optima FITZWILLIAM COLLEGE NEWSLETTER
Issue 26 | 2020
Contents Welcome to Optima 4
| Master’s message Baroness Sally Morgan on an extraordinary year
Lockdown
6 | Fitz’s response to the pandemic Retiring Bursar Andrew Powell 8 | The student perspective MCR and JCR Presidents on life in lockdown 10 | Garden escape Bluebell Drummond enjoys outside space
Farewell to Fitz 11 12
| A hastened exit Graduates Ellie Brain and Poppy Blackshaw | ‘I found my niche’ Dr Rogier Kievit and Dr Angie Tavernor
Alumni
16 | Global reports Alumni abroad share their pandemic experiences 19 | Medics on the NHS frontline Two doctors discuss recent events
Academics
22 | Searching questions Dr Jason Rentfrow on social psychology 23 | Virtual reality Professor Srinivasan Keshav on distanced conferences 24 | Dis-United Kingdom? Professor Michael Kenny on political reactions to the pandemic 26 | Combatting the climate crisis Dr Jonathan Cullen on a joined- up approach and Professor Giles Oldroyd on agricultural solutions
Extracurricular 28 30
| Music and Books by Members | Sport Fitz’s full trophy cabinet
And finally... 31
| Scenes from College
Introducing your interactive Optima
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elcome to Optima 2020. We have become a digital publication, retaining all your Fitzwilliam features, but with the addition of being interactive. We know many of you will miss a tactile read, but we hope you will enjoy the video clips which accompany some of our articles, and follow the links to our website. The magazine begins with the Master, Baroness Sally Morgan, recalling an extraordinary first 12 months in the role and looking ahead with optimism. Andrew Powell outlines the College’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has impacted his final months as Bursar. We thank him and wish him well in retirement. There are contributions from the JCR and MCR Presidents, discussing a virtual term and what life was like in College throughout the lockdown period. PhD student Bluebell Drummond was among those who stayed and shares her favourite view of the gardens, which provided much-needed solace.
Alumni in the United States, New Zealand and Brazil give a global flavour of our community and their thoughts on a period which affects us all, while two medical alumni share their experiences. Dr Sam Hare, a consultant chest radiologist, discusses COVID-19, while Dr Maxine Meju describes beginning a medical career in the midst of a global pandemic, after graduating earlier than anticipated to support the NHS. We have interviews with Fellows Dr Jason Rentfrow, Professor Srinivasan Keshav and Professor Michael Kenny on the impact of coronavirus on Google search trends, virtual conferencing, and the political landscape across the United Kingdom. On a different, but no less important theme, Dr Jonathan Cullen outlines his research relating to the climate emergency, and Professor Giles Oldroyd discusses an agricultural innovation which could pay global dividends.
Fellowship this summer without having the opportunity to say goodbye; finalists Ellie Brain and Poppy Blackshaw also had their time at Fitz curtailed and write movingly of their experience here. All this, plus a report from Director of Music Catherine Groom, and a selection of books by Members, plus news on another superlative sporting year despite the curtailment of competition. Please remember to add our email address development@fitz.cam.ac.uk to your ‘safe senders’ list so you can continue to receive communications from Fitz, including our monthly eNEWS. As always, please do get in touch with any feedback. We look forward to continuing to speak to you in the future. Take care.
There are farewells from Dr Rogier Kievit and Dr Angie Tavernor, who both left the
Matt McGeehan, Editor
If you see a video camera icon like the one on the left, there will be a video to accompany the story. Click on the camera and a YouTube link will open up.
We regularly post on our social media channels and website: keep checking back for more stories from the Fitzwilliam community. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
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A message from the Master: a year like no other The Master, Baroness Sally Morgan, discusses the challenges of her first 12 months in post – and the imminent issues to address
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his time last year, I was preparing to support us during an extremely challenging begin my first term as Master. Dinners financial period. Thank you. were being planned, speeches drafted, meetings with my new colleagues started to fill the diary and in common with all The College has shown huge the Freshers starting at Fitz, the months of resilience and community anticipation were coming to a close, and I was spirit. I am immensely proud of ready to start a new challenge. I’m not sure the students whose maturity any of us had foreseen how challenging 2020 and equanimity in the face of might be and how different preparations disappointments and challenges for Michaelmas this year would feel. I don’t has been inspiring. remember the crafting of face covering policies and socially-distant meetings being Set against the troubling and often seemingly mentioned on the job description! endless tide of COVID-business, there have In the pages that follow, you will read about been other moments of deep reflection how Fitzwilliam has coped with COVID, and and important reminders of our values. how we are preparing for the term ahead. I Some have been uplifting: 2019 marked the hope you’ll agree, the College has shown celebration of 40 years of women at Fitz, and huge resilience and community spirit. I am it was wonderful to welcome back many of immensely proud of the students whose our pioneer ‘79er alumnae for their reunion. maturity and equanimity in the face of We compiled a collection of interviews with disappointments and challenges has been alumnae and present students to mark the inspiring. Many of our MCR students spent significance of the year, which you can view quarantine in and around College, and they on our website. not only welcomed those JCR members living in College into their community, but On a more distressing note, the tragic death came up with some brilliant ideas to keep of George Floyd at the hands of the police the Fitz spirit strong – outdoor cinema and in America led to protests, both in the a formal on the Grove lawn were highlights. US and around the world. The Black Lives Our staff, both academic and non-academic, Matter protests are an emotive subject have worked tirelessly to keep things which have spawned plenty of debate, running safely. Some of our academics have including at Fitzwilliam, about history, our been working on research relating to the responsibilities, and freedom of speech and pandemic, and alumni have reached out to we have had a range of opinions expressed
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from across the Fitzwilliam community. Freedom of speech, within the law, is a fundamental right and Fitzwilliam is proud to uphold this. But what we surely cannot argue with is the continual need to strive for equality and for all to feel welcome, respected, and valued in our College. Words must be followed by meaningful action, and this begins with listening and educating ourselves. We seek to admit the best and brightest students – who come from all walks of life – but their success in gaining a place at Fitzwilliam is only the first step in their degree. For all students to thrive and succeed we must look beyond the admissions process, and systematically dismantle the disadvantages that students may face during their time at Cambridge and in preparation for their next steps. Fitzwilliam has been breaking down barriers since its creation, but more is needed. And this is especially true in 2020. This will be – at least in the last decade – our most diverse intake. It will also be our largest. This will bring significant challenges, both in terms of practicalities (teaching, accommodation etc.) and financial support. If you are able to make a contribution to this increased need for student hardship support, particularly at a time when the College’s funds are under significant pressure, please do so: there has never been a better moment have a direct and tangible impact on the ability of our
students to thrive at Fitz. Michaelmas 2020 will be a term like no other, of course, but we will do everything we can to make it enjoyable, productive and, most importantly, safe. Students will be supported by weekly asymptomatic testing – outside the NHS, funded by the University – and we hope that this will offer more flexibility and confidence in our ability to keep the College buzzing. There will be opportunities arising from the challenges and we will need to be nimble and flexible. I am looking forward to an exciting, intellectually engaging, and productive term. I look forward to seeing you – virtually or in person! – soon. Stay well,
Sally Morgan
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How Fitzwilliam responded to the unprecedented Andrew Powell, outgoing Fitzwilliam Bursar, explains how the College responded to the coronavirus pandemic
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e probably shouldn’t have furloughed all of the gardeners...
