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The European Research Council (ERC) has announced today the award of 255 Advanced Grants to outstanding research leaders across Europe, as part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme. Four University of Cambridge researchers are amongst those to receive this prestigious and competitive funding.

The University of Cambridge’s grant awardees are:

Dr Albert Guillén i Fàbregas in the Department of Engineering for his project Scaling and Concentration Laws in Information Theory.

Fàbregas, who has previously received ERC Starting, Consolidator and Proof of Concept Grants, said: “I am truly delighted with the news that the ERC will continue to fund my research in information theory, which studies the mathematical aspects of data transmission and data compression.

“This project will broaden the theory to study arbitrary scaling laws of the number of messages to transmit or compress."

Professor Beverley Glover in the Department of Plant Sciences and Director of Cambridge University Botanic Garden, for her project Convergent evolution of floral patterning through alternative optimisation of mechanical parameter space.

Glover said: “This funding will enable us to explore how iridescent colour evolved repeatedly in different flowers. We think it will shed new light on evolution itself, as we think about the development of iridescence structure from a mechanical perspective, focusing on the forces acting as a petal grows and the mechanical properties of the petal tissue.

“It's only possible for me to do this work because of the amazing living collection at Cambridge University Botanic Garden, and I'm thrilled that the ERC is keen to support it."

Professor Ian Henderson in the Department of Plant Sciences for his project Evolution of the Arabidopsis Pancentromere.

Henderson said: “This project seeks to investigate enigmatic regions of the genome called the centromeres, using the model plant Arabidopsis. These regions play a deeply conserved role in cell division yet paradoxically are fast evolving.

“I am highly honoured and excited to be awarded an ERC Advanced grant. The advent of long-read sequencing technology makes addressing these questions timely. The ERC’s long-term support will allow us to capitalise on these advances, build new collaborations, and train postdoctoral researchers.”

Professor Paul Lane in the Department of Archaeology, for his project Landscape Historical Ecology and Archaeology of Ancient Pastoral Societies in Kenya.

Lane said: “Pastoralism has been an extraordinarily resilient livelihood strategy across Africa. This project provides an excellent opportunity to reconstruct how East Africa’s pastoralists responded to significant climate change in the past, and to draw lessons from these adaptations for responding to contemporary climate crises in a region that is witnessing heightened water scarcity and loss of access to critically important grazing lands.”

“This project will allow us to utilise the department’s world-leading archaeological science laboratories and expertise to answer crucial questions about past patterns of mobility, dietary diversity, climatic regimes and food security among East African pastoralists over the last fifteen hundred years. This has never been attempted before for this time period.”

Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Cambridge said: “Many congratulations to Albert, Beverley, Ian and Paul on receiving these prestigious and highly competitive awards. It is fantastic that their ambitious, cutting-edge research will be supported by the European Research Council, marking them as outstanding European research leaders.

“Now that the UK is an associated country to Horizon Europe I encourage other Cambridge researchers to also consider applying to the ERC and other Horizon Europe programmes.”

President of the European Research Council Professor Maria Leptin said: “Congratulations to the 255 researchers who will receive grants to follow their scientific instinct in this new funding round. I am particularly happy to see more mid-career scientists amongst the Advanced Grant winners this time. I hope that it will encourage more researchers at this career stage to apply for these grants.”

The ERC is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. The 255 ERC Advanced Grants, totalling €652 million, support cutting-edge research in a wide range of fields from medicine and physics to social sciences and humanities.

The European Commission and the UK Government have reached an agreement on the association of the UK to Horizon Europe, which applies for calls for proposals implementing the 2024 budget and onwards.

The ERC Advanced Grants target established, leading researchers with a proven track-record of significant achievements. In recent years, there has been a steady rise in mid-career researchers (12-17 years post-PhD), who have been successful in the Advanced Grants competitions, with 18% securing grants in this latest round.

The funding provides leading senior researchers with the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs.

Many congratulations to Albert, Beverley, Ian and Paul... It is fantastic that their ambitious, cutting-edge research will be supported by the European Research Council, marking them as outstanding European research leaders.Anne Ferguson-Smith

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Millions of historical employment records show the British workforce turned sharply towards manufacturing jobs during the 1600s – suggesting the birth of the industrial age has much deeper roots.

The 16th edition of the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management honours Professor Dasgupta for his work in defining the field of environmental economics by incorporating and quantifying the social value of nature.

