Research in the News (<front>)

Researchers from the Cambridge Interfaith Research Forum and Goldsmiths University of London have issued an urgent call to rethink how faith and belief are understood and mobilised in planning new towns and settlements.

Their report, 'Housing with values: faith and belief perspectives on housing and community planning', presents the findings from a Faith & Belief Policy Collective study, produced in light of the UK Government’s ambitious pledge to build 1.5 million new homes.

The researchers’ analysis is based on interviews with practitioners and professionals including architects, housing developers, journalists, lawyers, activists, ordained ministers, policy makers and researchers, social historians, and scholars of religion. The report offers guiding principles for inclusive planning and proposes fuller civil–public collaboration to establish and disseminate good practice.

It follows the publication of the New Towns Taskforce (NTT)’s own recommendations to government in September 2025 which advised that plans for social infrastructure should include “faith-based spaces to enrich communities and open up opportunities for personal development” and that faith organisations should be involved in “community engagement strategy”.

The new report’s authors welcome this but warn that current planning systems in Britain have not yet embraced faith and belief communities as full partners in building thriving communities.

Co-author Dr Iona Hine from Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity, said: “Developers, agencies, and other planning professionals recognise the effort required to form healthy communities and ensure everyone lives well. Our hope is they’re open to thinking about that challenge in dialogue with people of all flavours of faith and belief.”

The report warns that flourishing communities are undermined by a wide range of factors including: short-term developer models that prioritise profit over social infrastructure; tokenistic consultation; segregated housing patterns that entrench inequality and risk alienation; secular bias and low faith literacy among planners and developers; and intergenerational imbalance in new towns.

The report’s key recommendation is for a 'New Towns Faith Taskforce' to be established to advance the conversation about how best to harness the vision, resources, and overall contribution of faith and belief communities to the delivery of New Towns.

Its authors call for the early provision of schools, health centres, cultural, sporting and faith-based facilities; long-term, co-design consultation that builds trust and ownership; and integration with natural landscapes and local heritage, deepening attachment to place, among a range of other practical recommendations.

The report argues that faith and belief communities offer trusted networks, convening power, insider knowledge, volunteer capacity, inter-generational reach, as well as financial and spiritual capital, and cultural contributions.

Dr Hine and her colleagues point to modern international examples such as Singapore’s proactive planning for religious diversity, but also to model communities in Britain such as Bournville and Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement (Letchworth, Welwyn Garden City, Wythenshawe, etc), that paved the way, in their design and ethos, for the 32 postwar New Towns which are currently home to 2.8 million people across the UK.

Lead author Christopher Baker, Professor of Religion, Belief and Public Life at Goldsmiths, University of London said: “As we embark on this next chapter of New Town building in England, it is vital to understand the contribution that faith and belief bring to the sustaining of new communities, through their vision, experience, resources and local leadership.”

Dr Hine said: “This is pivotal moment for housing supply and community formation in Britain. Treating faith and belief as partners in planning can accelerate social cohesion from day one, reduce loneliness and social isolation, and provide governance and voluntary capacity that complements statutory services. Ignoring these dimensions risks creating settlements that are physically complete but socially fragile.”

Dr Iona Hine manages the Cambridge Interfaith Programme and cross-sector Knowledge Hub. She is a member of the Faith & Belief Policy Collective and convenor of Cambridge Interfaith Research Forum.

'Housing with values' is available from the Cambridge Interfaith Programme website from Tuesday 14th October 2025 and the Religion Media Centre is hosting an online briefing for journalists at midday.

 

The UK Government’s pledge to build 1.5 million homes can lead to local resilience, social cohesion and wellbeing but only if the planning process embraces faith and belief communities as full partners

Treating faith and belief as partners in planning can accelerate social cohesion from day oneIona HineAlex PepperhillHouses under construction in a housing estate

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YesLicence type: Attribution

A total of 48 projects from across the UK are receiving funding from a new £9 million proof of concept programme to support and accelerate the development of new or improved technologies, products, processes and services. The aim of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) fund is to use research to drive growth and create the jobs of tomorrow.