There was a moment at the end of April when it felt like nature was going to take over. The sun shone, and the grass on the Grove lawn grew long and the weeds sprouted up around the remaining students, enjoying release from their lockdown bedrooms. We brought the gardening team back and the mood lifted, with seating at appropriate physical distances distributed across the lawns, and those students remaining in College during lockdown able to appreciate the wonder known only to a handful outside the Fitz community in a near splendid isolation. The first communication in my inbox about coronavirus came from the Secretary of the Senior Tutors’ Committee on 29 January, and throughout February it felt like here, in Cambridge, there was still no sense of realism about the virus or the fundamental changes which were about to occur. It very quickly became real. By the beginning of March the flow of confusing information from different sources was becoming very difficult to manage, so we convened our Business Continuity Plan meeting for the first time on 5 March, and thereafter these conference calls were a daily occurrence for four weeks, and they still continue. On Monday 16 March we held an open
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meeting for the Fitzwilliam community, streamed online, and led by Master Baroness Sally Morgan, Senior Tutor Paul Chirico, Graduate Tutor Professor Bhaskar Vira, Domestic Bursar Alan Fuller and myself. At this point we knew little more than the students and the answer to many of their questions was “we don’t know – yet” but the session was welcomed and, I hope, calmed fears. Perhaps it helped everyone to know there wasn’t something going on behind the scenes that no-one was coming clean about! Matters became somewhat clearer on 18 March when the University declared that it was moving to ’Red’ status, and the Vice Chancellor made the following announcement:
“We are asking students – both undergraduate and postgraduate – to return home now, if possible. It is especially urgent for international students needing to make travel arrangements to do so as quickly as possible, as many countries are already imposing travel restrictions. Students unable to leave Cambridge will continue to be supported by their Colleges, and College accommodation will be available if needed.” - University of Cambridge Vice Chancellor Professor Stephen Toope
University Departments, involving virtually all of our academic Fellows, began working flat out to devise online examination systems that would be a fair test of student achievements. Meanwhile, we were monitoring student departures, closing buildings, and furloughing staff. Initially we had 133 students living in College accommodation of whom some 50 were on the main site. Gradually the numbers fell as students managed to find flights home, and by 10 June the number was down to 117. We tried to keep a Buttery service running, but had to take the decision to close it on 6 April, as there wasn’t enough demand. For those students whose home was their College room, challenges were numerous, especially with no facilities open. Fortunately the glorious weather made it possible to study and relax in the College gardens – a major blessing. The students accepted the restrictions with remarkable equanimity; most had some company in households of at least two, and those who were on their own were offered a move to a different household, if they wished. The MCR and JCR presidents and committees worked tirelessly throughout to maintain the student community which had dispersed far from Cambridge, with virtual events. An early decision was made to postpone the Winter Ball to March 2021, while sporting competition was cancelled. Sadly, the Cuppers rugby union final was called off, and the cricket team were denied the chance to challenge for a fifth Cuppers
title in succession. I was looking forward to bedroom. On 25 July we reopened the Gym, another afternoon at Fenner’s! I am pictured and around the same time rowing was able to start again. Returning students at the start right with Fitz’s 2019 winning team. of the new term will be able to make use of It was sad to have to cancel graduation the Buttery and the Library. ceremonies, thereby depriving our finalists of their opportunity to celebrate and savour The financial impact on the College has of their achievements, and to say farewell to the course been very severe. Having planned College, their home for at least three years. to break even in our 2019-20 budget, we We have promised them we will organise a were suddenly facing a loss of £1.5million as a result of lost rents, catering income, suitable event as soon as conditions allow. and all of the 2020 conference business. In June travel restrictions were eased a little. The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme The first challenge was re-uniting students (CJRS, also known as the furlough scheme), with their belongings, as most students coupled with the decision of the Colleges’ did not have the time or the transport Fund to allow our annual grant to be applied available to make an orderly departure to our operational budget (rather than our when the lockdown was called. Throughout endowment as is usually the condition) have the month of July our housekeeping staff been a huge help in mitigating the effect were busy packing, shipping, or storing in 2020. The effect of loss of conference belongings of those who could not return, income will also be very severe in the current and giving all the bedrooms a thorough financial year, which runs until the end of deep clean so they could be reused when July 2021 and which we face with great needed. We also worked with departments uncertainty. over how to help research students return to their laboratories, and how to assist medical The end of September marks the end of students on call for the NHS. my 11 years as Bursar of Fitzwilliam. It certainly wasn’t how I envisaged heading On 4 July, in line with the rest of the country, off into the sunset. Along with other longFitzwilliam began to reopen. The decision serving colleagues and of course our final to reopen the coffee shop on a takeaway year students, we’re really sad not to have basis was an important signal to the College had the usual send-off. I’m fortunate that community. At the same time, the MCR was I had opportunities throughout the year able to reopen under strict social distancing – from the presentation of the accounts to rules, and although the Library remained Governing Body, through my last Journal closed, we were able to make available some article, and even an after dinner speech – to additional study rooms allowing students reflect and say thanks before the coronavirus to get a break from the four walls of their pandemic struck.
The interviews for my successor took place on 27 March – I did wonder if anyone would want the job in these circumstances and if I’d be asked to stay on! Rod Cantrill, my successor, is not going to take over a normal College in a normal bursarial way, given the myriad challenges posed by the pandemic. I feel as though I’ve seen it through the first phase; Rod will be there to steer us through its next phase. It felt like as appropriate a moment to hand over as any. While it is the end of an era for some, it is the start of an exciting period for our new undergraduate and postgraduate students and new members of staff and the Fellowship, who will start their Cambridge and Fitzwilliam life in ways that they cannot possibly have imagined. We are determined to provide the best collegiate experience possible in these strange times. We have had to re-think many of the activities that we have taken for granted in the past, and look forward to making the best of the new normal. Rod Cantrill begins his role as Fitzwilliam College Bursar on 1 October. Optima 7
Lockdown: the student perspective MCR President Maurits Houck and JCR President Andrew Salkeld talk us through lockdown from their experience
accommodation in the city. Many were postgrads, but there were some undergrads, and we quickly realised we needed a way of communicating and keeping the group together. We set up Fitz Isolating Together on Facebook as a support network and came up with lots of events, many of which linked those who stayed and those who left.
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We held quizzes and film nights – including watching Contagion! We had an open air cinema, with a film projected on to the Grove. We watched Spirited Away, a Japanese animated film about a 10-year-old girl and her parents stumbling across a seemingly abandoned amusement park. We had a Friday night happy hour, a socially-distanced formal hall, and we organised a formal For a lot of postgraduates, it was a very dinner with gong and gowns in the garden, strange end to their time at Fitz. For many which the Master attended. on one-year MPhils suddenly their year was over, even though it was only halfway We held our Graduate Conference online through; for some PhD students who and it was really successful. Being on Zoom, finished in this period it was a very weird end it was easier to attend and very international. of their three to four years at Fitz – more in We held an additional conference as it was super interesting, and some students some cases. organised their own seminar series on There were about 100 students who stayed, various topics and careers. in College, outside housing, and private e had a karaoke party in the MCR – and the next day everything changed. It was very sudden. It coincided with the MCR ballot and my election as president, and the traditional handover formal was one of the first events cancelled. It was a bizarre and surreal start for the new MCR committee.
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The MCR committee did an amazing job. We had meetings at 12.30pm in Cambridge, with someone from Canada calling in at breakfast time and someone from Melbourne in the late evening! Fitz really distinguished itself as home for many of us, with the beautiful surroundings, and the warm people – the staff always put the students first and handled the situation in the best way possible, whether it was implementing restrictions or easing them. The students saw the positives with the initiatives and events. We talked about the light at the end of the tunnel, and when is the end? Not yet! But I think the people who stayed became much closer. It’s been difficult, but going through experiences like this binds people together, and I think in 10 years’ time we’ll look back at this period and remember the good times. It would be good to have a special reunion at some point.
Maurits Houck (PhD Engineering 2018) is the MCR President and spent lockdown at Fitzwilliam College
could, and once we were sure College was looking after those students and that senior leaders were communicating with them, I left for home.
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The biggest challenge of the implementation of lockdown was avoiding confusion and panic. We had so much information thrown at us early on. Other Colleges were striding ahead and taking seemingly wild decisions, which were somewhat scary for the student body. I was impressed with the Fitz response, especially the Senior Tutor, Dr Paul Chirico, and how well connected we stayed. Everything was clarified quite quickly and Fitz stayed true to its goal of being a community.
am really looking forward to returning to Fitz and excited about what the new term will bring. Although it will be very different, with seminars in College and lectures online, there will be more students around during the day, so I am hopeful for an uplifting and supportive atmosphere. Whilst it will be different to this time last year, with face masks and social distancing, it will still be more fun than spending another term The best part of Fitz is its community – and even through lockdown we’ve stuck online!
together and tried to integrate new members. Being distant creates challenges, but our socials have been strong and I’d like to thank the MCR committee for extending invitations to JCR members. We are looking forward to welcoming the new students. The JCR contacted offer holders and played Kahoot – an online quiz series – with many of them, to open up communication. It was a student initiative the JCR requested and, whilst it now might be a bit more painful for those who didn’t secure their places at Fitz, it worked well.
