Where Were the Women?

Posted on November 23, 2025 by Athene Donald

I know that many people feel the Royal Society is a stuffy, white male institution, unwelcoming to women and other minorities, but I cannot agree. It may have had a long history of excluding women, but no more and, in my own personal experience, not over the past couple of decades at least. This year they are celebrating 80 years since the first women – Katherine Lonsdale and Marjory Stevenson – were elected with a series of events. Much more about these women and related events can be found out here. As part of that celebration, I attended a one-day meeting regarding historical perspectives. There will be further events in the coming months, including the unveiling of further portraits of women. For the current celebrations, they have acquired, on loan, the well-known painting of Caroline Herschel. There is no doubt the images around the building favour the male, but less so than when I was elected. Portraits take time to produce (not to mention are expensive), but in the short term there is also an excellent exhibition of photos of current women scientists that has been created for this year’s celebrations.

The meeting celebrated women active in science-related areas over the centuries, starting with Emilie du Châtelet, in a series of vignettes. In my own book Not Just for the Boys (now available in paperback too!), I included some brief accounts of some women from the past, including du Châtelet and Herschel, but I learned about a number of others whose names I’d not come across before this week. I’ve written in the past that, unlike female composers, where more and more from the past are receiving current attention, I didn’t expect many female scientists to emerge from history to claim a place in the scientific record, but perhaps I need to change my views, certainly as regards from the nineteenth century on. I believe in due course the recording of the meeting will be put online, so others can check who these women are.

Mary Wortley Montagu on the mystery of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’sMy illustration is of Lady Mary Montagu Wortley, with her splendid turban/hat. She spent a decade in (what is now) Turkey when her husband was Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and there came across the local habit of inoculation against smallpox. In the harems and Turkish baths frequented only by women, she could see that, unlike herself and so many of her British compatriots, the skins of Turkish women were not scarred from the effects of smallpox. She became convinced of the power of the practice in providing good protection against the disease that killed so many back home (including her brother and nearly herself), and disfigured many more. When she returned to England, she was vocal in support of the practice, and had her own daughter inoculated (her son had been inoculated back in Turkey). For these actions she was much reviled, including by the medical profession.

Although not a scientist in the modern meaning of the word, she had studied how the practice had been carried out in Turkey, not by medics but by more lowly folk. She noted they were careful to introduce only tiny amounts into the patient and then isolate them from others as a mild form of the disease took hold. In contrast, the medical profession in England, even when carrying out an inoculation, believed purging and bleeding were what needed to accompany the incision, not isolation, with predictable results. However, the royal family in due course inoculated their own children, which conferred a degree of respectability on the practice.  By introducing the practice into Western Europe,  she undoubtedly will have saved many lives. It was another 75 years before Edward Jenner came up with the idea of vaccination using cowpox rather than smallpox itself.

Let me single out one other woman from the many discussed:  Eleanor Ormerod (1828-1901). She was a so-called ‘economic entomologist’, in other words someone who studied pests which attacked crops to economic disadvantage. She built up an enormous circle of correspondents, creating what we might these days call a group of citizen scientists. She was much more formally a scientist than Montagu, including being appointed consulting entomologist to the Royal Agricultural Society and lecturer at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester. She also had something of a global reputation, winning awards from, for instance, both Russia and France. She became the first woman to be elected to Fellowship of the Meteorological Society in 1878 and the first woman to be awarded an Honorary Degree from the University of Edinburgh (1900), shortly before her death.  Nevertheless, she was very conscious of being largely excluded from the male scientific establishment and hers is not a well-known name. Apparently, Edinburgh’s cloud computing network is known as Eleanor, and I’m wondering how many of their undergraduates – or staff – have any idea why.

The day ended with Stella Butler and myself talking about what has changed since the first women FRS’s were elected in 1945 (three years, as I have to remind myself ruefully, before my own university even got to the point of awarding full degrees to women). Stella has just published a book Breaking the Glass Ceiling of Science, which tells the story of the first eleven women elected. Again, many of their names will not be well known. Most people will have heard of Dorothy Hodgkin, and possibly Kathleen Lonsdale (both, incidentally, very committed to promoting world peace), but are less likely to have come across the names of some of the others (in order of election after the first two in 1945: Agnes Arber [1946]; Mary Cartwright [1947]; Dorothy Hodgkin {1947]; Muriel Robertson [1947]; Sidnie Manton [1948]; Dorothy Needham [1948]; Honor Fell [1952]; Marthe Vogt [1952]; and Rosalind Pitt-Rivers [1954]). A group of women, none of whom were professors at the time of election, and many of whom survived for at least substantial parts of their careers on short-term and precarious contracts.

