President of the British Academy, said: “One of my first acts as the incoming President of the British Academy is to welcome this year’s newly elected Fellows. What a line-up! With specialisms ranging from the neuroscience of memory to the power of music and the structural causes of poverty, they represent the very best of the humanities and social sciences. They bring years of experience, evidence-based arguments and innovative thinking to the profound challenges of our age: managing the economy, enabling democracy, and securing the quality of human life.
“This year, we have increased the number of new Fellows by nearly ten per cent to cover some spaces between disciplines. Champions of research excellence, every new Fellow enlarges our capacity to interpret the past, understand the present, and shape resilient, sustainable futures. It is a privilege to extend my warmest congratulations to them all.”
Twelve academics from the University of Cambridge have been made Fellows of the prestigious British Academy for the humanities and social science
It couldn't be a more important time to mobilize the social sciences and humanities to address some of the most critical issues of our eraYael NavaroThe British AcademyThe exterior of the British Academy in London
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.
UK Govt appoints three Cambridge academics to new net zero council
Engineering Professor Julian Allwood (St Catharine's), Cambridge Zero Director Professor Emily Shuckburgh (Darwin) and Cambridge Energy Policy Research Group Director Emeritus Professor David Newbery (Churchill) join a panel of 17 expert advisors on STAC, which has been created to provide robust, scientific, evidence-based information to support key decisions as the UK overhauls its energy system to reach clean power by 2030.
The Council is expected to also offer independent viewpoints and cutting-edge research on topics from climate science, energy networks and engineering, to the latest technologies and artificial intelligence.
“Evidence-based decision-making is fundamental to the drive for clean power and tackling the climate crisis, with informed policymaking the key to securing a better, fairer world for current and future generations,” UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said in the Government’s announcement.
Professor Allwood is Professor of Engineering and the Environment at the University of Cambridge and directs the Use Less Group. Uniquely, his research aims to articulate a pathway to zero emissions based on technologies that already exist at scale. His projects include ground-breaking innovations such as electric cement.
Professor Shuckburgh is Director of Cambridge Zero, the University’s major climate change initiative. A mathematician and data scientist, Emily Shuckburgh is also Professor of Environmental Data Science at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Academic Director of the Institute of Computing for Climate Science, and co-Director of the Centre for Landscape Regeneration and the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training on the Application of AI to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER).
As a climate scientist, Professor Shuckburgh worked for more than a decade at the British Antarctic Survey where her work included leading a UK national research programme on the Southern Ocean and its role in climate.
Professor Newbery is the Director of the Cambridge Energy Policy Research Group, an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Economics and a Professorial Research Associate in the UCL Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources, University College London.
STAC’s expert advice is expected to allow ministers to access the most up-to-date and well-informed scientific evidence, improving decision-making and effectiveness of policy implementation.
STAC is led by Professor Paul Monks, STAC Co-Chair and Chief Scientific Adviser & Director General, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ); and Professor David Greenwood FREng, STAC Co-Chair and CEO of Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) High Value Manufacturing Catapult Centre.
Read the government announcement here
Three Cambridge academics have been appointed to the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s new Science and Technology Advisory Council (STAC), which met for the first time on Wednesday 9 July, 2025.
Evidence-based decision-making is fundamental to the drive for clean powerUK Energy Secretary David MilibandUK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband at London Climate Action Week/Credit: CISLUK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband at London Climate Action Week
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.
The Air We Breathe
Researchers from every school and more than 20 departments across the University of Cambridge gathered in February to explore the links between air quality and climate, their impacts on human health, and the challenges and opportunities for Clean Air and Net Zero.
The Air We Breathe
Researchers from every school and more than 20 departments across the University of Cambridge gathered in February to explore the links between air quality and climate, their impacts on human health, and the challenges and opportunities for Clean Air and Net Zero.
Cambridge researchers awarded Advanced Grants from the European Research Council
The successful Cambridge grantees’ work covers a range of research areas, including the development of next-generation semiconductors, new methods to identify dyslexia in young children, how diseases spread between humans and animals, and the early changes that happen in cells before breast cancer develops, with the goal of finding ways to stop the disease before it starts.
The funding, worth €721 million in total, will go to 281 leading researchers across Europe. The Advanced Grant competition is one of the most prestigious and competitive funding schemes in the EU and associated countries, including the UK. It gives senior researchers the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs. Advanced Grants may be awarded up to € 2.5 million for a period of five years. The grants are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme. The UK agreed a deal to associate to Horizon Europe in September 2023.
This competition attracted 2,534 proposals, which were reviewed by panels of internationally renowned researchers. Over 11% of proposals were selected for funding. Estimates show that the grants will create approximately 2,700 jobs in the teams of new grantees. The new grantees will be based at universities and research centres in 23 EU Member States and associated countries, notably in the UK (56 grants), Germany (35), Italy (25), the Netherlands (24), and France (23).
“Many congratulations to our Cambridge colleagues on these prestigious ERC funding awards,” said Professor Sir John Aston, Cambridge’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research. “This type of long-term funding is invaluable, allowing senior researchers the time and space to develop potential solutions for some of biggest challenges we face. We are so fortunate at Cambridge to have so many world-leading researchers across a range of disciplines, and I look forward to seeing the outcomes of their work.”