Andrew Salkeld (Engineering 2018) is the JCR President and returned home early in lockdown
We’re used to long vacations, but few anticipated a six-month break from Cambridge when lockdown was initially announced. I had been intending to stay for a week or so into the Easter holidays and then come back early ahead of exam term. As JCR President, I stayed on a bit into the vacation to make sure everyone who needed to stay Optima 9
Garden escape Bluebell Drummond (PhD Physics 2017) was at Fitzwilliam throughout the lockdown and shared her love of the gardens
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or the students who stayed at Fitzwilliam College during lockdown, the gardens extended our space. We were not confined to one room – we could use the gardens as our own. We appreciated how fortunate we were – and are. The gardens were a big part of the reason I decided to live on the College site. I like the architecture, and I like the variety of the buildings, and that extends into the gardens. I love the changes of the areas and the changes which come with the seasons. With the good weather, we could work outside and have meals outside. Tables were placed at appropriate distances. There were times when I missed my morning commute – even though it is only a 10-minute bike ride to my office – and I didn’t want to
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immediately have to look at a screen. That could be remedied by walking around the gardens instead. It would help to wake my brain up and I didn’t have to use my daily exercise – I could use that one opportunity later in the day. I enjoyed filming the gardens and sharing the videos with the Fitz community. Some of the responses from all over the world were shared with me. It made me appreciate and enjoy the gardens even more knowing I was sharing them with other people and it was one of the ways in which I felt more connected. Pictured is my favourite view in College – towards the Chapel from the Grove lawn.
A fond farewell to Fitz Ellie Brain (Geography 2017) and Poppy Blackshaw (Law 2017) reflect on the good times, after a curtailed undergraduate experience
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he phrase ‘time flies when you’re having fun’ permeates the undergraduate experience at Fitzwilliam College. And yet, for many of us, the abrupt end to our Cambridge experience came as no less of a shock. However, whilst the early departure may have been dominated by an overwhelming sense of uncertainty in the first few weeks and months, the time also provided for a period of introspection, in which all the things which make this college so great, and which make it so hard to say goodbye, became even clearer. It is no coincidence that Fitz has a reputation for being one of Cambridge’s friendliest colleges; whilst architecturally it may appear cold and imposing, the people at the heart of its close-knit community are warm and welcoming. It is a place with a distinct lack of hierarchy, where you can find yourself eating pancakes with the Master on a Sunday morning, or counting amongst your closest friends those from other year groups. It is a place where you tell yourself you are only popping into the cafe for five minutes but end up staying for the whole day, and where Wednesday Cindies tickets sell out quicker than Glastonbury – in 19 seconds to be precise! But for us finalists of Fitzwilliam – a tightknit group – the last three years have served as some of the most formative of our lives. Never ones to shy away from socialisation,
our Freshers’ week began in true Fitz fashion with the dreaded ‘speed friending’, a house ‘party’ featuring a cardboard cutout of Pitbull (a rap star) and movement en masse down Castle Hill to Sunday Life: a tradition which continues to this day. And who could forget the culmination of it all? Fitz Up Look Sharp. Who would have guessed that, in the years to follow, this biannual event would get messier and messier, and that we would revel in recounting the dramas of the night before? After grappling with 9am lectures, supervisions, and the lack of ovens in E and F blocks, we soon found ourselves singing at the top of our lungs (and very out of tune) at Fitzmas, attending countless birthday formals, and (again) moving en masse to Jesus May Ball. Our second year brought new challenges, but also a newfound sense of independence as we scrambled out to College houses littered across the Huntington and Oxford Road, with house parties aplenty. The newly-elected Fitz JCR made waves, whether in regard to the scholars’ ballot or laundry reform. It was the year in which many of us came into our own, fell in love, became sporting heroes, performers, or incredible academics and cemented life-long friendships. We saw College transformed into an ‘exhibition’ for the Winter Ball, and we said goodbye to the legendary Nicky Padfield, as she stepped down as Master.
The start of our final year brought with it a renewed sense of determination, new commitments to going out less and spending more time in the Olisa Library (a vow which likely only lasted for a week at most), and a very-nearly-successful RON (Re-Open Nominations) presidential campaign. Thousands more hash browns were consumed at brunch, our Billy pride continued to grow, and Fitz bops remained completely and utterly tragic (in an endearing way). Whilst there may be times we might feel inclined to focus on the final term that never was, it is important not to lose sight of those wonderful moments that made the two and a half years we had so memorable: the roar of the Fitz Firm as it cheered its team on to yet another Cuppers football victory, those endless summer evenings spent on the Grove lawn, and even those 2am Olisa Library crises. So, despite the sense of loss we may all understandably feel at times, there is much to be proud of, and our time at Fitz will stay with us forever. Although we prematurely had to say our goodbyes to so many talented and intelligent people, there is no doubt we will come flocking back for the many Winter Balls and Reunion Weekends to come. After all, whilst, to the rest of Cambridge, Fitz may be no more than the little College on top of the hill, to us it will always be home. - This article first appeared in Varsity
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To Cambridge and Fitz – thank you, I found my niche Dr Rogier Kievit relinquished his Fitzwilliam Fellowship to return to his native Netherlands. Here he explains what Cambridge means to him
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e left with barely a whisper, rather than a bang, but for us this was ‘goodbye for now’, rather than farewell. Moving is difficult at the best of times, but in the midst of a global pandemic, moving countries with two children in tow – one of whom is disabled – has been challenging to say the least. My wife, Dr Anne-Laura van Harmelen, and I have many emotional and academic ties to Cambridge and we will be back, but, after eight years, it is no longer the place we call home. We met in Cambridge, albeit the Massachusetts version while at Harvard, and had long wanted to live and work in the UK city. My mother is English and I had visited the city as a child, and it made a big impression on me. My first academic conference was there during my PhD, although I was told not to get used to such grand settings as St John’s hall for a conference dinner! I later pounced upon some promising feedback to an early PhD paper from Dr Niko Kriegeskorte, now at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute, to secure a research visit to the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (CBU). We loved it. The work-life balance was right for us – combining the best of the United States and European research cultures – and we were welcomed with open arms. Within a week of our arrival I found myself trying to understand traditional British humour at the CBU pantomime, and my wife attended 12 Optima
a Christmas dinner sitting next to the famous clinical psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. It was quite the way to start our visit. I was fortunate to be able to secure a postdoc to start eight months later. Our arrival in the UK was delayed by the premature birth of our son, Flynn, and once we moved to Cambridge, I was a new dad, in a new job, finishing off my PhD in the evenings. The CBU had just started a big ageing study, led by Lorraine Tyler and Rik Henson, and they needed someone with the statistical modelling skills I’d acquired during my PhD. I got to collaborate with a lot of people, which I always enjoy. In 2015, I then had a period a lot of early career scientists will recognise – my contract was coming to an end, we were expecting our second child and the future was a bit uncertain. I applied for a Wellcome Fellowship and the interview came about 10 days after our second child, Nova, was born. I had a renewed sense of perspective, as mum and baby were healthy, and I relaxed in the formal interview. Two weeks later I was told I was successful, then a group leader position became available at the CBU. My skillset was desirable and I got the position, so I went from one child and no job to two children and two jobs in the space of a few weeks! My wife then got a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship, so we knew Cambridge would be home for at least the next five years. There’s a huge difference when you have the job security – not just personally,
but also in the science you can do. Often in day-to-day science you’re so busy with finishing the next project. The good thing about applying for funding, as competitive as it can be, is it gives you a reason to spend a few weeks or months to decide and really think ‘what would I be excited about working on for the next five, 10, maybe 20 years?’ At the time I was studying neurocognitive ageing: why some people age well, why some people age poorly. However, the field of ageing research is quite disconnected from the field of developmental psychology, even though they are both periods of rapid change and there is ample evidence that there may be shared mechanisms and processes in brain and behaviour underlying these changes. I try to bridge the gap and study both childhood development and ageing to see what we can learn about brain development and cognitive development by studying both ends of the lifespan. Essentially I shifted from focusing on ageing to focusing on both ends of the lifespan, which has proved a good choice. It feels like something which is exciting with many unknowns, but also something which potentially really matters for society, by harbouring the promise of helping children develop better, and people age more healthily. I really found my niche.