It is interesting to note that, despite the early nomination in 1902 of Hertha Ayrton to be a fellow, a nomination that was rejected on the grounds of her being married (you can find out more about her in the film that Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and I were involved with as part of the Royal Society’s 350th celebrations), there was a long period after the time the Royal Society had had to accept the legal argument that women were eligible to be elected, when strangely not one was nominated (from 1922 to 1943). You can read the details of how the first women came to be nominated, and how the politics of making sure the existing (male) fellows would accept the election of women came to pass in Stella’s book.

Once women were elected, it wasn’t long before they were serving on the Royal Society’s Council, so it would seem after the momentous step had been taken, they were fully included in the fellowship. As I say, I always found the organisation welcoming. I was struck that after I had remarked on this at the meeting, and how it was noticeably different from my experiences in Cambridge at around the same time, another Fellow came up to me to say how that chimed with her own experience, albeit in another university and more recently. Interestingly, I’ve just been going through a transcript of an oral history I recorded for the AIP (the interview was actually conducted about 18 months ago) in which I talk about this experience. There I stated about this time and how I had found the Royal Society more welcoming and inclusive than Cambridge:

‘I think just because they always treated me as a person, not as a woman. I’m just one of them, as it were, instead of being othered.’

Probably quite a succinct way of expressing the feelings of the years around my election in 1999.

There is much more about the historical aspect of women in science, those connected with the Royal Society and more broadly, as well as the current situation and the work that is now being done by the Society on their website. They may still be way off parity in the fellowship (I think they’ve reached around a third of the fellowship being women), but the numbers have been rising steadily. That’s not to say there isn’t still some negativity towards women lurking in some corners – but that’s true everywhere in our world, and probably getting worse. It’s not time to give up the good work and the fights where needed.

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The Importance of Community

Posted on November 16, 2025 by Athene Donald

I mentioned the book by Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard, AI and the Science of Being Human, in a previous blogpost. I love its optimism about how all of us could work with AI without letting it take us over simply to make money for Silicon Valley folk, although I’m not sure I share it. The idea that groups of individuals, in their daily lives or at work, might ‘fight back’, as it were, take control of the messaging so that humanity not money wins, is wonderfully positive, but it is based around imagined ‘stories’ as much as current reality. Can we get there from here?

One thing that is very obvious about how the authors describe their new world, is that it works via a sense of community, of people coming together. As it happens Maynard was a PhD student in my own department, the Cavendish Laboratory. We must have overlapped in the department, but I’m not sure we interacted back then, and my infrequent exchanges with him since have purely been digital. Nevertheless, he describes something I well remember: the importance of the Cavendish canteen and the tea breaks we all enjoyed.

‘I remember tea breaks and seminars from when I was a grad student, where we’d get together in person and talk about everything and nothing; in the process sparking ideas and hashing out new possibilities. Now we’re all in our offices (or more likely at home), doors closed, “connecting” through email chains that nobody fully reads.’

Those tea breaks were fundamental to the rhythm of the day for condensed matter physicists, both when I was a student myself and also, later, as a young lecturer. Every research group had its own timing for turning up and its own table(s) to sit at. So, you had the opportunity to talk casually about politics, or football – or science – on a daily basis with everyone else in your group. Group sizes varied from a handful to dozens of students and postdocs, and sometimes group technicians joined in (although workshop technicians had their own space in the comfortable chairs by the window).

It built a strong sense of community, which was often extended to the pub in the evenings. Different groups had a reputation for being more or less friendly. Some academic staff were more likely to be seen in the tea room than others, but in principle you could meet and engage with anyone there. Indeed, it was in the tea room that I recall Brian Pippard (already retired from the Cavendish Chair, the senior chair in the department, but still much in evidence) questioning why I wanted to get a research grant, when I admitted my first application had been turned down. He was definitely in the ‘you can do it all with string and sealing wax’ school (although for him, this would have been along with fantastic workshops and technicians to help build the apparatus, which were properly funded by the department under the funding mechanisms of the day.)