The four Cambridge projects receiving funding exemplify the University's commitment to translating world-class research into practical solutions that address global challenges in health, sustainability, and inclusion. 

CamBoom: championing inclusion in cricket with engineered bamboo bats

Pioneered by Dr Darshil Shah, Associate Professor in Materials Science and Design in the Department of Architecture, this innovation aims to achieve an inclusive and sustainable future for cricket by developing low-cost bamboo bats, meeting the needs of millions of players in low and middle-income countries. 

AI-based coronary artery analysis

Professor Martin Bennett, British Heart Foundation Chair of Cardiovascular Sciences in the Department of Medicine, is using AI to advance medical diagnostics, improving the accuracy and efficiency of coronary artery analysis. 

Pre-clinical development of orally-administered, ultra-stable antibody mimetics

This initiative, led by Professor Mark Howarth and Dr Ana Rossi at the Department of Pharmacology, focuses on new treatments for gastrointestinal conditions, using innovative antibody mimetics that can be administered orally. 

Sustainable film packaging from plant waste

Professors James Elliott, Ruth Cameron and Serena Best from the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy have developed a new way of creating sustainable cellulose-based films at scale from waste plant material, with a range of applications from food and personal care packaging to anti-static discharge bags.  

Professor John Aston, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Cambridge, said: “Turning Cambridge research into innovations that will change people’s lives is at the heart of our mission. That four Cambridge projects have received UKRI proof of concept funding is a tribute both to the excellence of our researchers and to the support provided by our innovation arm, Cambridge Enterprise, in helping to translate their new ideas into effective solutions to global challenges.”

Dr Jim Glasheen, Chief Executive of Cambridge Enterprise, added: “The strength of Cambridge research lies not only in its scientific excellence but in our ability to translate discoveries into real-world impact. These projects are a great example of this strength, and showcase the University’s leadership in research translation and innovation. Funding of this kind is vital for nurturing breakthrough ideas and delivering lasting impact.”

UKRI proof of concept funding

This funding provides critical early-stage support to projects, helping researchers and innovators bridge the gap before attracting private investment, reducing the risks associated with premature market entry.

Of the 48 projects receiving funding, Professor Charlotte Deane, UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Research Commercialisation Executive Champion, said: "These projects are a powerful demonstration of the UK’s talent for turning cutting-edge research into real-world solutions. UKRI’s new proof of concept programme is all about helping researchers take that critical next step toward commercialisation, ensuring that bold ideas are not just published but put into practice where they can deliver tangible impact."

Adapted from a Cambridge Enterprise news story

Four cutting-edge University of Cambridge research projects are to receive funding from UKRI to grow into market-leading products and services.

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Yes

Albert Einstein famously remarked that, had he not been a physicist, he would have been a musician. He said “I know that most joy in my life has come to me from my violin”; and his wife, Elsa, claimed that she fell in love with him “because he played Mozart so beautifully on the violin”.

Dr Paul Wingfield, Director of Studies in Music at Trinity College, has now helped to identify an 1894 German violin as having belonged to Einstein. On 8th October 2025, the instrument will be auctioned by Dominic Winter Auctioneers in Cirencester. When the hammer falls, this will be the end of a remarkable 18-month journey for Dr Wingfield.

In March 2024, Wingfield was at the wake of his brother-in-law, Joseph Schwartz, a lifelong Einstein enthusiast and co-author of the 1979 book Einstein for Beginners. A copy was on a table next to a family photograph album containing a 1912 picture of a small boy playing the violin.

Wingfield says: “This juxtaposition sparked in my mind the idea of composing a musical drama, Einstein’s Violin, in which Einstein tells the story of his life, not as a physicist, but as a violinist, to the accompaniment of music for violin and piano.”

“Researching, scripting and composing this show took me six months, by which time I had collected details of everything Einstein is known to have said or written about music, as well as of the violins he owned, and of the concerts in which he played.” 

Einstein’s Violin was premiered in April 2025 in Highgate by distinguished actor Harry Meacher, Newnham alumna Leora Cohen on violin and Wingfield himself on piano. After a performance at the Highgate Festival at the end of June, the theatre manager handed Wingfield a message that began ‘I am not mad…’!