Family
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ur son Flynn was born nine weeks premature. He seemed to develop reasonably normally, maybe a bit slower than average. However, when he was approaching a year old (on the day I handed in my PhD thesis), we were woken up by strange noises coming from his bedroom and found him having severe seizures. We called an ambulance which arrived in six minutes and six minutes later we were in hospital. That was our first exposure to the NHS and Addenbrooke’s, who have been amazing. Over the next few weeks, the seizures kept happening and we (and the doctors) were a bit in the dark, cycling through various diagnoses. Finally, they genotyped him and it turned out he had a condition called Ring 14 Chromosome Disorder so his 14th chromosome, instead of looking like a chromosome, is meshed together. There are only about 75 published cases since the 1960s so it’s quite rare indeed – we call him our ‘one in a million’, but that’s quite an overestimate. It’s obviously much more rare. In many ways Cambridge is the best place to be with such a rare condition because of the quality of the academic doctors and the nature of the NHS. However, it was a tough period, with many ambulance trips and hospital visits – we spent about three months in Addenbrooke’s in total. One day, Flynn’s neurologist read about a new treatment for a different but similar genetic
condition, which was also quite rare, and suggested trying a different medication and immune replacement therapy. It worked a charm – he was seizure free for three and a half years and his treatment was published as a case study. One benefit, if you like, of spending a lot of time in the hospital is you see a lot of the challenges children and parents have and you can pick and choose seeing your situation in the best way. It helps us a lot he’s always happy, always smiling, cheerful and gives a lot back in terms of love and cuddles. If you’ve seen the full diversity of conditions children or people can have you don’t take that for granted. Even though he can’t speak and can’t walk, he can do a lot of other things. He’s made some fans at Addenbrooke’s along the way. They nurses would be working on very long and
demanding shifts, and as soon as they got anywhere near him, his ‘strike zone’, he’d give them the biggest hug and make quite a few burst out in tears. Addenbrooke’s has been great and his school in Linton, the Granta School, has been amazing, but the way care is supplied is a bit more fragmented in Cambridge. The last year or so has been challenging, because of the prospect of a No Deal Brexit looming. We had to stockpile epilepsy medication because one of his medicines is quite rare and there’s no guarantee of supplies. Combined with the fact that we have family and also more institutional support in the Netherlands, we decided to accept our exciting new positions (AnneLaura has taken up a Professorship at Leiden University).
Fitzwilliam College
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ome of the other Colleges are very nice to go to dinner occasionally, but as a place to make your ‘home’ Fitz was ideal. I was made to feel welcome immediately. For example, I remember one evening where we had arranged last minute childcare, and thought it would be nice to invite my wife (then a Fellow at Lucy Cavendish) to a dinner at Fitz. There seemed to be an awful lot of speeches about rowing, and we were asked by various bemused Fitz Fellows ‘what’s your affiliation with the Boat Club?’ The answer was none at
all, but we were made to feel very welcome despite having registered at the ‘wrong’ dinner. That’s what I like. Fitz has traditions and decorum, but doesn’t forget what it’s all about, which is people, interactions, and learning from each other. One of my favourite things are lectures or talks by Fellows and students. For example, as a Bye Fellow I started the Fellows lecture nights. It’s wonderful to see someone with whom you normally discuss, say, tutorial matters, suddenly ‘switch on’, with a spark in their eye as they discuss the topic they ...continues overleaf Optima 13
care about deeply and have devoted their life to. To me, it almost doesn’t matter what the topic is: if someone’s excited about it and passionate about sharing it, I’ll listen to pretty much anything. When you go to your own conferences, you often get good questions, but they’re questions within a defined, confined space – you know what the rules are and what the types of questions are. Questions from fellow Fellows and students can be out of the box and can make you think more deeply. Being exposed to such a diversity of thought and background at a College is quite unique, and is hard to match in a non-collegiate setting.
Cambridge, the city
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here are lots of quirks about Cambridge which justify its reputation. It’s been a really nice home for us. There is so much to do, so much green space and lots of activities for family, which makes the quality of life in Cambridge really excellent. We cycle everywhere – when we first moved our cargo bike was among the most photographed objects in Cambridge as a novelty. We’ve seen that change to them being all over the place. One thing I remember about life in Cambridge is walking along the river and a couple running, overtaking us, arguing about programming languages – the most striking thing is that that happened again a few months later! One occasion I remember really vividly was when we went to the theatre on a weekday evening. It was already snowing a little bit as we walked there. We saw the play and walked out again. It had been snowing constantly when we came out at about 11pm and there was about two inches of snow everywhere. We went for a walk in the city centre and there was nobody about, just pristine snow. We were alone, beautiful lights and no cars. It was a magical experience of Cambridge at its prettiest, and we will certainly be back regularly to experience it again.
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Rogier was Programme Leader, Executive Processes Group, at the University of Cambridge/Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. He is now Professor of Developmental Neuroscience at the Donders Institute in his native Netherlands.
It was a privilege to be part of the student journey Dr Angie Tavernor has retired from the Fellowship. The veterinary Fellow discusses her special relationships with students and a certain goat...
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hen I moved out of my office I paused to think of the hundreds of students who have laughed or cried in the room. It was a difficult moment pondering 17 years of memories and saying goodbye to the room. If you asked me ‘what was the best thing about being a Fellow at Fitzwilliam?’ there is one obvious answer and it is from the heart: the students. It’s an absolute privilege being part of their journey. I’ve been very lucky with the vets having a six-year course. They come in at 18 and leave at 24, 25 – it’s a big chunk of their early life.
I’m blown away with the relationships I’ve built up with them and my tutees over the years – I’ve been invited to five weddings! Graduation for me is a joyous day when you can celebrate with them. I don’t have research, so that’s allowed me to indulge more in the life of Fitz. I’ve developed friendships throughout its rich community, from academics to staff in catering, housekeeping, maintenance and other College roles, including head gardener Steve Kidger. The gardens have brought a great deal of joy to me. I would leave my bike in Storey’s Way and always pick a different route across the site to my office on
D staircase, just so I could admire what was going on in the ever-changing flowerbeds. The COVID crisis has shown the strength of the Fitz community. We are very blessed with the people in positions of leadership – Bursar Andrew Powell, Senior Tutor Paul Chirico, Master Sally Morgan and her predecessor, Nicky Padfield. They listen. I’m still going to be at Fitz, and Billy, the wicker goat I made after being challenged by Nicky’s husband Christopher, is going to be back – once I’ve repaired him and his horns!
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Global issue: views from afar We spoke to alumni from far afield for a global perspective of the pandemic
Brazil
Katy Watson (MML 2000), pictured right, is the BBC South America Correspondent
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studied Spanish and Catalan at Fitz and have always been fascinated by Latin America. When I moved to Brazil and I learned Portuguese my interest grew. This is a part of the world which hasn’t been a news priority in the past, but my patch has become hugely busy in 2020. The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, models himself on Donald Trump, has described COVID-19 as ‘the little ‘flu’, and the pandemic has become hugely politicised.
and the people that have taken leadership are at a more local level, state governors and so on. They’ve implemented things like lockdown and the closure of schools. People did listen and took the lead from that. It might’ve been much worse were it not for those measures, but we will never know. What we do know is people Another contributor said Brazil could see are getting fed up because it’s been going what was happening in Europe and they on for so long and mixed messages are had time to prepare. Yet a lot of people continuing as the country opens up. didn’t prepare, because you didn’t have a leader saying ‘you need to be prepared’, As a reporter I have a responsibility to you had a leader saying it was just the tell the stories, but also to keep safe – for sniffles. Even if you disagree with the myself, my family and our contributors. politics of a president, it’s the president I’ve been working mainly at home and who is the most important politician and over Zoom, and luckily – in a way – I’m in that message filters down. the city which has been worst affected. The story has been here, in Sao Paulo. The awful thing that has happened here in Brazil is the mixed messaging, from the I want to do more travel, but it’s a big beginning. The president has said one challenge. There are stories about thing, or not really said anything at all, indigenous communities to be covered.
Miguel Nicolelis is a neurobiologist here in Brazil and he said any country who made light of the pandemic suffered – and Brazil is top of the list. Unless a country took this very seriously from the beginning you’ve seen the outcome.
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I covered those early on in the crisis, by speaking to leaders remotely. The pictures would help tell the story in more detail. The problem is how do you speak to them without putting them at risk, as they’re the most vulnerable? It is a fascinating time to be telling the story. It’s a very depressing time as well. I can’t see how Brazilians move forwards. It’s a deeply divided and unequal country and it doesn’t feel like there’s much collaborative work, thinking this is beyond politics.
Interviews took place in July and August 2020 and information was correct at time of writing
New Zealand
Dr JJ Eldridge (NatSci 1997), pictured right, is an Associate Professor in Astrophysics at the University of Auckland
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t’s strange to see the rest of the world. I was back teaching, to 200 students in a lecture theatre, and the rest of the world just couldn’t do that. Some people have got too blasé now and don’t realise it could still be here – there could be silent community transmission – but the fact the lockdown was so hard and happened early on made a big difference. It broke the transmission train.
Shaun Hendy leads a group called Te Pūnaha Matatini, a transdisciplinary research centre focused on the study of complex systems and networks, so they’re very used to making new models of something very quickly to understand it. They’d already been doing a lot of work on M. bovis, which affects cattle, and they then started to work on COVID-19, just to see what would happen to transmission of cases in their research institute. Then the government said: what will it do to the country? And because of the numbers that came back from that modelling, we went into lockdown. had to know where we were going so we could contact trace if we got it, but people didn’t have to wear a mask on the bus – I always do. There was still ‘flu and colds around, because it was the winter, but our ‘flu rates were a third of what they were normally. We know we were extremely lucky.