The Cambridge recipients of 2025 Advanced Grants are:
Professor Clare Bryant (Department of Veterinary Medicine) for investigating human and avian pattern recognition receptor activation of cell death pathways, and the impact on the host inflammatory response to zoonotic infections.
Professor Sir Richard Friend (Cavendish Laboratory/St John’s College) for bright high-spin molecular semiconductors.
Professor Usha Goswami (Department of Psychology/St John’s College) for a cross-language approach to the early identification of dyslexia and developmental language disorder using speech production measures with children.
Professor Regina Grafe (Faculty of History) for colonial credit and financial diversity in the Global South: Spanish America 1600-1820.
Professor Judy Hirst (MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit/Corpus Christi College) for the energy-converting mechanism of a modular biomachine: Uniting structure and function to establish the engineering principles of respiratory complex I.
Professor Matthew Juniper (Department of Engineering/Trinity College) for adjoint-accelerated inference and optimisation methods.
Professor Walid Khaled (Department of Pharmacology/Magdalene College) for understanding precancerous changes in breast cancer for the development of therapeutic interceptions.
Professor Adrian Liston (Department of Pathology/St Catharine’s College) for dissecting the code for regulatory T cell entry into the tissues and differentiation into tissue-resident cells.
Professor Róisín Owens (Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology/Newnham College) for conformal organic devices for electronic brain-gut readout and characterisation.
Professor Emma Rawlins (Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience/Gurdon Institute) for reprogramming lung epithelial cell lineages for regeneration.
Dr Marta Zlatic (Department of Zoology/Trinity College) for discovering the circuit and molecular basis of inter-strain and inter-species differences in learning
“These ERC grants are our commitment to making Europe the world’s hub for excellent research,” said Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation. “By supporting projects that have the potential to redefine whole fields, we are not just investing in science but in the future prosperity and resilience of our continent. In the next competition rounds, scientists moving to Europe will receive even greater support in setting up their labs and research teams here. This is part of our “Choose Europe for Science” initiative, designed to attract and retain the world’s top scientists.”
“Much of this pioneering research will contribute to solving some of the most pressing challenges we face - social, economic and environmental,” said Professor Maria Leptin, President of the European Research Council. “Yet again, many scientists - around 260 - with ground-breaking ideas were rated as excellent, but remained unfunded due to a lack of funds at the ERC. We hope that more funding will be available in the future to support even more creative researchers in pursuing their scientific curiosity.”
Eleven senior researchers at the University of Cambridge have been awarded Advanced Grants from the European Research Council – the highest number of grants awarded to any institution in this latest funding round.
Westend61 via Getty ImagesScientist pipetting samples into eppendorf tube
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.
Cambridge scholar helps bring Ukraine’s pain and power to the stage in critically acclaimed creative collaboration
The Guardian calls it “shattering.” The Stage heralds it as a “challenging, artfully constructed indictment of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.”
Written by Anastasiia Kosodii and Josephine Burton, and directed by Burton, The Reckoning channels voices of Ukrainians across the country – a priest, a volunteer, a dentist, a security guard, a journalist – who are forced to confront the sudden horrors of invasion and occupation and to repair bonds of trust amid violence and fear. These voices are real, drawn from witness statements collected and conserved by the journalists and lawyers behind The Reckoning Project.
Rory Finnin, Professor of Ukrainian Studies and a Fellow of Robinson College at Cambridge, collaborated with Burton to help shape the play. His decades of research into Ukraine’s culture and society formed the basis for a grant in support of The Reckoning from the University of Cambridge’s AHRC Impact Starter Fund account.
“Our collaboration with Rory Finnin has been invaluable throughout the making of The Reckoning,” said Burton, who is also Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Dash Arts. “Rory’s insights into Ukraine’s past and present gave me deeper grounding as a director and co-writer and helped sharpen the questions the play asks of its audience.”
The Reckoning blends dynamic storytelling with movement, music, and food to forge new routes of solidarity and understanding with the audience. As Everything Theatre notes in a glowing review, “We leave not as passive spectators but as an active part of the struggle.”
Attendees share in a summer salad made over the course of the play by the Ukrainian and British cast – Tom Godwin, Simeon Kyslyi, Marianne Oldham, and Olga Safronova – who bring empathy, humour, and integrity to each scene. The conclusion of each performance features an invited speaker from the audience who comes to the stage to reckon with their own experience of the play from different ethical and intellectual perspectives.
Professor Finnin spoke on the play’s first night at the Arcola Theatre.
“Over three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, we are too often tempted to turn our eyes away from Ukraine,” said Finnin. “But The Reckoning empowers us to look closely and to see with new purpose. It has been an incredible privilege to support a dynamic work of art that brings Ukrainian voices to the fore and challenges us to listen and respond to them, with urgency and moral clarity.”
The Reckoning runs through 28 June at London’s Arcola Theatre.
The Reckoning is an intimate work of documentary theatre composed from a verified archive of witness testimonies chronicling Russia’s war of aggression. It is now playing at London’s Arcola Theatre to universal acclaim.
We are too often tempted to turn our eyes away from UkraineRory FinninDash ArtsThe Reckoning being performed at the Arcola Theatre, London, in 2025
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