“Reading this message proved to be one of the most exciting, if surreal, experiences in my life, Wingfield says. “It was from an auctioneer who had been commissioned to sell a violin that had purportedly belonged to Einstein, and who was asking for my help in checking the instrument’s provenance.”

Einstein bought the violin in Munich in 1894, before he left for Switzerland. He played it throughout the period in which he developed his theory of relativity and received his Nobel prize, buying a new violin in Berlin in 1920. In 1932, just before he fled Nazi Germany for the US, he gave the Munich violin, along with a bicycle and two books, to his friend and fellow Nobel Laureate in Physics, Max von Laue. The books and the bicycle’s saddle will also be sold on 8 October. Twenty years later, von Laue gifted the violin and other items to a friend, Margarete Hommrich, whose great-great-granddaughter is the current owner.

Wingfield says: “I am of course not an expert on nineteenth-century violins but, by a quirk of circumstance, my extensive research into Einstein’s musical life made me the obvious person to investigate the owner’s narrative.”

“Over the summer I have thus been deploying all the historical skills that I have amassed over the years, in examining correspondence and a wide range of other documents, critically appraising witness testimonies, mapping Einstein’s movements over a forty-year period and even analysing his school-age handwriting."

The 1894 violin has an inscription of the name ‘Lina’, which Einstein bestowed on all of his violins.

“Along the way, I have acquired knowledge about topics that were previously a closed book to me, such as nineteenth-century varnish, the precise measurements of Einstein’s hands and even inter-War Belgian customs regulations. I am now as sure as anyone could be that this violin was indeed once owned by Einstein. It would seem that, just occasionally, life does imitate art.”

Paul Wingfield’s research focuses primarily on Czech music and music theory and analysis. He has published on Janáček, Martinů and nineteenth-century sonata form, and he has recently written a chapter on Joseph Joachim’s Violin Concerto no. 1 for a CUP book on the nineteenth-century violin concerto. His musical drama, Einstein’s Violin, received its premiere on 27 April 2025 at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate. He is currently composing a new musical drama, Mademoiselle Adagio, about the nineteenth-century violinist, Teresa Milanollo. 

This story is adapted from a Music @ Cambridge: Research blog post

Albert Einstein’s violin has been identified by Dr Paul Wingfield, composer of a musical drama about Einstein’s life as a violinist.

I had collected details of everything Einstein is known to have said or written about music, as well as of the violins he ownedPaul WingfieldCourtesy of Dominic Winter AuctioneersEinstein's violin sold by Dominic Winter Auctioneers in 2025

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YesLicence type: Attribution

The University of Cambridge study of 615 state schools in England found that while socio-economic background does not have a significant impact on students’ desire to study languages, poorer students are disproportionately concentrated in schools that give languages lower priority. This significantly reduces their chances of studying a language after the age of 14.

The research identified a seven percentage point gap between the proportion of disadvantaged students at schools where languages were optional at GCSE, and at those where they were considered ‘core’. Uptake at these schools diverged dramatically, with the proportion of students studying a GCSE language varying by more than 50 percentage points.

These findings suggest that disadvantaged students have been worst affected by the national decline in language study since 2004, when GCSE languages ceased to be compulsory. In the academic year 2023/4, just 45.7% of eligible students in England took a language GCSE. By contrast, 97.9% of upper secondary students in the EU study at least one foreign language.

The study also shows that if schools offer a wider choice of languages, their GCSE language scores tend to be better overall. For every additional language offered at GCSE, schools’ average scores for GCSE languages rose by almost a quarter of a grade.

The research, published in The Language Learning Journal, was undertaken by Dr Karen Forbes, Associate Professor in Second Language Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.

Forbes said it raised concerns about widening inequalities in language learning. “It seems obvious, but surely all children should have the same opportunity to learn a language,” she said. “In practice, for less wealthy students these subjects are often de-emphasised. If this is not addressed, the national decline in language learning will continue and probably accelerate.”

Language learning in England is compulsory from ages seven to 14, with most pupils studying French, Spanish or German. Thereafter, schools decide whether to treat languages as ‘core’ or optional. In addition, some offer languages through a specific pathway tied to the English Baccalaureate (EBacc): a performance measure based on the number of pupils taking GCSEs in what the Government considers important subjects, which includes languages.