It’s shocking seeing the huge numbers elsewhere. When you do try to look at why different countries have different reactions and progression of the outbreak, it really comes down to when countries went into lockdown. Now we’re getting our second batch of cases, but they’re all in quarantine and track and trace is working well because the numbers are so low.
At the same time Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles, a microbiologist, was working with a cartoonist for Stuff newspaper in New Zealand, making all these great infographics about bubbles and what exponential increase is when you have a pandemic. Everyone bought straight into the lockdown. Some people did try to push the boundaries, but by and large, everyone was doing the same thing.
A couple of scientists I know at the University of Auckland were influential in Jacinda Ardern’s government implementing the lockdown and its success. Professor
We have the level system, which, funnily enough, everywhere else copied, and we were at Level Four, full lockdown, and we moved down slowly to Level One. We still
Due to a small cluster found in Auckland, lockdown procedures were quickly reimplemented and teaching returned online, while shops had physical distancing in place. It’s fortunate that we have a government taking hard decisions and controlling outbreaks.
nearly impossible. It’s just me and my lovely inamorata, Page, and a few close friends. I keep on hearing in my head E. M. Forster’s maxim: “Only Connect!” “Easy for him to say,” I mutter.
What I am struck by is how rapidly we have adapted to strange new rituals. When we are out walking, my girlfriend and I make sure to give anyone coming towards us a wide berth – even if that means crossing the street. In a town where the people are friendly and talkative, that’s so strange. We shop early at the supermarket. We sanitise everything we buy before it goes on the shelves or in the fridge. I wouldn’t do this, but my girlfriend wants to and – in the current situation – everyone needs to feel safe. We have happy hours on Zoom and our Buddhist sangha meets on Zoom.
United States
Professor Toby Widdicombe (English 1974) is an English Professor at the University of Alaska in Anchorage
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am one of the lucky ones in this great contagion. I truly know I am. I have a good job teaching literature at the local university, and I still have that – albeit exclusively on Zoom these days. I live in Alaska, the state with the smallest population in the United States and one of the lowest infection rates in the country. Anchorage, the city where I live, has a proactive mayor who knows you have to practise social distancing and wear a mask. That said, I am desperately worried for my family and friends in the UK and around the world. The pandemic has had no effect on my income, but it has trashed the lives of friends in the hospitality industry. So, my girlfriend and I are giving money to friends who have been laid off so they can survive economically. Every day I feel this physical longing to connect and know that right now it is
So, how do spend my days? Recently, my girlfriend and I went over to see some friends in Spenard (a funky part of town – full of artists and radicals and exhippies). We practised social distancing on their deck in the back garden. Four or five hours go by and none of us wants the conversation to end. All of us are that desperate for social contact in real life. God I love people in all their threedimensional oddness! I really do. I’m a long-distance runner and reader. I am doing both to keep myself sane. Better than therapy.
And then I realise that I have always relied on rituals: the ritual of going to the coffee shop to get caffeinated and to people watch and to chat with the baristas; the ritual of going to my office at work, of teaching in the classroom, of holding office hours to help struggling students. All gone in a matter of days. We were in Hawaii in early March staying at a remote farm, and then the contagion came. But as Monty Python famously said: “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” I am one of the lucky ones. I know I am. Optima 17
United States
Dr Zoe Johnson King (Philosophy 2007) is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Southern California iving in SoHo – in Lower Manhattan – I never thought that I would see the streets empty on a Friday night. But that’s exactly what happened. I went out for runs during lockdown and was the only visible person on Broadway, on Houston, on the Bowery, in Chinatown, in Washington Square Park. I listened to Ghost Town by The Specials on repeat, thinking it a good match for the eerie way the city felt. That said, some parts of New York were still densely populated; wealthy Sohoans had fled to their country homes, but people in poorer areas either couldn’t afford to leave or didn’t have anywhere to go. This might partly explain why the city was hit so hard and so quickly.
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I was quite relaxed, as I’m pretty sure I had COVID in January, following a trip to Singapore. Little was understood about COVID then, but I had what are now known to be textbook symptoms: the worst ‘flu of my life, a couple days of fever and delirium, and then a cough that wouldn’t go away for weeks on end. My parents were still worried,
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though. At one point they each separately asked me to send them daily text messages just to confirm that I wasn’t sick. I tried to use optimistic emojis like the sunflower and the spouty whale in a silly attempt to make it seem like there was nothing to worry about. I moved to Los Angeles to start a new job at the University of Southern California in July. My position at New York University was a two-year post-doc, and I’d already accepted the USC job and deferred my start date, so I always knew that I’d be headed to California in summer 2020. But, still, it’s not easy to move across America in the middle of a pandemic to a place where you don’t know anyone. You have to be a bit more proactive about getting to know your colleagues and grad students – you don’t just bump into people! I have the sense that I need to wait for the pandemic to be over to officially start my new life, but, still, it’s good to be putting down roots under the blue skies of California.
Relishing the challenge Maxine Meju’s medicine career began in earnest in the midst of a global pandemic
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r Maxine Meju (Clinical Medicine 2014) was awarded a distinction when she graduated early from the University of Cambridge on 6 April. She was one of 265 medical students, nine of whom attended Fitzwilliam, who graduated early to enter the NHS workforce to help with the response to the COVID-19 crisis. Maxine was Co-President of the Fitzwilliam College Medical and Veterinary Society in her third year and is a keen athlete. She worked in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, and is now undertaking her Foundation Year One (FY1) at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital in London, beginning with Gastroenterology and General Medicine. She admits to having felt a little trepidation about beginning her medical career during a pandemic, but the reality was somewhat different. “It seems better than ever starting as a new doctor because the environment is so supportive,” she says. “We joined after the peak and it hasn’t been quite so scary. It’s a lot more fun than I anticipated. Team morale is high, there’s lots of camaraderie and people are supporting each other, as most of the senior doctors who would usually be in clinics are working on the wards.”
Maxine’s final examinations, scheduled for the end of April, were cancelled in early March and she took up her interim FY1 post in Harlow at the end of May. Some of her friends started earlier, depending on the hospital they were allocated to. Maxine embarked on her FY1 proper in August. She says: “I didn’t expect it to be so relaxed, especially during a pandemic. People say FY1 is really tough and a steep learning curve, and it is challenging in some ways, but as a weekday job it’s well supported and you can pick up stuff and put it into practice what you learn at the weekend, when you’re by yourself. I’m excited for the next year.” After a week’s induction and two days of shadowing, Maxine’s first weekend of her first four-month rotation included being on call. “It was challenging because I didn’t know my way around the hospital,” she adds. “Everyone I worked with was really nice and I found the ward job a lot easier when I went back to normal shifts.” The main impact of coronavirus has been on communication, with Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) making conversations with patients and their families more challenging.
Maxine adds: “There aren’t many COVID patients in the hospital at all; in my first week there were zero, which I found surprising in London. I encountered my first COVIDpositive patient when I did my first set of night shifts in early September and actually, with the full PPE available and full support from the nursing staff on that ward, I felt pretty safe. “Everyone’s wearing masks all the time, so communicating with patients is difficult as they can’t see your whole face. It’s sad for the patients because we can’t show our emotions.” But the rewards are present, Maxine says. She adds: “For anyone thinking about doing medicine, or people who are just about to graduate from med school, don’t let anyone scare you. It’s a very exciting job and very rewarding. “The hours might be slightly longer and you have a lot of responsibility, but it’s truly gratifying to be thanked by patients when they recover. It’s a heartwarming feeling to know you have an impact on people’s lives. COVID hasn’t ruined that side of things. It’s exceeded my expectations. I enjoy getting to work, which is really nice. It’s great to wake up in the morning, knowing you’re going to help people.” Optima 19
‘We have to learn to live with this and be patient’ Consultant chest radiologist Dr Sam Hare has been on the frontline in the battle with the COVID-19 pandemic
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ormality is something we all crave amid the uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic. Dr Sam Hare (Medicine 1995) understands the desire for normality, while warning of the precarious position we are all in when coping with this stubborn disease. “Hopefully the virus fizzles out and we build immunity in our communities,” Sam says. “But until we have a vaccine we can’t be confident that immunity is going to build. “I think the Government approach is right. I don’t advocate a national lockdown unless we have a real surge, but I think local lockdowns are the right way to deal with it. “We have to try to get some way towards normality and learn to live with this.” Sam speaks from the experience of a consultant chest radiologist with the British Society of Thoracic Imaging (BSTI) and someone who suffered from COVID-19 in spring 2020. He adds: “I had it. It did leave me pretty exhausted, but I was exhausted from the way we were working during the pandemic, with night shifts and 24-hour on-call rotas. It’s difficult to know how much of it was symptoms and how much was work. “It’s almost easy if you’ve got a fever, a cough
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and loss of taste or smell: you know you’ve got the virus and have to self-isolate at home.
attacks, kidney stones, cancer treatments, scanning of patients, to name a few – were being overlooked.