I mention this was the case for condensed matter physicists because, as I recall, the astronomers and high energy physicists always stayed away, with their own tea room(s). In due course the theoreticians got their own fancy coffee machine and were no longer to be seen, and over time that whole habit was essentially lost, except possibly amongst the workshop technicians for whom the 30 (I believe) minute breaks were sacrosanct. I note the new Cavendish building, recently fully opened as the Ray Dolby Centre, has preserved the idea of a large tea room, open to anyone without the need to get through the security gates with a University card. It will be interesting to see how it is utilised. I was struck, on arranging a meeting with an active member of the department (as I clearly am no longer) that they chose the canteen as a place to meet, rather than their office.

That is all a long-winded way to say that personal interactions matter, access to people you might not otherwise see during the course of your day crouched over some apparatus or screen. That sense of a community where you can ask naïve questions over a cup of tea as well as discuss the latest gossip is important for science to progress. As Abbott and Maynard say ‘Digital spaces optimize for transaction, not relationships…’ I’ve not forgotten the last huge US conference I went to, now many years ago but already people were sitting in the corridors staring at phones/laptops/tablets rather than attending the talks themselves. I found it deeply dispiriting and have avoided all such conferences since. I didn’t travel across the Atlantic simply to read the emails I could have read more comfortably from my desk.

Abbott and Maynard stress the importance of working in close collaboration and discussions with others in the context of AI, neighbours as well as work colleagues, and the importance of social interactions form the backdrops to another book I’m currently reading: Pete Etchell’s Unlocked about screen time and whether or not it is bad for us, particularly for adolescents. There is mass media discussion of how bad staring at a screen can be for teenagers, but the evidence is far from clear. In part this is because looking at email is vastly different from TikTok, which is different again from gaming or watching a film, let alone doom-scrolling. Obvious though that point is, it isn’t usually possible to detect that level of nuance in headlines. Nevertheless, people matter to adolescents as to PhD students and indeed to (just about) all of us. I am very conscious of this as a retiree, where I no longer have a place of work to go to and could just spend my life staring at a screen, even if I’m reading books on my iPad rather than getting worked up by what I find on social media.

The pandemic upended all our lives, for the current generation of adolescents and those a bit older probably more than for us older folk. I appreciate that I can give webinars without stirring from my desk, or attend committees without suffering the vagaries of the trains (Cambridge to London trains seem to have been particularly unreliable recently), but if chairing I find hybrid meetings unsatisfactory however convenient. I hope we will not voluntarily return to never being in the same room as other people as the default setting which was forced on us during the Covid era; or let AI tell us what it wants us to do, without human intervention and discussion.

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Being Practical (Or Not)

Posted on November 9, 2025 by Athene Donald

Last week I attended a workshop on the future of practical science in schools at the Royal Society.  Driven in part by the findings of the 2023 Science Education Tracker, that students at secondary school were frustrated they had little opportunity to do hands-on work themselves, as opposed to watching either the teacher do an experiment, or simply a video of that experiment, the meeting explored different aspects of the issue for both primary and secondary schools. The meeting was held, as it happened, the day before the publication of the Curriculum and Assessment Review. However, when the 197 pages of the report did land (metaphorically) on desks, its remarks about school practical science were somewhat bland. Recognizing that ‘practical work is not always effective’ it recommends that:

‘practical science activity – focused on high-quality teacher demonstration and hands on work by pupils – be underpinned by clearly defined purposes in the Programmes of Study and GCSE subject content.’

One can hardly disagree with such a statement, but it could be argued that is more about prescription for the teacher than feeding curiosity in the student.

When I think about my own school science days – as I was encouraged to do when talking about my personal experiences in the opening talk of the meeting – our lessons, as far as I recall, were largely based around ‘doing’ science. Right from the beginning of secondary school we were expected to do experiments, involving things such as dilute acids (no goggles provided) and open flames from Bunsen burners with tripods and asbestos mats. It was a different world, in which health and safety was not visibly considered, although I don’t remember any significant accidents. Lessons consisted of a teacher starting off with some explanations and then we were set loose. We had plenty of opportunity to explore and get used to apparatus.