The Cambridge study explored how schools’ policies on languages – treating them as ‘core’, attaching them to an EBacc pathway, or leaving them fully optional – affects uptake at GCSE and students’ attainment.

It also considered other factors that might influence uptake and grades, including students’ prior attainment (measured using test scores at Key Stage 2), the number of “disadvantaged” students, and the number of students who use English as an additional language (EAL), meaning they speak a different language at home.

Out of the 615 schools, 19.2% treated languages as ‘core’, 29.6% offered an EBacc pathway, and 51.2% positioned languages as completely optional. The vast majority of GCSE students took French, Spanish, or German; but some studied Chinese, Italian, Urdu, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese or Bengali.

Disadvantaged students were more likely to attend schools where languages were optional, accounting for almost 29% of all students, compared with just 21.3% in schools where languages were core. The proportion in EBacc pathway schools was 25.65%: almost identical to the national average.

Critically, the effect of school language policies on uptake were stark. In schools where languages were core, 82.6% of students studied a language to GCSE. The figure sank to 52.7% in EBacc pathway schools and just 31.9% in schools where languages are optional. As the study shows, these are the schools that disproportionately serve less affluent communities.

Even after accounting for prior attainment and EAL pupils, school policy remained the strongest predictor of students’ likelihood of studying a language to GCSE. In contrast, disadvantage had no significant effect. In other words, given the chance, poorer students are just as likely to continue language study past age 14 as their peers.

The research also considered the effects that increasing language uptake has on results. On average, each percentage increase in uptake was linked to a 0.019 point drop, or about one-fiftieth of a grade, in the school’s average GCSE grade across all language subjects.

This effect was more than outweighed by the benefits of offering a wider choice of languages, however. For each additional GCSE language on the timetable, the average grade rose by 0.234 points – almost a quarter of a grade.

Forbes said that how schools position languages in the curriculum sends important signals to students. “When schools frame languages as useful and important the students pick up on this,” she said. “Offering a wider range of languages also gives them a choice, and they are more likely to be motivated if they are studying a language they have actively chosen.”

While the EBacc has not reversed the national decline in language learning, the findings provide some tentative evidence that it has a positive effect in some schools, bearing in mind the 20 percentage point difference between uptake in EBacc pathway schools and schools where languages are purely optional.

“Personally, I would love to see languages reestablished as core subjects at GCSE across all schools – this would signal its importance and create more equitable opportunities for students,” Forbes said. “In the absence of that, something is better than nothing, and national-level accountability measures for languages like the EBacc do seem to influence both schools and students. Broadening choice – rather than narrowing it – is key to reducing inequalities between students, and to raising both participation and attainment.”

Students from less wealthy backgrounds are more likely to attend schools where learning a language to GCSE is treated as optional – and not necessarily strongly encouraged – new research shows.

Andrew Fox/GettyUK schoolgirls in a GCSE language lessom

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Yes

In Rewilding Education, Professor Hilary Cremin argues that modern schooling is defined by an obsession with standardisation and outdated thinking, while it fails to nurture creativity, critical thought, or the physical and mental health of students and teachers.

Cremin, who is Head of the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, draws on decades of experience as a teacher, academic and consultant – as well as the work of other scholars – to put forward a programme for “long-term, radical change”, including a stronger focus on students’ social and emotional development alongside academic achievement.

The book’s numerous proposals include more lessons outdoors, and more projects that connect students to their communities beyond the school gates. Steps such as these, she argues, would help prepare young people to live responsibly – and well – in a rapidly changing world.

Cremin acknowledges that these ideas may be disparaged by traditionalists and policy-makers – as, indeed, they have been before. In 2013, she was one of 100 academic critics of Michael Gove’s educational reforms whom the then Education Secretary branded “enemies of promise”.

More than a decade later, she argues, there is still no evidence that those reforms, like many before and since, have narrowed the attainment gap between wealthy and poorer students as promised. Research shows that the gap widens throughout school, reaching the equivalent of more than 19 months of learning by the end of secondary education.