The award also takes into account Professor Dasgupta's leadership of an independent, global review on the Economics of Biodiversity commissioned by the UK Treasury in 2019. The Dasgupta Review is expected to help set the agenda for the UK Government’s 25-year environment plan.

The BBVA awards committee said it commended Professor Dasgupta for laying the foundations of environmental economics through his pioneering work “on the interaction between economic life and the natural environment, including biodiversity.”

“More than any other economist of our time, Partha Dasgupta has stressed the important interplay between economic life and the natural environment," Chair of the BBVA selection committee and Nobel Economics laureate Eric Maskin said, adding that Dasgupta’s work and his proposals for measuring economic well-being “are critical for our time.”

The citation for the award said that Professor Dasgupta provided conceptual foundations for the definition and measurement of sustainable development with the social value of nature as a determining factor. That in contrast with measures of well-being based on flows such as GDP, Dasgupta proposed measuring sustainable development as the change in the accounting value of total wealth, including natural capital within this indicator.

“These ideas...have provided a framework for green accounting which is now widely adopted for measuring sustainable development,” the citation concludes.

“Most economists who work on natural resources or the environment think about nature as providing certain types of goods, like food, clean water, timber, fibres or pharmaceuticals,” Professor Dasgupta said. “So these are goods. These are objects that you can harvest from nature and transform with our human ingenuity into a final product, like the clothes we are wearing or the painting in the room where you are sitting, and so forth. These are the things we make out of the goods that nature gives us.”

At the core of this conventional line of economic thought, he explains, is that when a good becomes scarce, you can substitute it with another offering the same or similar results. But as he delved deeper into the subject, Dasgupta came to realize that nature supplies something much more important and irreplaceable than goods. It supplies processes (or in more economic terms, services).

“My own understanding of economics,” he said, “has moved away from goods to processes. These are the key things we economists should keep in mind. Of course we care about nature’s goods, like water, food and clothing, because without them we wouldn’t be here. But none of this would exist without the underlying processes of nature.”

Climate regulation is among the services, or processes, that Dasgupta uses to illustrate his point: sunlight comes and gets reflected into space, water evaporates and comes down as rain.

“You have the water cycle and you get your drinking water from it. And what is not consumed doesn’t disappear, it just evaporates or becomes part of the ocean through the river system and so forth. But if you mess around too much with climate, you also mess around with the water cycle, which will end up weakened. Likewise, if you deforest too much or get rid of biodiversity in the Amazon, you’re going to exacerbate the climate system. So my work has been to bring these issues into economics.”

Dasgupta believes economics has become over-reliant on the idea that scarcity can be overcome by substituting goods.

“In industrial production, of course, this idea of substitutability has been a great success. Think of all the materials that are produced in engineering departments or material science departments. But there are limits to this, when you tamper with processes. Just think of the human body. You have the metabolic process, which keeps you in a healthy state, and it would be foolish to think you could substitute one process for another. You wouldn’t say let me have less digestive capacity, but more running capacity. It would be silly, because these two things go together.”

The BBVA Foundation centers its activity on the promotion of world-class scientific research and cultural creation, and the recognition of talent.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards recognise and reward contributions of singular impact in physics and chemistry, mathematics, biology and biomedicine, technology, environmental sciences (climate change, ecology and conservation biology), economics, social sciences, the humanities and music, privileging those that significantly enlarge the stock of knowledge in a discipline, open up new fields, or build bridges between disciplinary areas.

Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta (Economics, St. John's) wins the BBVA award for Economics, Finance and Management for his groundbreaking work in environmental economics.

More than any other economist of our time, Partha Dasgupta has stressed the important interplay between economic life and the natural environmentNobel Economics laureate Eric Maskin

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Detailed reports on thousands of artefacts pulled from “Britain’s Pompeii” reveals the surprisingly sophisticated domestic lives of Bronze Age Fen folk, from home interiors to recipes, clothing, kitchenware and pets.

Two leading academics from the University's School of Humanities and Social Sciences provide a framework that supports scholars and students in navigating generative AI.

The University of Cambridge study used data about the physical activity participation of more than a million five-to-17-year-olds internationally. It found that in countries where a majority of schools require students to wear uniforms, fewer young people tend to meet the average of 60 minutes of physical activity per day recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Regardless of uniform policies, across most countries fewer girls than boys reach those recommended exercise levels. Among primary school students, however, the difference in activity between girls and boys was found to be wider in countries where most schools mandated uniforms. The same result was not found in secondary school-aged students.