In my talk, I discussed the A Level Physics course I had done, a new course just getting underway from the Nuffield Foundation at that time. It must have been very demanding on our teacher, since – as a pilot – she only got the material to teach a few weeks beforehand. There were no textbooks, everything came in a loose-leaf file. One of the innovative ways of working was to carry out an extended investigation. Having read The New Science of Strong Materials by JE Gordon (an inspiring book, then as now, and one I wrote about back in the days when the Guardian had science blogs, because it was so influential on me) to supplement the work on materials we did, I chose to attempt to replicate one of the key experiments described there. That was on glass fibres and related to fracture mechanics. The theoretical details don’t matter, but when preparing my talk I went back to look at those teenage diaries I referred to in my last post. Of this attempt at independent experimentation, I wrote:

This time I did some work on glass fibres – and I managed to burn myself while making one – not very badly, but inconveniently.

Nobody seemed too bothered about this accident.

Let’s face it, I was then – and throughout my career – not very dexterous. I broke things repeatedly during my PhD, and my experiences with chemistry were equally unfortunate. Again, my diary tells the tale:

‘Had our first chemistry practical. We did some titration and I swallowed some sodium hydroxide when trying to pipette it, but although nasty not serious.’

By the time I went to Cambridge as an undergraduate, and finding myself needing to continue with Chemistry to my annoyance, I hadn’t got much better with my hands.  This time quoting from a letter to my mother, I described my first undergraduate practical lab:

‘I got myself well and truly stained bright yellow by a salt of picric acid all over my hands (I should have been wearing gloves but took them off to wash up some apparatus). Also on my face, since I kept touching my face when adjusting safety goggles.’

I literally lived to tell the tale, and I don’t really want to know whether the salt was cancerous or explosive or any of the other things I’ve been told.

However, amusing and embarrassing though these anecdotes may be, the reality is science in my day was full of practical work at least from secondary school on (there was nothing that was described as science at my primary). It was striking how many people in the Royal Society audience last week had also done one or more of the Nuffield courses of the day. Courses that had practical work at their heart, in stark contrast to what schools can offer now. Everything from a packed curriculum, to teachers having to teach outside their specialism and therefore comfort zone; from lack of space to lack of cash; and from school accountability measures to absence of crucial equipment, practical science just doesn’t have the same focus in science lessons today as in my own, often as not. Yet, as the most recent Science Education Tracker shows, students miss being able to do their own practical work. It was a motivating factor for students wanting to do science for more than half of those in KS3. By making that a rare treat rather than something that they can routinely expect to engage in, we are turning students off pursuing science thereafter.

What many students get regularly as part of their lessons is watching a video demonstration. It may in principle have the same learning outcomes as doing the identical experiment themselves, but in practice almost certainly it will be less memorable and not give them ‘muscle memory’ of how to do things. Or, as in my case, how not to do things. The Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR) had little to say about these matters. It explicitly states it won’t be discussing the teacher workforce. Yet, a science teacher who is teaching outside their own speciality, may not have the confidence to talk around a video to help the students understand what is going on, let alone have the resources or the confidence to do the experiment themselves. The evidence the conference was presented with showed that – in terms of student learning – a well-prepared and judiciously commented on video or, even better, teacher demonstration can be very effective for learning. But passively watching a demonstration with no additional elucidation from the teacher is not.

School practicals should feed curiosity as well as learning. Finding out what doesn’t work and why and how to use key apparatus ought to be central to the science curriculum. Unless schools are enabled – through adequate funding, curriculum time and supply of teachers in each of the sciences – to deliver effective practical work, we are short-changing our students, whether or not they are going to be the scientists of the future. It is disappointing that the CAR had so little to say about this.

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Is That What Makes Me Human?

Posted on November 2, 2025 by Athene Donald

I have been reading the recently published book AI and the Art of Being Human by Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard. I found it a fascinating – and indeed optimistic – book, which prompted a lot of reflection, although not directly because I’ve been exploring AI myself. I haven’t (at least as yet), but the underlying theme of what it takes to be human resonated with me, even without the AI bit. I may have more to say about other aspects of the book another time, but for the moment I want to pause and think about one of the many questions the book poses:

What remains uniquely mine? – Name the experiences, feelings or qualities that can’t be captured by algorithms.