“Despite decades of reform, I think the school system as we presently configure it may be beyond redemption,” Cremin said. “This isn’t an attack on the idea of education, or on the thousands of brilliant teachers who give the job their all. But government after government has tinkered with education when the basic model is obsolete.”

“If we keep preparing children for the second half of the 21st century using a system designed in the 19th, it could do catastrophic harm. We need to rethink what it means to educate, and what we are educating for.”

Rewilding Education challenges the ‘myth of social mobility’, arguing that education functions more as a sorting mechanism than a levelling force. High-performing school still admit disproportionately few disadvantaged young people, and poverty remains the strongest available predictor of student outcomes.

The chimerical belief persists that good grades will secure students a better future. “None of the ideas driving schools policy really stands up to scrutiny,” Cremin writes, “yet this hardly seems to matter”.

Cremin contends that schools often resemble outdated, factory-style production lines: rigid, standardised and with sometimes militaristic discipline. This, she suggests, suppresses curiosity, discourages critical thinking and disempowers teachers.

Her critique of the effects on physical and mental health is particularly urgent. Cremin argues that schools are making students and teachers ill. She presents evidence linking the loss of physical education and the sale of school playing fields to rising childhood obesity, and notes that even basic needs – such as access to adequate toilet facilities – often go unmet.

High-stakes testing, she adds, is fuelling poor mental health, while zero-tolerance behaviour policies have driven a 60% rise in permanent exclusions since 2015, with disadvantaged students four times more likely to be excluded. Students and teachers, she suggests, sometimes turn to medication to cope with an “ailing system”.

This bleak reality, she argues, demands more than incremental reform. The book calls for a new educational model for a new kind of future – one shaped by the climate crisis, downward mobility, Generative AI and post-truth politics. “We are educating for jobs and lifestyles that will soon cease to exist,” Cremin writes, “while failing to educate for those that don’t yet exist.”

This leads Cremin to call for education to be ‘rewilded’ – a metaphor drawn from ecological restoration. In schools, it implies letting go of rigid, one-size-fits-all structures, and allowing less predictable and more holistic forms of learning to emerge.

Nature plays a central role in her vision. Drawing on thinkers like Rabindranath Tagore, Cremin argues that schools should treat the natural world as a “co-educator”. She encourages outdoor and experience-based learning and suggests that even small changes – like planting trees, creating school gardens or nature-inspired arts activities – could help foster greater respect for the environment.

Rewilding Education also urges a rebalancing towards project-based learning, the arts and civic engagement. Students, Cremin argues, must learn not only to reproduce knowledge, but to act with wisdom and care, and to think critically about complex problems. This requires education for “body, mind, heart and soul”.

She proposes, for example, giving students time to walk and reflect when grappling with difficult questions, and highlights research linking later start times for adolescents – who have different sleep patterns – to better performance and wellbeing. She also champions mindfulness and ‘metacognitive’ approaches, that help children reflect on how they are thinking while they are learning.

In a chapter Cremin anticipates critics will deliberately misread, she calls for greater trust and deeper relationships between teachers and students. Risk aversion in schools, she argues, has counter-intuitively made it harder for teachers to care and support pupils, in favour of rule enforcement and teaching facts.

The book draws on examples from the UK, India, Germany and the US to show how ‘rewilding’ is not just possible, but already happening, in some schools that emphasise education for togetherness, harmony and wellbeing. “Something fundamental needs to change,” Cremin added. “We are crying out for systemic transformation: a completely new vision of what education involves, however challenging that may be.”

A new book warns that the school system may be “broken beyond repair”, claiming that it is deepening inequality and making children ill.

We are crying out for systemic transformation: a completely new vision of what education involves, however challenging that may beHilary CreminCaia images/GettyGirl takes exam in a London secondary school.

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Yes

LLMs are powering more and more products, but testing their safety, reliability and performance is a significant challenge. Current testing methods are slow, manual and inconsistent, making it difficult for teams to iterate quickly or trust their results.

Trismik aims to solve this by using adaptive testing and automatic scoring to evaluate models against a number of dimensions including factual accuracy, bias and toxicity. Inspired by psychometrics and machine learning, the system dynamically selects the most informative test cases, dramatically reducing the number of datapoints required while achieving high reliability and enabling faster development cycles.

