Theme 6: Healthy lives

Keywords: physical and mental health, medicine, ethics, society, death, well-being, longevity, family, aging, pharmaceuticals, child development, wellbeing, inequality

Summary of plan

Mapping the research theme (across Schools) to support collaborations and grant applications, increasing visibility of the research by better communications support, workshop

Suggested focus and ambitions of theme

Participants agreed that “Healthy Lives” was a good name for the theme that was broad enough to accommodate the diverse interests in the group:

  • Patenting of pharmaceuticals and emerging medical technologies
  • Medical law medical sciences for law and ethics
  • Health, medicine and society
  • Healthy aging
  • Child development and mental health
  • Mental health and physical health intersections
  • Wellbeing of young people in school settings
  • Medical spending
  • Health and longevity
  • What healthy living looks like it across a population
  • Families, adoption, parental conflict, impact on children’s health
  • Accurate measures of death in the past, demographic models
  • Wellbeing and the collections in University Museums
  • Health and inequalities
  • They also agreed that there is no common measure of what “impact” looks like in this field, be it scientific, societal, cultural, etc. How do you define impact?
Benefits for collaboration under umbrella of theme

Getting to know people in other Departments: “who are interested, you could write up a short bio but would reference to the same sort of highlighting what are the aspects of healthy lives that they are particularly working”, “Take stock at the point at which the online form detail is put together and I totally endorse what I said about you know, the first step, I think, is identifying people of interest plugging up what our interest areas are and then seeking collaborations at a point when we want them.” 

Getting to know researchers in other Schools, particularly with the Medical Sciences, if they are interested in working on social science, ethics, etc.

Grant writing: “I think that  (research map) could be a really valuable resource for any future collaborations and future grant writing”, “It's often the case that you don't have a lot of time like putting a bidding and if you think it would be great to be able to cooperate with someone in you know particular department, but who's out there, I think that would be in itself would be really helpful resource for people to have.”

Gaining visibility: “Cambridge is well known for its scientific researchers, a real global leader. Wouldn't it be great if we could increasingly match that with work and reputation and profile in the humanities and social science of healthy lives”.