Thinking about what is ‘uniquely mine’ I would hazard a guess is not something many of us dwell on too often, at least if our primary focus is science. However, that sentiment certainly gave me pause for thought. I looked up and around the room I work in, and my eyes fell on the objects casually sitting on and around one of the (many) bookcases in the room in which I now ‘work’ (given I’m retired). It struck me how much these are symbols of the people and things that matter to me, or who have contributed to who I am. A strange collection they happen to be, but feeding into my being.

There is a conductor’s baton. This belonged to my grandmother who, in my teenage years, expended much effort every autumn on being part of running a conductors’ school; my grandparents lived with us. This was a weeklong course for those who lead things like WI choirs and other amateur bodies. My grandmother was undoubtedly musical, and right to the end would play Chopin mazurkas and polonaises with great panache but, in my lifetime, I never knew her conduct anything. Nevertheless, when we cleared my mother’s house after her death, this baton turned up and I couldn’t bear to throw it out.

Most of the other items on this bookshelf were also tied to that house-emptying, along with some of the books on the shelf itself. How can one throw out appalling Victorian tracts given to a great- or even great-grandmother as a Sunday school prize, for attendance or good behaviour? I can’t imagine reading the actual books, but inscribed books have sentiment attached it’s hard to dispose of.  Then there are a couple of pieces of damaged porcelain that were always part of my childhood. Perhaps they were valuable once, but they surely aren’t in their damaged state. I suspect anything actually valuable of this ilk was sold when we were on our beam-ends when I was around 10 and bankruptcy stalked the family.

Perhaps the item I treasure most is a print of brent geese by the naturalist, broadcaster and artist Peter Scott, dated 1939. I remember buying this – a scruffy somewhat crumpled print at the time, unframed – at a jumble sale (as I say, money was tight) for my mother’s birthday when I was a young teenager. She kept it by her bed all her life, and I treasure it because she treasured it. We brought it back to our house, and now that it is flattened and suitably framed it looks rather good. It reminds me of the days she and I used to go out birdwatching, including with the London Natural History Society’s coach trips to the Essex and Kent mudflats where we often saw brent geese. An atmospheric painting, bringing back memories of freezing cold days at the coast. But they were happy days out to places we’d never have got to without the LNHS (my mother never drove).
brent geeseHanging over the bookshelf is a penguin mobile that we must have given my daughter as a small child. It hung in her room till she left home. Indeed, it hung in her empty room gathering dust for many years and I rescued it before our house was gutted and refurbished, and now here it is.

The final item is a bronze (?) figurine of a woman standing tall and empowered. It’s about 30cm tall and very heavy. This was given to me by colleagues in the University when I stood down as the Gender Equality Champion as a vote of thanks. It meant a lot to me that they had clubbed together to give me this as a measure of appreciation for what I’d done, or at least tried to do, to support women across the university. It definitely symbolises empowerment and was created by a local artist.

So, in some ways that is a summary of significant parts of my life and the fact that I’ve kept these objects must say something about me. Is that what makes me human, because an algorithm probably wouldn’t have collected a random array like this? At least, I assume not.

Of course, that is by no means all of my past that I treasure and which I keep upstairs in nooks and crannies. There’s also my school attaché case, given to me when I was still at primary school and which – I suspect – I took in every day rather than the traditional satchel. It contains much of my past too, in the form of letters from my husband before we were married, the single letter from my father I still have with me, and my childish diaries. Curiously I had recourse to these this week: preparing a talk for the Royal Society’s meeting on practical science at school on Tuesday, I was amused to look back at what I wrote about my own days of school practicals. Suffice it to say, I was not good at them and safety issues were less on people’s minds then than now. I once nearly set fire to the chemistry lab and I had this to say about my first A Level chemistry lesson:

We did some titration and I swallowed some sodium hydroxide when trying to pipette it, but although nasty not serious.

I lived to tell the tale, and to gather all these memories – solid and ephemeral – around me. Is that what makes me human?

