Year  Awardee Department Grant amount Project

2021

Professor Neil Arnold  Scott Polar Research Institute £1500 Analysing the Arctic: a Digital Interactive
The Analysing the Arctic: a Digital Interactive takes a technology used by researchers to understand the changing Arctic, and makes it accessible to members of the public. Loaded onto tablet computers, the interactive will be trialled with visitors to the Polar Museum who will use satellite images to identify the size and location of meltwater lakes on the Greenland ice sheet. While using the software, they will learn about the impacts of climate change on the Arctic. The digital interactive feeds data back to a database, and each user will enhance our knowledge about the behaviour of meltwater lakes in Greenland.
2021

Dr Stefanie Buckner

Department of Psychiatry £1492.65 Rehousing older social housing tenants: a research project, and what we learned from it
Appropriate housing is fundamental to health and wellbeing. Rehousing programmes are an important means to support older adults to move to more suitable homes. Stefanie and her colleagues created a short film describing research in Hackney/London into how well rehousing programmes for older social housing tenants are working. The film presents the methods used by the researchers, including a photography project capturing older tenants’ rehousing experiences, and it highlights what the research has found. It features older tenants and housing professionals who participated in the study discussing where rehousing programmes are working well, and where improvements are needed.
2021

Dr Lorna Dillon

Department of Politics and International Studies £1432 Art, Politics, Feminism: Textile Narratives
Lorna will work with Naomi Polonsky to run events exploring the socio-political uses of textile art. The events will link to an exhibition that brings textile art from community needlework projects in Colombia and Chile into dialogue with textile art by UK and US based artists. We will have public talks on Chilean arpilleras and workshops for schools that share knowledge the children wouldn’t normally have access to. We will use art to start dialogues about restorative justice, human rights issues, gender politics, racial discrimination, and migration politics, challenging the art / craft dichotomy and structural biases in art history.
2021

Professor Andrea Foreman

Gurdon Institute £1500 The Great BioQuest
The Great BioQuest is an interactive trail across Cambridge where participants are invited to complete one of three routes exploring developmental biology using a web app designed for smartphones. Each route (the worm, fly and frog) begins at the 1-cell stage and by answering a series of riddles at scientifically historic locations, participants aim to reach the adult stage at the last point in the trail. The project will also include a live event at the Cambridge Science Festival following an adapted route with active researchers stationed around the city, providing the opportunity for participants to speak to researchers in an informal setting.
2021

Dr Tiffany Harte

Department of Physics, Cavendish Laboratory £650 Atoms All Around Me
Atoms All Around Me is an interactive creative workshop for children aged 7-11 years to explore the universe of atoms. Through craft and creative activities, participants will learn about the structure of the tiny atoms that make up our universe, and how these come together to make some familiar objects. They will learn about what makes atoms different from each other, and how these different atoms are categorised in the periodic table. Workshops can be between two hours and a school day in length, and tailored to the age of the participants.
2021

Dr Philippa Hoskin

Faculty of Divinity £675.30 Sharing Impressions: learning about medieval seal matrices with metal detectorists
Sharing Impressions will share knowledge between metal detectorists, heritage professionals and academics around a very frequent metal detecting find: the medieval seal matrix. Workshops will disseminate new academic knowledge about seals; details of how to put them in context through research in heritage organisations; and metal detectorists’ knowledge about the context and nature of their finds.

2021

Dr Kitty Jones Centre for Family Research, Department of Psychology £1500 My Dad and Me: Our Story
‘My Dad and Me: Our Story’ will be a short, free, downloadable picture book for fathers to use when talking to their children about starting a family using surrogacy. It will be a collaboration between researchers at the Centre for Family Research and an illustrator to create a parent-led resource for single fathers who used surrogacy.
2021

Swetha Kannan

Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology £1459 Demystifying women's health through social media

The project is targeted at communicating cutting-edge science related to women's health, and raising awareness on ovarian cancer, pre-eclampsia, smear tests, HPV vaccinations etc. through exciting educational content, infographics, innovative games and story-telling sessions, podcasts and short-interviews.
2021

Yufei Li

Department of Architecture £1500 Manchuria Nostalgia: Bridging the Past and Present in Northeast China

‘Manchuria Nostalgia’ is a shared virtual atlas designed for the local communities to discover, record and engage with the narratives and cultural heritage of Northeast China. The project proposes a public place-making exercise of the historic Manchuria in its current urban regenerations, by engaging locals in walking tours and sharing their observations on interactive maps. In an era when the material cities are changing drastically whilst history and memories are falling apart, we believe the use of visuals and writings to re-initiate the conversations about our transforming neighbourhood, and to rebuild the place in collective narratives as our live chorography.