“AI is no longer just generating answers, it's shaping decisions, products and lives. If we want trustworthy AI, we need to treat evaluation as seriously as we take training. Trismik aims to lead that charge by giving AI engineers the tools to test with precision, act with confidence and build with integrity,” said Nigel Collier, Professor of Natural Language Processing at the University of Cambridge and co-founder and Chief Scientist at Trismik.

Collier, who started his career in the 1990s with a PhD in machine translation using neural networks, has increasingly focused on how we can ensure AI acts as a trusted partner to humanity rather than a risk to it. Collier’s curiosity for whether AI could be assessed in the same efficient and fair way as humans, created the genesis for Trismik’s approach to adaptive evaluation.

In 2023 Collier met co-founder Rebekka Mikkola, a repeat founder and enterprise sales executive with a passion both for building in AI and opening doors for women in tech. The pair were backed early by Cambridge Enterprise and in 2025 were joined by former Amazon scientist Marco Basaldella as CTO, completing a founding team that blends science, engineering and commercial expertise.

Dr Christine Martin, Head of Ventures at Cambridge Enterprise, said: "Trismik exemplifies Cambridge’s continued contribution to global AI development with the team combining world-class academic credentials and practical industry experience that has given them the unique authority to define how AI capabilities should be measured. By solving a pivotal challenge in AI adoption, Trismik is positioned to drive trust at scale - we’re excited to support their journey to market."

The £2.2m in pre-seed financing was led by Twinpath Ventures, with participation from Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, Parkwalk Advisors, Fund F, Vento Ventures and angel investors from Ventures Together. 

Read the full news story on the Cambridge Enterprise website.

As AI becomes embedded in everyday tools and decisions, ensuring the safety and reliability of large language models (LLMs) is more critical than ever. Cambridge spinout Trismik has raised £2.2 million to help it make AI testing faster, smarter and more trustworthy.

AI is no longer just generating answers, it's shaping decisions, products and lives. If we want trustworthy AI, we need to treat evaluation as seriously as we take training.Nigel Collier, Professor of Natural Language Processing and co-founder of TrismikNigel Collier

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.

Yes

The Academy is completing the national rollout of its ECRN, a researcher-led network for UK-based researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences, as a new cluster is launched to serve the East of England.

At Cambridge, the ECRN will be based at CRASSH (the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) and also supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Facilitation Team and the Postdoc Academy.

“Early career researchers are the architects of some of the most innovative and dynamic projects, events, and networks we host at CRASSH, and we are delighted to be able to extend our work with them in this way,” said Professor Joanna Page, Director of CRASSH and academic lead for the East of England Cluster.

“The British Academy ECRN will provide a wonderful opportunity for researchers across the region to connect with each other and benefit from a rich programme of research and professional development.”

ECRN members benefit from mentoring schemes, training, networking events, grant-writing retreats, academic book-publishing conferences, travel grants to attend network events and conferences, and seed-funding opportunities.

“The University of Cambridge has a longstanding commitment to supporting early career researchers, and we are honoured to play a part in this excellent initiative,” said Professor John Aston, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Cambridge.

“The British Academy Early Career Researcher Network also helps us to achieve our aims to strengthen ties with academic leaders and communities across the East of England region, helping further the exciting research taking place in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.”

Daniela Dora, ECR assembly representative for the University of Cambridge School of Arts and Humanities, said: “It is exciting to see the British Academy ECR Network launch in the East of England. The network offers not only new opportunities to share ideas and experiences across disciplines but also provides a supportive community for researchers. For early career researchers, this comes at a crucial stage where collaboration and connection matter most.”

The launch event for the East of England cluster of the ECRN will take place on 24 November 2025 in Cambridge, and ECRs from across the region will be invited to take part.

Funded by the Wolfson Foundation, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and Wellcome, the ECRN launched in 2021 as a pilot programme and has since been extended to 2027 due to its success.

Find out more and sign up to the ECRN with the British Academy.