“If you test positive without symptoms, it just shows the minefield out there with people wandering around with the virus having no idea that they’ve got it.
“What happened when lockdown eased, we found patients coming back into hospital, seeing more severe cases, cancers which had progressed during lockdown…
“I only got tested because I’m a healthcare worker, but there must be asymptomatic people in the community who can theoretically pass it on.”
“Although we have to be careful and if the R number goes above one in a particular area we have to do a local lockdown, we have to try to get a message out to all patients that if you’re unwell it’s still important to come to hospital.
Sam was speaking in early September, after a steep rise of cases almost doubling to nearly 3,000 in a 24-hour period. He says: “It’s worrying when we hear of sharp rises of cases. We just don’t know what’s going to happen – there’s trepidation.” Sam, though, believes a semblance of normality is necessary due to the myriad other effects of a lockdown, for example to support the mental and physical wellbeing of young children, and to treat patients falling ill with other conditions. “This disease has a much wider impact outside of just the hospital, into everyday life,” he adds. “We were so fixated on COVID and the damage it was doing that in some ways the other diseases that are always there – heart
“There’s a lot of other things out there as serious as COVID and as doctors we encourage patients to come forward. “If you’re unwell, various measures have been put in place in hospitals in terms of having green, clean sites and other COVID sites. “We’ve done a lot of restructuring of our healthcare system that allows us to be able to see all diseases in a safe way. That’s one of the most important messages.” Another challenge facing the population and health workers is the cold and ‘flu season across autumn and winter. Sam says: “The symptoms are similar and you’re going to have situations where
people are going to have the ‘flu and we’re not going to know whether it’s the ‘flu or COVID. The COVID testing still takes 24 hours and there’s going to be a lot of fear out there amongst the public.
necessarily be true. We’ll only know that as we keep understanding about the virus and doing more research.”
For those who recover from COVID-19, there can still be long-term effects, and not “What if you’ve already had COVID and just from patients who required hospital you get a fever? The current advice is you treatment. should self-isolate again. But there’s no real guidance out there. Theoretically you can get it again.” Antibody tests, which check your blood by looking for antibodies, which may tell you if you had a past infection with the virus that causes COVID-19, do not always provide answers either. For example, Sam has had a negative antibody test, which has two possible explanations. Either he has a level of natural immunity, or the viral load of COVID-19 he experienced was low and did not prompt an immune response, meaning he could be infected again.
“I’ve been struck by how long it’s taking people to get over this illness if they’ve had it.”
Sam adds: “I’ve been struck by how long it’s taking people to get over this illness if they’ve had it.
“Usually normal pneumonia clears by four to six weeks. With COVID, three months or so later, a lot of lungs have improved, but He adds: “We were all hopeful a positive haven’t gone back to normal. antibody test would mean you’ve had the virus and you’re immune, but that might not “We’ve seen groups of patients who have
developed bits of lung scarring. We’ve also seen a lot of deconditioning – although the lungs on CT scans have gone back to normal, we’ve got patients who are subjectively short of breath, finding it difficult bending down to tie their shoe laces, or having a lot of post-viral fatigue. “There’s a group of patients who self-isolated at home, didn’t go to hospital and still don’t feel back to 100 per cent. “It’s just not what you see in your more usual infections.” We will have to be patient for a while yet, Sam says. He adds: “There’s still a lot of unknowns, coupled with that is those visions of people coming into hospital, having difficulty breathing and dying. “There’s a lot of uncertainty. We’re just doing what we can.”
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Searching questions Dr Jason Rentfrow is looking at personality and the pandemic using internet search trends
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r Jason Rentfrow is an optimist. The Fitzwilliam Fellow is looking at how responses to the lockdowns caused by the coronavirus pandemic might be related to personality. His own response has been to focus on the positives, such as more time with his family; the one major negative has been the disrupted travel he has experienced. “The way in which we frame our current experiences can strongly influence how we feel about our situation and respond to it,” he says.
The pandemic has presented a research opportunity for Jason’s group, the Cambridge Personality and Social Dynamics Research Group, which investigates geographical variation in personality and focuses on how environmental factors influence people’s personalities and vice versa. The team, working with colleagues at universities in Europe, North America and Australasia, are trying to discover how different responses to the crisis might be understood in terms of distinct personality traits in different regions.
“There are several things we can be concerned about: Brexit is still going on and causing uncertainty; things in America are looking quite depressing. But I can’t help but try my best to not get weighed down by these events by trying to take a broader perspective.
“This isn’t the first time bad things have happened in the world. People are resilient and will recover.”
“The narrative I tell myself is that we’ll make considerable progress within the next year or so, hopefully, and it will take some time after that to recover as a society, but we’ll get on with it and things will be OK. “Keeping in mind the hardships that previous generations have endured helps me have a bit of hope and optimism that these things will pass, life will continue.
Google search trends are used and then mapped into different domains – symptom checking (e.g., “allergy vs COVID symptoms”), risk reduction (“how to make a face mask”), infection rates (“COVID rates in my area”) and so on. The topics that are commonly searched in Google will then be evaluated in relation to the personality characteristics of regions. The group has been harvesting Google search-trend data for months.
“This isn’t the first time bad things have happened in the world. People are resilient and will recover.”
He adds: “We are beginning to look at what people were searching for during the early phases of COVID. And, as events unfold,
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we will be able to see how search trends are changing over time. Behaviours are changing quite a bit, people’s attitudes to different safety measures are changing a lot. “The nature of this research enables us to harvest data over several months and potentially years. That will enable us to look at how these patterns ebb and flow, in terms of symptom checking or risk reduction, for example.” Jason has noticed early trends and changes. “My sense is that search trends indicative of anxiety about COVID have reduced, in part because we’ve learned more since March and we’ve seen a reduction of cases in many places throughout the summer,” he says. “From the public’s perspective, that information has likely reduced some of the anxiety that people have experienced concerning the virus. So I don’t expect to see as many anxiety-related searches during the summer. “I would imagine some of the anxietyrelated searches we might begin to detect will be of a more financial nature. Obviously, the pandemic is having significant economic effects, so there may be more searches related to job security, benefits and various indictors of financial hardship. “It seems that early on a lot of searches were related to risk reduction: face masks, handwashing, social distancing, and hand sanitisers. I think people now have the
The virtual space F itzwilliam Fellow Professor Srinivasan Keshav has helped academics cope with the enforced virtual revolution in their conferences.
Keshav joined Fitzwilliam in October 2019 when he was appointed Robert Sansom Professor of Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. information they were looking for, so there’s less concern about how to reduce the risk of infection and those types of issues. That’s preliminary.” Jason acknowledges there will be geographical variations based on political, economic, and societal issues, which it will be possible to assess at a later date. He says: “We want to be able to make comparisons across regions and cultures, so the search terms we’ve been focusing on are not tied to specific locations. The purpose of doing this is to enable us to make meaningful comparisons across regions. “There will be important location-specific terms, inevitably, but most of our attention for now has been on those terms that generalise across areas.” Mental health among adults, adolescents and children is anticipated to be an increased area of concern, while there could be longterm knock-on effects of the pandemic. Like the pandemic and the reaction to it, Jason’s research is fast-moving, everchanging and it will take some time for the full verdict to come out. In the meantime, he is determined to stay upbeat.
Early in the coronavirus pandemic, he was approached by the Association of Computing Machinery to be part of a taskforce to make recommendations on how to run a virtual conference. He says: “There are many moving parts and we tried to come up with guidance. We were able to put together the document and release it within a month. To my knowledge it’s been widely used.” His role was to integrate applications and software to give attendees the best possible experience, accounting for time zones, connectivity and other challenges, such as the plethora of videoconferencing solutions. “There’s a whole alphabet soup of things out there,” adds Keshav, speaking over Zoom, one of the options. The formal aspects of conferencing have been a success, with presentations delivered on a screen, and recordings possible for participants to view them in their own time. Breakout rooms have been proposed in an attempt to replicate informal conversations, with mixed results. Keshav adds: “If you’re with three, four, five people, some of whom you know, some of whom you don’t, it works reasonably well. When you’re with four strangers, sometimes it’s easier to check out and get ready for the next session. I’ve also been the only person in a breakout session!”