2021

Qian Liu

Faculty of Education £1360 ACTalk: Children Dialogue for Innovative Solutions to Global Challenges

ACTalk (All about Children’s Talk) is based on Qian Liu and Yun Long’s PhD research findings. The project aims to foster Chinese and British pupils' engagement in solving global challenges based on the UN's Sustainable Development Goals through intercultural dialogue. ACTalk intends to develop online dialogue supported by interactive technologies. The project will develop an international partnership with several interested schools, provide teacher workshops and launch a designed global challenge. In addition, pupils will video their solutions and share their insights via social media and at the Cambridge Festivals.

2021

Lucy Lloyd

Department of Public Health and Primary Care £1500 LBGTQ+ health: what our research tells us?

LBGTQ+ health: what our research tells us? will engage the public in our research on the health of sexual minorities. We have described how LGBTQ+ people experience more health challenges and more problems accessing healthcare than their heterosexual counterparts. After five years of research, ten academic papers and a lot of help from our existing public involvement panel, we now want to widen engagement. We will do this via: online briefing to bring our findings together in accessible form; forum to connect academics, policymakers, our public panel and healthcare providers; and a Cambridge Festival interactive event.

2021 Max Long Faculty of History £1294

'Secrets of Nature: science and natural history films in interwar Britain'

‘Secrets of Nature’ (https://secrets-of-nature.co.uk/) is an online resource created by Max Long as part of his PhD research at the History Faculty. It is named after a popular series of nature films produced in the 1920s and 1930s in Britain. The website offers historical context to these films and the people that made them. It also features links to view the films, and original historical materials. This project will develop and expand the website by working with teachers adapt it for classroom use. This will involve creating a teaching pack which will be free and available to all.

2021

Valentina Ndolo

Department of Veterinary Medicine £1500 Tackling Anthrax in Northern Uganda

Valentina Ndolo has been working directly with livestock farmers, animal health workers, district veterinary officers, academicians, and representatives from the Ugandan Ministry of Agriculture since 2019 to investigate anthrax occurrence patterns in Northern Uganda. Anthrax affects animals, particularly grazing herbivores, and can also be transmitted to humans. Her public engagement project seeks to create awareness about anthrax transmission and prevention via one-on-one sessions with livestock farmers, stakeholders, and collaborators. She also aims to develop a farmer-led action plan involving the establishment of a collaboration between farmers to facilitate the implementation of a joint livestock vaccination campaign.

2021 Dr Jenna Panter MRC Epidemiology Unit £1495

Creating community and stakeholder dialogue about active travel in Northstowe and Cambridgeshire

Our research team are planning to engage the public and policy stakeholders on our research in Northstowe about the role of financial incentives in promoting alternatives to the car. The team will create a small exhibition for use at community events orientated towards families. This aims to share information about the research we do with Cambridgeshire residents, to build curiosity about what’s going on to promote active travel in their area and what could be improved . To engage, consult and create a dialogue with a range of stakeholders, a short video, written summary, and a podcast will be produced.

2021 Dr Jwalin Patel  Faculty of Education £1500

Education for togetherness and harmony; developing a community of practice (practitioners)

Jwalin's PhD and postdoctoral research focuses on philosophies and practices of holistic education stemming from the global south, particularly India. He aims to develop a community of practice wherein teachers meet on regular basis to discuss and learn from each other. Additionally, he plans to engage the teachers in a cocreation process to develop a website (and potentially an edited book) on pedagogies and practices for education for togetherness and harmony. Furthermore, he hopes to conclude the series of discussions with an unconference. These will allow for dissemination of my research findings and scope for bottom-up teacher-driven educational change.

2021

Dr Joe Sutliff Sanders

Faculty of Education £1496 A Workshop for Autistic Comics Creators to Improve Communication and Professional Creativity

Joe Sutliff Sanders and Jenny Gibson of the Faculty of Education have joined with the Lakes International Comic Art Festival (LICAF) to leverage academic research on comic books (Sanders) and autism (Gibson) with LICAF’s ongoing commitment to comics fans throughout the community. Together, they will launch a workshop with adult autistic participants to explore how web-based technologies can improve communication and professional artistic pathways for autistic comics creators.