The authors suggest that this could be explained by the fact that younger children get more incidental exercise throughout the school day than older students; for example, through running, climbing and various other forms of active play at break and lunchtimes. There is already evidence that girls feel less comfortable in participating in active play if they are wearing certain types of clothing, such as skirts or dresses.

Importantly, the results do not definitively prove that school uniforms limit children’s physical activity and the researchers stress that “causation cannot be inferred”. Previous, smaller studies however provide support for these findings, indicating that uniforms could pose a barrier. For the first time, the research examines large-scale statistical evidence to assess that claim.

The study was led by Dr Mairead Ryan, a researcher at the Faculty of Education and Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge.

“Schools often prefer to use uniforms for various reasons,” Dr Ryan said. “We are not trying to suggest a blanket ban on them, but to present new evidence to support decision-making. School communities could consider design, and whether specific characteristics of a uniform might either encourage or restrict any opportunities for physical activity across the day.”

The WHO recommends that young people get an average of 60 minutes of at least moderate-intensity physical activity per day during the week. The study confirms previous observations that most children and adolescents are not meeting this recommendation, especially girls. The difference in the percentage of boys and girls meeting physical activity guidelines across all countries was, on average, 7.6 percentage points.

Existing evidence suggests that uniforms could be a factor. Previous concerns have, for example, been raised about girls’ PE uniforms and school sports kits. A 2021 study in England found that the design of girls’ PE uniforms deterred students from participating in certain activities, while the hockey player Tess Howard proposed redesigning gendered sports uniforms for similar reasons, after analysing interview and survey data.

Children often get their exercise away from PE and sports lessons, however.

“Activities like walking or cycling to school, breaktime games, and after-school outdoor play can all help young people incorporate physical activity into their daily routines,” Ryan said. “That’s why we are interested in the extent to which various elements of young people’s environments, including what they wear, encourage such behaviours.”

The study analysed existing data on the physical activity levels of nearly 1.1 million young people aged five to 17 in 135 countries and combined this with newly collected data on how common the use of school uniforms is in these countries.

In over 75% of the countries surveyed, a majority of schools required their students to wear uniforms. The study found that in these countries, physical activity participation was lower. The median proportion of all students meeting the WHO recommendations in countries where uniform-wearing was the norm was 16%; this rose to 19.5% in countries where uniforms were less common.

There was a consistent gender gap between boys’ and girls’ physical activity levels, with boys 1.5 times more likely to meet WHO recommendations across all ages. However, the gap widened from 5.5 percentage points at primary school level in non-uniform countries to a 9.8 percentage point difference in countries where uniforms were required in most schools.

The finding appears to match evidence from other studies suggesting that girls are more self-conscious about engaging in physical activity when wearing uniforms in which they do not feel comfortable.

“Girls might feel less confident about doing things like cartwheels and tumbles in the playground, or riding a bike on a windy day, if they are wearing a skirt or dress,” said senior author Dr Esther van Sluijs, MRC Investigator. “Social norms and expectations tend to influence what they feel they can do in these clothes. Unfortunately, when it comes to promoting physical health, that’s a problem.”

The authors of the study argue that there is now enough evidence to warrant further investigation into whether there is a causal relationship between school uniforms and lower activity levels. They also highlight the importance of regular physical activity for all young people, regardless of their gender.

“Regular physical activity helps support multiple physical, mental, and well-being needs, as well as academic outcomes,” Dr Ryan said. “We now need more information to build on these findings, considering factors like how long students wear their uniforms for after school, whether this varies depending on their background, and how broader gendered clothing norms may impact their activity.”

The findings are reported in the Journal of Sport and Health Science.

School uniform policies could be restricting young people from being active, particularly primary school-aged girls, new research suggests.

Social norms and expectations tend to influence what they feel they can do in these clothes. Unfortunately, when it comes to promoting physical health, that’s a problemEsther van SluijsThirdmanSchool children watching a sports game from indoors

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Chips and datacentres – the “compute” driving the AI revolution – may be the most effective targets for risk-reducing AI policies as they have to be physically possessed, according to a new report.

Listening to people's lived experiences is helping to improve the awareness and uptake of cancer care. On World Cancer Day, we take a look at some of the ways researchers are working with communities to ‘close the cancer care gap’.

Prof David Howarth, a commissioner on the UK Governance Project, outlines proposals that seek to fix defects in our political system increasingly exploited by those in power.

People of religious faith may have experienced lower levels of unhappiness and stress than secular people during the UK’s Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, according to a new University of Cambridge study released as a working paper.