Keshav believes conferences from home, necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, have been a success, but he does not anticipate a major change to the way academics work in future. “We’ve demonstrated the ability for virtual conferences to replace substantial portions of a real conference,” Keshav says. “But once things go back more or less to normal, I’d be very surprised if people said ‘let’s do things virtually and not travel so much’. “From the perspective of academic conferences, much of it is happenstance meetings, casual conversations, informal events and that is very hard to replicate. Though people are trying to, it hasn’t worked very well.” This is a contributing factor in Keshav’s belief that people will revert to travelling, unless restrictions are applied by academic institutions. However, his own intention is to limit his travel due to environmental concerns. Keshav’s work has been largely unaffected by the pandemic, but he has been enjoying being at home and lunchtime walks. He has worked in computer networking since 1988, and currently works on the use of techniques and technologies from computer science to encourage the adoption of renewable energy and to reduce the carbon footprint. He adds: “I’ve been working with Professor David Coombs, a Fellow at Fitz and plant scientist, on a number of topics, bringing together techniques from computer science and nature-based solutions. I can see myself working on it more as I learn more about how computer science can play a role in this space.”
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Dis-United Kingdom? Professor Michael Kenny discusses the different political responses to the pandemic across the UK
Optima asked Professor Michael Kenny, the Co-Director at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy and a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, how the coronavirus pandemic could change the political landscape across the United Kingdom. Why have the responses to the coronavirus pandemic been so different across the UK? When the pandemic first arrived in the UK, there was quite a lot of collaboration between the UK Government and the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and their scientific advisors. Each of them also started to make its own decisions about lockdown, and how and when to exit from it. And that was when a much greater sense of divergence in their decisions and approach to the pandemic became more apparent. What this episode has highlighted, more generally, is the lack of familiarity of sections of the public and many politicians, especially at Westminster, with the nature of devolution in this country. The extent to which the devolveds have been able to make key decisions in areas affecting public health has come as a surprise to many, and so too the very idea that these governments might take responsibility in a crisis of this scale. But, in a functional devolved system, you would expect different policies to be pursued in different parts of the country in a situation like this, and hope that a broadly co-operative approach could be maintained.
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Any sense of partnership has fallen away pretty quickly in the UK, and what has been most striking is the extent of the differences that have become apparent in the lifting and timing of lockdown restrictions in England, Scotland and Wales. In the case of Northern Ireland this is perhaps not so surprising, given how rural much of it is, and its geographical proximity to another country – the Republic of Ireland. What I suspect has also come as a shock has been the realisation that in many key respects the UK Government is, in the wake of devolution, the government of England – but nobody has ever really made that clear. In the last few months, co-operation appears to have given way to a more politically competitive atmosphere, with the Scottish and Welsh governments distancing themselves from the Johnson administration’s approach in England. This has been painted as more risky in character, a charge that has been given legs by the ready availability of comparative data about rates of infection and excess mortality in different parts of the country. And, as we are all aware, the sense that the UK Government has not handled things well is accentuated by comparisons with the experience of the pandemic in many other western countries. The speed and ease with which comparisons between countries can be made, in this crisis, is one of its most striking features. But we should take some care about making overly confident judgements about who
has handled this better or worse, given the difficulties of ensuring comparability and accuracy of data. This will take some while for us to know for sure. At the 2019 Reunion Weekend, you delivered a lecture titled ‘Will Brexit lead to the break-up of the UK?’ (pictured above right) Has the response to the coronavirus pandemic hastened the likelihood of that scenario? Well, the pandemic has certainly created major new challenges for the British system of governance, and these comes hard on the heels of the Brexit crisis which, as I said at the 2019 Reunion Weekend, triggered some powerful new conflicts between the devolved governments and London, and raised a bunch of extremely difficult questions about the UK’s constitutional order. At the same time, we should be careful about leaping to the conclusion that just because these differences of approach have emerged over COVID-19, this means that the Union is unravelling. In a system of multi-level government, you would expect differences of this kind. But what the pandemic has thrown into relief is that the British state still sees itself as standing above, and separate from, these other tiers of government, and also that there is nowhere at the heart of UK Government where relationships with them, and with
other local and regional authorities in England, are held and managed coherently. At the same time, there appears now to be a move within the Johnson government, to push back against the views of the devolveds in the context of the UK’s preparations for the development an internal market, once we leave the EU. There will very likely be a very bruising collision on this important subject. This, and other pressing issues, are now more likely to determine the future of the Union than COVID-19. A question mark hangs over the future of Northern Ireland, following the Withdrawal Agreement which passed through parliament in late 2019 – and which could be circumvented by the Internal Market Bill, potentially breaching international law. The Protocol which this included in relation to Northern Ireland leaves it in a very uncertain position in constitutional terms. And the situation in Scotland is now becoming ever more urgent, from a unionist perspective, as recent polls indicate a majority of people there would now favour independence – a shift that may be linked to perceptions of how the UK and Scottish governments have handled the pandemic.
What impact will the pandemic have on UK politics? Standing back from the slew of daily events and decisions which the COVID-19 crisis has thrown up, I suspect that one of the biggest questions that future historians will want to answer, when they look back at this extraordinary episode, will be why the emergence of this common threat has not turned out to have a unifying effect on the country, in the way that other existential threats, like the Second World War, have. At the very start of lockdown, there were plenty of people hoping and thinking that this would be the case. And yet, sitting here, six months on, it feels like the opposite is happening. And we should start to reflect on why it is that our politics and our systems of government seem to have pulled the country further apart, rather than bringing us together. In political terms, it is really hard to judge what kind of fall-out the pandemic may have. In part this will depend on people’s memories of it in years to come and, specifically, whether blame gets pinned on the key decision-makers in the current Government, or is spread more widely – encompassing bodies like Public Health England, and Britain’s creaking system of governance, more generally. Certainly, huge questions have arisen about how we are governed in the UK, why we appeared
so poorly prepared for a pandemic despite years of warnings about the likelihood of one, and the ways in which scientific advice is incorporated in governmental decisionmaking. And these will need to be given full and proper consideration, at a distance from the political blame games that are, no doubt, to come. But I suspect too that by the time of the next General Election, the memory of lockdown will have faded for many people, and what will be uppermost in most people’s minds will be the economic shock that is about to come. What kind of recession we are about to experience, how long it lasts, and whether governments in different parts of the UK have the competence and strategic ability to mount a coherent and successful response to it, will, I suspect, be the questions that will dominate political life in the coming years.
Fresh Thinking at Fitz
The Master, Baroness Sally Morgan, will discuss Devolution: lessons from COVID with Andy Burnham (English 1988), Mayor of Greater Manchester, on Thursday 15 October.
Foundation Lecture 2020
Professor Diane Coyle, Co-Director of the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, will present the Foundation Lecture 2020 on Monday 9 November. To book to attend, click on the events above.
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A looming threat Dr Jonathan Cullen, head of the Resource Efficiency Collective, is working to lessen the climate crisis
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or some, the coronavirus pandemic has been a prelude to a far greater challenge: the climate emergency.
the grants it distributes, because of its perception of the immediacy of the climate emergency.
Reduced emissions and air pollution early in lockdown, due to reduced traffic on the roads and in the air, were among events which for some shone further light on the scale of the climate crisis.
Jonathan is one of the beneficiaries, as part of a $4 million, three-year grant, together with the University of Bath, University of Texas, Austin, and University of California, Santa Barbara, in a project called C-THRU: carbon clarity in the global petrochemicals supply chain.
Fitzwilliam College Fellow in Engineering Dr Jonathan Cullen knows all too well the myriad issues at stake and that there is no single solution. “The coronavirus pandemic caused us to stop and our climate emissions went down, but we can’t argue it’s a good thing! We don’t want that type of stopping,” Jonathan says.
Petrochemicals are products made into plastics, fertilisers, solvents and fibres, and the project will assess the growing demand and the associated carbon emissions with the manufacture of those products. The group will also see if emissions reported from the sector are accurate.
“There’s a lot of smart engineers around working on modelling and solutions, but historically we haven’t engaged that well with the climate change threat. But climate change is a problem which isn’t going to be solved by one technology, one silver bullet. There’s a new breed of multi-interdisciplinary researchers coming through, and it’s really important engineers are part of the solution narrative. We need to understand the need more and work on the technical solutions. That’s what I’m passionate about – climate change and interdisciplinary research.”