2021

Dr Bethany Schmidt

Institute of Criminology £1499 Democratising Democracy: Reimagining Prisoners as Active Citizens

Bethany, in collaboration with Healthier Democracies, will facilitate three workshops with prisoners to reflect on and document the democratic innovations they have developed whilst incarcerated. Mixed media creative expressions around the meanings of ‘citizenship’ and ‘civil death’ produced from these sessions will be exhibited at the Institute of Criminology. This adapted form of participatory photovoice has three primary aims: to illuminate an overlooked pain of imprisonment; to stimulate a public dialogue about political marginalisation and its social and democratic implications; and, to explore ways to promote and energise inclusive civic participation. An interactive webforum will be developed to enable wide and sustained engagement.

2021

Reetika Revathy Subramanian

Department of Politics and International Studies, Centre for Gender Studies £1500 Climate Brides Podcast: (un)tying the knots between climate change and early marriage

Set against the backdrop of rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, Climate Brides is an evidence-based, conversational podcast that seeks to (un)tie the knots between early marriage and the climate catastrophe in South Asia. Using the accessible format of conversations, with survivors, frontline workers, activists and academics in the region, this feminist collaborative project trains the spotlight on the historical compulsions and everyday negotiations of young women and girls confronting the biggest challenge of the 21st century.

2021

Veronica (Jingyi) Wang

Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies £1500 Academic Bird: the school of critical thinking for a Chinese-speaking audience

Academic Bird is an online channel that bridges academic debate in the social sciences to the Chinese general public, inspired by doctoral research on Chinese media and internet culture. Using short videos of themed talks with scholars from different disciplines, the channel fills a gap for critical thinking platforms in the Chinese-speaking market. These talks quickly gained traction through social media with over 1,000,000 views and 45,000 followers, with a strong presence on Weibo.

2020

Dr Doroteya Vladimirova Engineering / Institute for Manufacturing £1500

Purpose beyond Profit

Doroteya will engage with small companies, responsible entrepreneurs and start-ups to help them re-define the future post-crisis direction of their business. Doroteya will design and produce an online workshop entitled “Purpose beyond Profit.” Building a business focused on purpose has never been a more urgent business strategy. Strong purpose statements flow from the impact generated by the business through its products, services, and behaviours. In this practical workshop, participants will follow a robust step-by-step approach to develop a clear purpose statement to help them secure support from critical stakeholders. This online workshop stems from Doroteya’s research on sustainable business models and her in-person workshops.

2020 Ms Sharmila Parmanand

Gender Studies (POLIS)

£1500 Reflecting on 20 years of the Palermo Protocol: lessons learned and future directions in anti-trafficking

Sharmila will work with the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women to produce and host at least ten episodes of video or audio podcasts that feature conversations with activists, scholars, and bureaucrats who work in anti-trafficking. These conversations examine 20 years of anti-trafficking practice since the adoption of the UN Palermo Protocol, and explore issues such as upholding the safety of migrant workers using a rights-based framework, the effects of raids, rescues, and rehabilitation interventions on sex workers, and donor accountability. Interviewees and other interested parties will be invited to reflect on these episodes in articles or blog posts.

2020 Dr Clare Oliver-Williams

Public Health & Primary Care

£1500 The ties that bind: Pregnancy Complications and Heart Disease

Clare Oliver-Williams and the artist Shady-Illustrations will further their partnership from Cambridge Creative Encounters to produce art depicting women with pregnancy complications having a greater risk of heart disease.
We will engage patients in the creation of images and a digital resource pack, that includes the images with text. The images will be displayed in hospitals and in the Cambridge Festival. The resource pack will be distributed to national organisations. A concise and hopeful written message will be included with the artwork and in the resource pack providing guidance to women about how they can improve their heart health. 

2020 Dr Safet Hadzi Muhamedovic

Divinity

£1500 Shared Sacred Landscapes: Interfaith Dialogues in Cambridge

Safet will develop an exhibition of anthropological photography, a public symposium and an interactive website to further our understanding of sacred environments shared by different religious communities. Inaugurated during the UN World Interfaith Harmony Week in 2021, the exhibition will showcase diverse examples of co-orchestrated rituals, feasts and shared sacred spaces that speak of rich historical and present-day encounters in the polities increasingly partitioned along the lines of religious identity. Building upon Safet’s ethnographic research of syncretic religion in the Mediterranean, the symposium will consider the importance of shared landscapes and their main obstacles in different contemporary contexts. The project will also establish a partnership and knowledge exchange between the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme (CIP) and the Cambridge Central Mosque.