The findings follow recently published Cambridge-led research suggesting that worsening mental health after experiencing Covid infection – either personally or in those close to you – was also somewhat ameliorated by religious belief. This study looked at the US population during early 2021.

University of Cambridge economists argue that – taken together – these studies show that religion may act as a bulwark against increased distress and reduced wellbeing during times of crisis, such as a global public health emergency.

“Selection biases make the wellbeing effects of religion difficult to study,” said Prof Shaun Larcom from Cambridge’s Department of Land Economy, and co-author of the latest study. “People may become religious due to family backgrounds, innate traits, or to cope with new or existing struggles.”

“However, the Covid-19 pandemic was an extraordinary event affecting everyone at around the same time, so we could gauge the impact of a negative shock to wellbeing right across society. This provided a unique opportunity to measure whether religion was important for how some people deal with a crisis.”

Larcom and his Cambridge colleagues Prof Sriya Iyer and Dr Po-Wen She analysed survey data collected from 3,884 people in the UK during the first two national lockdowns, and compared it to three waves of data prior to the pandemic.

They found that while lockdowns were associated with a universal uptick in unhappiness, the average increase in feeling miserable was 29% lower for people who described themselves as belonging to a religion.*

The researchers also analysed the data by “religiosity”: the extent of an individual’s commitment to religious beliefs, and how central it is to their life. Those for whom religion makes “some or a great difference” in their lives experienced around half the increase in unhappiness seen in those for whom religion makes little or no difference.**

“The study suggests that it is not just being religious, but the intensity of religiosity that is important when coping with a crisis,” said Larcom.

Those self-identifying as religious in the UK are more likely to have certain characteristics, such as being older and female. The research team “controlled” for these statistically to try and isolate the effects caused by faith alone, and still found that the probability of religious people having an increase in depression was around 20% lower than non-religious people.

There was little overall difference between Christians, Muslims and Hindus – followers of the three biggest religions in the UK. However, the team did find that wellbeing among some religious groups appeared to suffer more than others when places of worship were closed during the first lockdown.

“The denial of weekly communal attendance appears to have been particularly affecting for Catholics and Muslims,” said Larcom.

For the earlier study, authored by Prof Sriya Iyer, along with colleagues Kishen Shastry, Girish Bahal and Anand Shrivastava from Australia and India, researchers used online surveys to investigate Covid-19 infections among respondents or their immediate family and friends, as well as religious beliefs, and mental health. 

The study was conducted during February and March 2021, and involved 5,178 people right across the United States, with findings published in the journal European Economic Review in November 2023.

Researchers found that almost half those who reported a Covid-19 infection either in themselves or their immediate social network experienced an associated reduction in wellbeing.

Where mental health declined, it was around 60% worse on average for the non-religious compared to people of faith with typical levels of “religiosity”.***

Interestingly, the positive effects of religion were not found in areas with strictest lockdowns, suggesting access to places of worship might be even more important in a US context. The study also found significant uptake of online religious services, and a 40% lower association between Covid-19 and mental health for those who used them****.

“Religious beliefs may be used by some as psychological resources that can shore up self-esteem and add coping skills, combined with practices that provide social support,” said Prof Iyer, from Cambridge’s Faculty of Economics.

“The pandemic presented an opportunity to glean further evidence of this in both the United Kingdom and the United States, two nations characterised by enormous religious diversity.” 

Added Larcom: “These studies show a relationship between religion and lower levels of distress during a global crisis. It may be that religious faith builds resilience, and helps people cope with adversity by providing hope, consolation and meaning in tumultuous times.”  

Two Cambridge-led studies suggest that the psychological distress caused by lockdowns (UK) and experience of infection (US) was reduced among those of faith compared to non-religious people.  

Getty/Luis AlvarezPeople in church praying with covid-19 restrictions Notes

* The increase in the mean measure for unhappiness was 6.1 percent for people who do not identify with a religion during the lockdown, compared to an increase of 4.3 percent for those who do belong to a religion – a difference of 29%.

**For those that religion makes little or no difference, the increase was 6.3 percent.  For those for whom religion makes some or a great difference, the increase was around half that, at 3 percent and 3.5 percent respectively.

*** This was after controlling for various demographic and environmental traits, including age, race, income, and average mental health rates prior to the pandemic.

**** The interpretation is from Column 1 of Table 5: Determinants of mental health, online access to religion. Where the coefficients of Covid {Not accessed online service} is 2.265 and Covid {Accessed online service} is 1.344. Hence the difference is 2.265-1.344 = 0.921 which is 40% of 2.265.

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