The University has been selected as the lead delivery partner for the British Academy’s new East of England Early Career Researcher Network (ECRN) cluster. Cambridge will work closely with the other delivery partners, Anglia Ruskin University and the University of East Anglia, to support early career researchers in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences across the region.

Early career researchers are the architects of some of the most innovative and dynamic projectsJoanna PageTwo students walking through central Cambridge

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.

Yes

The Academy is completing the national rollout of its ECRN, a researcher-led network for UK-based researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences, as a new cluster is launched to serve the East of England.

At Cambridge, the ECRN will be based at CRASSH (the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) and also supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Facilitation Team and the Postdoc Academy.

“Early career researchers are the architects of some of the most innovative and dynamic projects, events, and networks we host at CRASSH, and we are delighted to be able to extend our work with them in this way,” said Professor Joanna Page, Director of CRASSH and academic lead for the East of England Cluster.

“The British Academy ECRN will provide a wonderful opportunity for researchers across the region to connect with each other and benefit from a rich programme of research and professional development.”

ECRN members benefit from mentoring schemes, training, networking events, grant-writing retreats, academic book-publishing conferences, travel grants to attend network events and conferences, and seed-funding opportunities.

“The University of Cambridge has a longstanding commitment to supporting early career researchers, and we are honoured to play a part in this excellent initiative,” said Professor John Aston, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Cambridge.

“The British Academy Early Career Researcher Network also helps us to achieve our aims to strengthen ties with academic leaders and communities across the East of England region, helping further the exciting research taking place in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.”

Daniela Dora, ECR assembly representative for the University of Cambridge School of Arts and Humanities, said: “It is exciting to see the British Academy ECR Network launch in the East of England. The network offers not only new opportunities to share ideas and experiences across disciplines but also provides a supportive community for researchers. For early career researchers, this comes at a crucial stage where collaboration and connection matter most.”

The launch event for the East of England cluster of the ECRN will take place on 24 November 2025 in Cambridge, and ECRs from across the region will be invited to take part.

Funded by the Wolfson Foundation, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and Wellcome, the ECRN launched in 2021 as a pilot programme and has since been extended to 2027 due to its success.

Find out more and sign up to the ECRN with the British Academy.

The University has been selected as the lead delivery partner for the British Academy’s new East of England Early Career Researcher Network (ECRN) cluster. Cambridge will work closely with the other delivery partners, Anglia Ruskin University and the University of East Anglia, to support early career researchers in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences across the region.

Early career researchers are the architects of some of the most innovative and dynamic projectsJoanna PageTwo students walking through central Cambridge

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.

Yes

Research uncovers how a poet-physician turned the innovation in assisted reproduction into a moving story and amplified the women involved.

The experiment, by two education researchers, asked the chatbot to solve a version of the “doubling the square” problem – a lesson described by Plato in about 385 BCE and, the paper suggests, “perhaps the earliest documented experiment in mathematics education”. The puzzle sparked centuries of debate about whether knowledge is latent within us, waiting to be ‘retrieved’, or something that we ‘generate’ through lived experience and encounters.

The new study explored a similar question about ChatGPT’s mathematical ‘knowledge’ – as that can be perceived by its users. The researchers wanted to know whether it would solve Plato’s problem using knowledge it already ‘held’, or by adaptively developing its own solutions.

Plato describes Socrates teaching an uneducated boy how to double the area of a square. At first, the boy mistakenly suggests doubling the length of each side, but Socrates eventually leads him to understand that the new square’s sides should be the same length as the diagonal of the original.

The researchers put this problem to ChatGPT-4, at first imitating Socrates’ questions, and then deliberately introducing errors, queries and new variants of the problem.

Like other Large Language Models (LLMs), ChatGPT is trained on vast collections of text and generates responses by predicting sequences of words learned during its training. The researchers expected it to handle their Ancient Greek maths challenge by regurgitating its pre-existing ‘knowledge’ of Socrates’ famous solution. Instead, however, it seemed to improvise its approach and, at one point, also made a distinctly human-like error.

The study was conducted by Dr Nadav Marco, a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, and Andreas Stylianides, Professor of Mathematics Education at Cambridge. Marco is permanently based at the Hebrew University and David Yellin College of Education, Jerusalem.