 

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Civic Responsibilities

Posted on October 26, 2025 by Athene Donald

Innovate Cambridge Summit 2025 The University Vice Chancellor Debbie Prentice, with Lord Patrick Vallance and Minister Pennycook at this week’s Innovate Cambridge Summit

This week saw various significant announcements for and from the University of Cambridge, the Cambridge region and the wider so-called Ox-Cam Corridor. Starting with the last, £500M has been pledged for investment in new homes, infrastructure and business space by the Government for the Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor. Most of this money is coming to the Cambridge city region. Improving local infrastructure (housing, water and transport in particular) is vital if growth is to be possible. Those in the north of England may wonder why Cambridge is favoured but, as Minister Pennycook stated clearly at this week’s Innovate Cambridge Summit, the Government sees the Corridor as crucial in being able to stimulate the economy of the whole UK. Or, as Lord Vallance (also present this week) is quoted in the Government’s press release:

‘These investments are a milestone, not just for the Oxford to Cambridge Corridor, but for the entire country. We are going to deliver the housing, amenities and infrastructure that businesses need to grow and that people need to flourish. This region has all the ingredients to be the UK’s answer to Silicon Valley or the Boston Cluster: somewhere that turns world-class innovation into economic growth the whole nation benefits from.’

Within this new money, £15M has been put aside for an innovation hub to drive growth, alongside the necessary infrastructure. In terms of innovation, money was also committed earlier this summer to develop the Cambridge x Manchester Innovation Partnership – the first trans-UK innovation collaboration of its kind – funded with £4.8M from Research England, so that there is a direct connection  between the Cambridge city region and Manchester, one vehicle to ensure the north of England does receive some benefit. Both the University of Cambridge and the University of Manchester are committing further funds of their own to this enterprise.

The Innovate Cambridge Summit covered these plans and much more. One key message that has sat at the heart of the work of Innovate Cambridge since its start is the importance of inclusion. That Cambridge is the most unequal city in the country was highlighted by many speakers during the day, with a call for action to make sure that innovation and growth benefit the whole community. The Cambridge Pledge, an initiative driven by Innovate Cambridge, is a shared commitment to channel wealth and innovation into lasting social good: companies that create wealth in the city through innovation are called upon to pledge some of their future profits.

For many Cambridge residents, the University may seem a remote, forbidding organisation not accessible to people ‘like them’, and who probably don’t expect the inequalities they face every day to go away any time soon. In an important new venture, the University is aiming to change both the perception and the reality for the whole community. The day before the Innovation Summit, the University had launched its Civic Framework, which is the outcome of a ‘listening exercise’ conducted over the past months. When asked to describe the University in three words, the most common words local residents used were historic, prestigious and excellence, but also and less attractively, elite. There was a range of other worryingly negative words such as arrogant, remote, exclusive and entitled. Nearly half the respondents felt the University did badly at communicating its research.

Under the banner People, Place, Partnership: Civic priorities for the University of Cambridge the University pledges to improve with four underpinning civic principles:

  • Equity, inclusion and belonging;
  • Collaboration and mutual benefit;
  • Transparency and learning
  • Sustainable impact

Of course the proof of the pudding will be in the delivery. In three years’ time, will local residents be more inclined to use words such as inclusive and transparent rather than exclusive and remote?

I have argued before (and also here and here) that universities have a responsibility for training youth who are not aiming at university, but perhaps at something technical and/or vocational. I am delighted to see that amongst the actions the University is proposing under its Civic Missions is one to develop skills including youth opportunities. Opening up its training programmes to more apprentices – whether they end up working in the University or elsewhere in the local innovation ecosystem – strikes me as a minimal action the University can take. Ensuring that T-Level students have the necessary placement is another ‘easy’ step. Academics and staff who have the charisma to inspire the young in the less advantaged areas around the city region, not just the city schools themselves, need to get out more to share their love for their discipline or work more generally. It is not sufficient to run a Festival of Ideas that local middle-class families attend, fun and thought-provoking though that may be, but the net must be cast far more widely.

If transport links around the city really do improve, we can hope to see easier access into the city from Fenland villages, where job opportunities may be scant, so it becomes all the more important that training opportunities are available within the University, and that this fact becomes widely known. Of course, it’s not just the University of Cambridge. Anglia Ruskin University is already active in this area. I hope – from the discussions held earlier this year – more local companies will feel able to take on such youth training opportunities, facilitated by the Opportunities Hub that is being set up through Cambridge University Health Partners which aims to cover this strand and much more. Some funding has been obtained to get this initiative under way.

It is encouraging that the University is focussing on its civic responsibilities. I look forward to seeing both the local economy flourish and infrastructure improve as the OxCam Corridor funding flows in, and the local youth feeling included in the benefits that derive from the investment.

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