2020 Dr Irene Fabry-Tehranchi

University Library, Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

£1500 Cambridge University Library’s caricatures of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, 1870-71

Irene Fabry-Tehranchi and Nick White will organise a physical and online exhibition of caricatures of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, 1870-71 at Cambridge University Library (May-June 2021). We want to foster public engagement with the events and their significance by producing a film explaining and demonstrating illustration printing techniques set in the library historical printing rooms. We will share the film with Cambridge History and Arts AS-level classes and invite them to visit the University Library’s historical presses, teaching them through primary historical sources, using historical games produced during the Commune. 

2020 Mr Charles Emogor

Zoology

£150 Pangolino: An awareness-raising initiative to increase knowledge about pangolins through art and science communication.

Charles will use art and science communication to raise awareness of the conservation status of the pangolin – simultaneously one of the world’s most trafficked, yet least known wild mammals. This project will make his PhD work on the white-bellied pangolin in Nigeria more accessible to the public (primary/secondary school students in Nigeria and UK, and hunters in Nigeria). Students will create and share pangolin art through dedicated channels. Additionally, alongside hunters, students in Nigeria will be mobilised to celebrate 2021 World Pangolin Day. These hands-on experiences will help mobilize support for pangolin conservation and ultimately contribute towards reducing pangolin decline.

2020 Dr Gilly Carr

Archaeology

£1472.50 Crowdsourcing 1940 – 1946: A community project in the Channel Island of Alderney

Dr Carr seeks to collect material, through crowdsourcing, for an online, interactive map of Alderney (funded elsewhere) to showcase the multi-layered history of sites related to both the Nazi occupation during WWII and residents' experience of ‘Homecoming’ after the war. We will invite islanders to submit their own stories and photos related to place, and we will add images and historical material about the Holocaust history of the Island to accompany this. This will encourage residents to accept equally these two distinct histories of the Island while tying the sites into a global, critically important Holocaust memory.

2020 Eng. Mariam Makramalla

Education

£1350 Why Learn?

Mariam will work on a public engagement project that stems from the findings of her recent PhD. It aims at promoting a whole societal re-think of the value and purpose of schooling in Egypt. The project targets to promote awareness about the core essence of learning, thereby shifting the societal perception of the school mainly acting as a “certification institution”. This target is to be achieved through local collaborative partnerships with schools and the media. The aim is to raise awareness by triggering public debate amongst various platforms of engagement. 

2020 Ms Colleen Rollins

Psychiatry

£1480 Sound and Vision: A collaboration between service-users, artists and the public to explore the lived experience of hallucinations

Colleen will coordinate Sound and Vision, where local artists and patients with schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease will collaboratively create artworks on their hallucinatory experiences to catalyse conversations with the public about our perceptions of the world. Artworks will be displayed at UK Science Festivals and as a digital (on-line) presentation with a variety of material explaining the current science on hallucinations. The public will be encouraged to complete on-line surveys collecting structured information on their personal experiences. This unique dataset will be the origin for exploration of the content of hallucinations across mental health and illness.

2019  

Dr Chioma Achi​ Veterinary Medicine £1500 Strengthening participation of poultry farmers in North-Western Nigeria in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.

Chioma engaged with poultry farmers in Kaduna State, Nigeria, to enable them to gain better understanding of the dangers of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). This aims at improving global public health. The project leverages existing collaboration through the Poultry Association of Nigeria (PAN), and is based on ongoing research into the genome of AMR Salmonella. 

2019 Dr Aude Belin-Rauscent

Psychology

£610 Become a neurosurgeon and learn the procedure used to implant life changing deep brain stimulating electrodes!

As part of the Cambridge Science Festival, Aude uses a neurosurgeon role play experience to visualise the complex ‘puzzle’ structure of the brain. The brain is composed by interconnected regions, which all play a specific role, the alteration of which results in functional deficits manifested as the symptoms of neuropsychiatric disorders. The hands-on activity help to increase the awareness of the importance of animal research in the development of new therapeutic strategies.  