While they are cautious about the results, stressing that LLMs do not think like humans or ‘work things out’, Marco did characterise ChatGPT’s behaviour as “learner-like”.

“When we face a new problem, our instinct is often to try things out based on our past experience,” Marco said. “In our experiment, ChatGPT seemed to do something similar. Like a learner or scholar, it appeared to come up with its own hypotheses and solutions.”

Because ChatGPT is trained on text and not diagrams, it tends to be weaker at the sort of geometrical reasoning that Socrates used in the doubling the square problem. Despite this, Plato’s text is so well known that the researchers expected the chatbot to recognise their questions and reproduce Socrates’ solution.

Intriguingly, it failed to do so. Asked to double the square, ChatGPT opted for an algebraic approach that would have been unknown in Plato’s time.

It then resisted attempts to get it to make the boy’s mistake and stubbornly stuck to algebra even when the researchers complained about its answer being an approximation. Only when Marco and Stylianides told it they were disappointed that, for all its training, it could not provide an “elegant and exact” answer, did the Chat produce the geometrical alternative.

Despite this, ChatGPT demonstrated full knowledge of Plato’s work when asked about it. “If it had only been recalling from memory, it would almost certainly have referenced the classical solution of building a new square on the original square’s diagonal straight away,” Stylianides said. “Instead, it seemed to take its own approach.”

The researchers also posed a variant of Plato’s problem, asking ChatGPT to double the area of a rectangle while retaining its proportions. Even though it was now aware of their preference for geometry, the Chat stubbornly stuck to algebra. When pressed, it then mistakenly claimed that, because the diagonal of a rectangle cannot be used to double its size, a geometrical solution was unavailable.

The point about the diagonal is true, but a different geometrical solution does exist. Marco suggested that the chance that this false claim came from the chatbot’s knowledge base was “vanishingly small”. Instead, the Chat appeared to be improvising its responses based on their previous discussion about the square.

Finally, Marco and Stylianides asked it to double the size of a triangle. The Chat reverted to algebra yet again – but after more prompting did come up with a correct geometrical answer.

The researchers stress the importance of not over-interpreting these results, since they could not scientifically observe the Chat’s coding. From the perspective of their digital experience as users, however, what emerged at that surface level was a blend of data retrieval and on-the-fly reasoning.

They liken this behaviour to the educational concept of a “zone of proximal development” (ZPD) – the gap between what a learner already knows, and what they might eventually know with support and guidance. Perhaps, they argue, Generative AI has a metaphorical “Chat’s ZPD”: in some cases, it will not be able to solve problems immediately but could do so with prompting.

The authors suggest that working with the Chat in its ZPD can help turn its limitations into opportunities for learning. By prompting, questioning, and testing its responses, students will not only navigate the Chat’s boundaries but also develop the critical skills of proof evaluation and reasoning that lie at the heart of mathematical thinking.

“Unlike proofs found in reputable textbooks, students cannot assume that Chat GPT’s proofs are valid. Understanding and evaluating AI-generated proofs are emerging as key skills that need to be embedded in the mathematics curriculum,” Stylianides said.

“These are core skills we want students to master, but it means using prompts like, ‘I want us to explore this problem together,’ not, ‘Tell me the answer,’” Marco added.

The research is published in the International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology.

The Artificial Intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, appeared to improvise ideas and make mistakes like a student in a study that rebooted a 2,400-year-old mathematical challenge.

Unlike proofs found in reputable textbooks, students cannot assume that Chat GPT’s proofs are validAndreas StylianidesGreg O’Bairne, CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence, via Wikimedia Commons / NadaDespite ‘knowing’ the famous geometrical solution Socrates (left) gave to double the size of any square (right), ChatGPT preferred its own idiosyncratic approach, researchers found.

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.

Yes

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

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YesLicence type: Attribution

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

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YesLicence type: Attribution-Noncommerical

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.

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 professor and counsel team member for Vanuatu gives his initial views on the ICJ Advisory Opinion.

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.

YesLicence type: Attribution

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.

YesLicence type: Attribution

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.

Yes

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.

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.