The University wants to bring its global research expertise to the service of the local region.
In fulfilling our mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education,
learning and research, we are fundamentally committed to engaging with communities and
partners close to home. We do this with agriculture, working with farmers and industry to increase
productivity sustainably right here in Fenland.
In the East of England we have very flat well-trained fertile soil that accounts for half of the
food production for England.
So agriculture is really important for the eastern region because of the amount of jobs
and employment that we can provide to local people here and the contribution that we can
make to the economy with the healthy produce that we're making on our fertile soils.
Well there are lots of factors coming together that are going to affect global food production.
Climate change, recruiting workers for farms and factories and an aging population all
have an effect on ensuring we have food for the future. Technology is where we can find
solutions to do this without damaging the environment.
The links between the University and G’s go back many years with many successful projects
being run. The work that we've done together is focussed on areas of expertise that we
don't have internally in-house which means it's great for us to be able to work with
University colleagues.
We've worked in areas like supply chain management, computer vision to detect the maturity of
crops and also most recently in robotic harvesting.
So we're really excited about the links and the projects that we're running with the University
as we believe we're tackling a crucial problem in agriculture which is a skills shortage
in robotics, autonomous systems, AI, machine learning, areas that we believe will be really
fundamental in improving the productivity of agriculture in the future. We know as farmers
that it's very important that we are managing our environmental stewardship so that we can
farm safely and productively in the future.
The region has many assets. Innovative and entrepreneurial people, clusters of knowledge-intensive
industries, high-quality agricultural land, but it also faces multiple challenges including
economic inequalities. One project with a Cambridge-based housing association CHS Group
is helping people furthest away from the job market.
Alongside the economic prosperity that we see in the East of England region, there are
also significant levels of deprivation. In fact some of the wards in the Fenland area
are not just some of the most deprived in the UK, but some of the most deprived in Europe.
Now the University produces world-leading research but it's really important that we
also work with the communities that are right on our doorstep.
So a lot of people when they first come to us are in financial crisis. They're not managing
to cover all of their expenses. So each of our delivery partners employs a coach who
work with people for up to 20 hours.
Within those 20 hours, they'll focus on what that person needs. They'll be looking at making
sense of their money, at helping them get online, at helping them get closer to the
job market.
The Department of Land Economy has been involved in the New Horizons program as an evaluation
partner. So what we've been doing is carrying out a programme of action research. So right
at the beginning of the programme we work with CHS to set up the evaluation tools to
do work with them to decide what data do you need to collect in order to measure the impact
of the New Horizons program.
The people who are on it, we're seeing huge changes for them so it's great that we're
able to continue to deliver. The funding has just been extended for another three years
so that will be another around 300 people who get to have this one-to-one coaching.
For individuals who have gone through the coaching program, they have not just learned
new skills but they've gained confidence. They gain self-esteem. And one of the impacts
of this has really been on proving their mental health. So many of the people when they began
the program were under severe stress and suffering mental health impacts particularly as a result
of high levels of debt. And one of the impacts of the program has been to give them self-confidence,
self-belief not just to tackle those problems but also to believe that they can put themselves
onto a pathway to a better future.
We have researchers working with organisations across the region on environmental issues
including how coastal erosion can be managed for the future by working with nature rather
than against it.
With much of its flat and marshy lands, the East Anglian coast is very vulnerable to sea
level rise and to flooding. It's also home to nationally important infrastructure, to
some of the richest farmland around the country, to important tourist areas and many homes
and people of course. In order to protect all these assets, we need to look at managing
the coast sustainably into the future. Here at Cambridge University, we are looking at
a creative way of doing this by taking into account the natural coastal protection that
environments like dunes, marshes, estuaries provide to the hinterland. To test this we
excavate and transport soil cores into large wave flumes and then expose them to waves
to see how much energy these landforms can withstand. By working with the National Trust
and the Environment Agency for example we can then develop sustainable management programs
for the East Anglian shores. So we can get away from hard coastal engineering structures
and look at alternatives like natural landforms and working with nature to allow the coast
to adapt to a changed future.
We're working with communities, doctors and hospitals across the region on public health,
the National Health Service and how people can stay healthy and active in their later
years, including whether portable monitors can be used to screen for a heart condition
called AF.
AF is atrial fibrillation which is essentially your heart rather than beating regularly it
beats irregularly-irregularly and around 7 percent of people over 65 have it and it increases
the risk of stroke fivefold. The cost of that in Europe is around 10 billion Euros per year.
So if screening could find people with atrial fibrillation and they could be offered anticoagulants
it might reduce their risk of stroke and that might improve their quality of life, their
length of life and reduce the cost to the health system. There are a number of different
ways that you might want to test for atrial fibrillation.
So screening for pulse when people come into the surgery is quick and simple and relatively
cheap but we know that misses people, that's the thing.
One of the approaches we're using is a screening tool that's a bit like a mobile phone. Patients
can take it away for a couple of weeks and they can test themselves just by putting their
thumbs on the device and it measures their heart trace. We’re in the pilot phase at
the moment or the feasibility phase and we're working with practices in the eastern region
to test the feasibility of the screening program and the feasibility of the study to evaluate
it.
And so this gives us an extra dimension to check and this is about clinical effectiveness
and cost effectiveness of using this type of device, and that's the answer that will
be of use around the world.
In the region as elsewhere there is always more to do but the breadth and longevity of
our mutually beneficial partnerships show the importance that these relationships have
for us. Our academic community remains open to new and creative forms of working with
partners in the East of England.