2019 Thomas  Matthews Boehmer

Archaeology

£600 Under Our Feet: Retracing Ancient Lives

‘Under Our Feet’ stems from a concern that important aspects of the UK’s more distant past are overlooked due to a lack of signposting. Archaeology destroys features in the act of digging them, and excavated materials often disappear into (publicly inaccessible) storage. This can make us forget features of the past, as the space which they occupied is turned over to new uses. Thomas engaged with Cambridge residents and tourists by using chalk drawings and boards to highlight spaces of history within the city.

2019 Dr Laura Davies

English

£1440 A Good Death: Literature as Reflective Resource for End-of-Life Care Practitioners

Laura engaged with end-of-life/bereavement care practitioners as part of an inspiring one-day knowledge exchange event. This enabled them to explore and directly co-create a text-based resource combining the professional practice and experience of end-of-life CARE practitioners with research on the enriching properties of death writing.

2019 Dr Tanja Fuchsberger

Psychology

£1350 Memories - how they come and go, or sometimes get lost

Our memory defines who we are. Yet there are many open questions concerning how memories are formed and retained in the brain — how does it happen that some memories are stored only for a little while before they fade away, whereas others stay with us for a lifetime? Tanja’s work focuses on Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In close collaboration with relevant charities, Tanja created a short film that portrays research on the mechanisms of memory and how it relates to finding treatment strategies for AD.

2019 Dr Maziyar Jalaal

Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics

£800 Optics for Everyone 

Optics plays an essential role in our daily life, from our eyes to our cell phones. Maziyar is using an optical system to visualize algae algal blooms, and their threat to global health. Working with school teachers and children between the age of 5 and 17, Maziyar used Optics for All (OfA), a modular low-cost toolkit, to make optics education accessible, fun, and memorable for students and science teachers.

2019 Catherine Jones

Psychology

£650 In Conversation with Fathers 

Catherine organised a panel discussion with fathers who are highly involved in childcare, which will be recorded live and turned into a podcast. This helped to spark conversations about the roles of fathers in caregiving among expectant and new parents or those considering starting a family in the future.

2019 Dr Ulla Sovio

Obstetrics & Gynaecology

£760 It takes 3 to Tango: Key players for a successful pregnancy

Ulla hosted an informative, interactive and entertaining public engagement event at the Cambridge Science Festival to provide basic information about pregnancy and associated research. In particular, she developed displays focusing on maternal health, placental function and fetal growth.

2019 Danika Parikh

Archeology

£1000 RePresent 

Danika worked on voicing ‘untold histories’ from the perspective of minority communities living within Cambridge. This built on decolonial and anti-racist research done at the collections at the University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA).

2019 Dr Teresa Perez

Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

£1492 Valuing plastic: Evaluating the potential to derive economic, environmental and social value from plastic waste in South Africa  

Teresa collaborated with church and women's networks in South Africa to identify ways in which local residents can be incentivised to consume less single-use plastic and donate their recyclable plastic. Through participant observation, public forums and focus groups, Teresa and her collaborators will help establish the recycling initiative, identify challenges to plastic recycling in townships, and help develop best practice. This was done with a view to cross-fertilising similar initiatives across Southern Africa, South East Asia and the Carribbean.

2019 Hamish Symington

Plant Sciences

£450 Flower Power: breeding crop plants that are better at being pollinated

Hamish developed a freely downloadable, easily accessible app that lets users experience and retrace Hamish's research into crop plant breeding and pollination. Users are prompted to make choices, try out different plant variations, let bees fly around between different plants - and thus learn about key challenges in the context of a worldwide decline in insect populations, but also about experimental research as conducted at Cambridge.

2019 Erin Whitcroft

English

£1412 Collaborative Choreography

Erin and her collaborators from the Cambridge-based charity "Arts and Minds" delivered dance and poetry workshops for 15 young women (14-15 years old) encountering difficulties with confidence and negative body image. By engaging the participants through dance and poetry, Erin aimed to make a positive contribution to their body image. By enabling them as ‘choreographers’, she hopes to develop their confidence. 

2019 Rebecca Haboucha

Archaeology

£334 Workshop on Climate change and cultural heritage in the Dehcho Region, Canada

Rebecca engaged indigenous communities in Canada on the results of her research into their perceptions of cultural heritage in the face of climate change, in which these communities played a key role as interview partners. Rebecca delivered a three-part workshop and produce an easily accessible booklet to communicate her findings and discuss their implications.


The 2020 & 2019 Public Engagement Starter Fund projects were supported by:

Research England The Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF), Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund (ISSF) & UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Impact Acceleration Accounts EPSRC IAA