Jonathan adds: “We’ll be looking at upstream, industry options – can we change the way we make plastics, formulations, can we make them with hydrogen or biological materials, can we capture the carbon from them?
The funders of Jonathan’s latest grant are in agreement with his approach. The V Kann Rasmussen Foundation is to spend down its endowment in the next 15 years, doubling
The sheer variety of materials and products means demand profiles and climate change solutions will be different for specific products.
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“We’ll be mapping them through to the products made – how long do the products last? Can we make it longer? Can we make them lighter weight, easier to recycle, recover or reuse? We will also predict what the future demand of the sector looks like.”
“The project will be open sourced, which means the modelling and results will be brought out into the open to be interrogated and so people can use models,” says Jonathan, who runs the University of Cambridge’s Resource Efficiency Collective. “We seek answers to a challenging question: how can we deliver future energy and material services, while at the same time reducing resource use and environmental impact?” His 2012 book Sustainable Materials, written with Professor Julian Allwood and six PhD students, was one of Bill Gates’ six best books in 2015. “Using a lot of evidence in an accessible way the book showed the concept of material efficiency using materials better – making lighter-weight vehicles or recycling better – can save emissions,” Jonathan says. “We helped to bring that concept into popular thinking. Now you have big programmes in the UK and European Union on research efficiency, circular economy, which in many ways embodied that material we put out there.” His interest in the climate emergency stems from human suffering. Predictions of environmental migrants raised alarm bells, with the United Nations International Organization for Migration forecasting there could be between 25 million and 1 billion environmental migrants by 2050. The complexity of his work is illustrated in
the plastic problem. “Plastic is a very good product, because it’s very cheap, it’s very easy to make into products, it’s very durable,” Jonathan adds. “It just doesn’t have any value once it comes to the end of its life. We hardly recycle any plastic because it’s just not valuable to do so. So we’ve got a decision – do we want to pay people to recycle it? Or can we design products better so they last longer? Remember plastic’s not one material, it’s hundreds of different materials that get made into thousands of products. Each different plastic product needs different solutions. “The type of evidence-based research we do asks: how much plastic do we make in this country? How much do we import and export? Can we trace that through to the products, where that plastic is used? Can we make the link between what the consumer is doing with plastic and the emissions and the environmental damage that happens from plastic production and disposal?”
Recycling can use more energy than producing the product in the first place, while alternatives may not be much better. For example, using paper bags instead of plastic ones has challenges associated with production and in some cases plastic coating on the paper bags makes them more difficult to recycle.
it’s better to have a biodegradable plastic there? If we could get one that biodegraded within, say, a month, it would degrade and there’s no damage from that. Maybe that’s a better option than forcing recyclable material on a developing country when they just don’t have the infrastructure to even collect the bottles, let alone recycle them.”
One of the many possible solutions which could make a difference in the developing world, in particular, is using biodegradable materials with plastic-like properties, like cellulose. That links with research by Professor James Elliott, another Fitzwilliam Fellow, and Professor Paul Dupree (NatSci 1984), a Fitzwilliam alumnus.
Jonathan is part of a Cambridge-wide research project called CirPlas: Circular Economy Approaches to Eliminate Plastic Waste. He recently released a report covering many of these issues for UK plastics, called ‘The ‘P’ Word’.
“Bioplastics have gone a little bit out of fashion, because there’s a particular problem that biodegradable ‘plastics’ don’t really fit with our current recycling system,” Jonathan says. “But when you go to developing countries, where there is no formal recycling system and plastic bottles for soft drinks are just thrown in the desert or the river, maybe
Agricultural benefits P rofessor Giles Oldroyd hopes his research in self-fertilising crops can increase yields for farmers in the developing world and reduce pollution.
The Fitzwilliam Fellow and director of the Crop Science Centre, pictured right, leads an international programme focused on engineering nitrogen-fixing cereals, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, called Engineering the Nitrogen Symbiosis for Africa (ENSA) project. The team aims to understand the signalling and developmental processes in plants that allows interactions with fungi and bacteria, that help plants acquire limiting nutrients, thus eliminating the need for artificial fertilisers. Their work has potential to deliver more sustainable and secure food production systems, with particular potential to deliver significant yield improvements to the poorest farmers in the world, who have little access to
fertilisers. It can also help reduce the damage caused by the escape of fertilisers to the environment. Fertilisers leach into water systems and cause eutrophication, resulting in a collapse in the biodiversity of aquatic systems. “My long-term aim is to reduce as much as possible the utilisation of nutrients in agriculture,” Giles says. “We can eradicate nitrogen, theoretically, by using nitrogenfixing symbioses. And we can greatly reduce the amounts of phosphate and probably potassium you need to apply by improving the fungal association. But more importantly, when you apply them,
we can ensure you’re losing less out into the environment, so we’re not having all the environmental consequences. “So many industrial processes have been massively improved in their efficiency, but agriculture is not one of them. We just accept there’s a vast amount of pollution because we have to produce food, and we accept all the consequences in the environment. “If you look at the 20th century, all of the agricultural problems were solved by chemistry, and in the 21st century, I think we can replace most of those with biological solutions. Some of those will involve biotechnology, which society might not like, but if you’re talking about removing nitrogen out of the environment, are you willing to accept a GM (genetically modified) crop if it totally removes the need for fertilisers? That’s a very different discussion. We can certainly optimise agricultural production far greater than at present.” Optima 27
The year in music
Catherine Groom, our Director of Music, reports on 2019-20
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eing Director of Music at Fitz continues to be an unalloyed joy. Fitz’s ensembles have all enjoyed showcases this year. The Choir has been heard beyond the walls of Fitzwilliam College, in a sold-out Beethoven Symphony no. 9 at West Road Concert Hall, with the City of Cambridge Sinfonia and the choirs of several other Cambridge Colleges, and in a Hampstead Arts Festival Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius with the Choir of Emmanuel College. The evening jointly produced by the Barbers and the Sirens was as slick as one would expect from these fine ensembles. Termly Gin & Jazz in the Bar has featured quartets from Fitz Swing; flute and saxophone solos by our very own Tom Peirce have been a real highlight. Twice-termly JCR-organised Fitz Sessions, termly Graduate Salons of music and poetry and termly Orchestra-onthe-Hill concerts have all been rewarding. 2019’s Reunion Concert, Musical postcards from 1869, saw the first performances by several permutations of chamber musicians that have survived the test of time and gone on to coaching from the Fitzwilliam String Quartet, who themselves played a mesmerising Shostakovich Quartet no. 12 here this year. Beyond the FSQ, visiting professional musicians have included handpan-andsaxophone duo Boubakiki who performed an inspired and inspiring, slick and well-attended evening of collaborative improvisation, and pianist Steven Osborne whose Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus was luminescent. One immensely exciting student-led initiative this year has been second-year Classicist Emily Beck’s actor-
28 Optima
musicianship collective ‘Jack & Master’. Emily’s interest in the ways in which theatre and music inform one another was piqued at her local theatre, The Watermill in Newbury, and developed through summer study at the renowned Rose Bruford College. Emily is keen to develop this field further within the Cambridge theatrical scene, and has put her fine organisational and leadership skills to use in establishing this collective here at Fitz, working with student actors from Fitz and from the wider University. There have been three workshops so far, the first two led by Emily herself and the third by Jeremy Harrison, who has been active in defining the field. We look forward to more. Other terrific student initiatives have been ‘City of Stars’, a charity concert of film music, Padley Répétiteur Scholar Pierre Riley’s superb recital Pianistic Diversions, and a ‘Latenight Lent’ concert of medieval fragments for two voices and medieval harp, devised by first-year English student Rebecca Severy in collaboration with the Director of Music. Rebecca’s singing was hauntingly beautiful and her research sparky and scholarly. Informal student concerts on Monday evenings have continued to be varied and
well-supported. In addition to the usual Freshers’ and Christmas concerts and weekly recitals by Fitz’s singers, players, composers and song-writers, a recital as part of the Minerva (formerly Cambridge Female Composers) Festival, took place, and a scratch performance of Terry Riley 1960s minimalist work ‘In C’ was memorable for all the right reasons – fascinating timbres and sociability were the order of the evening. Alas, COVID-19 saw off one of the major endeavours of 2019-20: Fitzwilliam Chamber Opera’s fully-staged production of Mozart’s romantic comedy Così fan tutte, set to run in early May and featuring an all-Fitz cast, chorus, orchestra and creative team. This will, however, become 2020-21’s production, all being well. Similarly, the Choir’s CD recording, will be rescheduled. Programmed around the theme of the changing light seen through the vast plane tree outside the Chapel, the physical disc’s packaging will feature photography produced in collaboration with Fitz’s outstanding gardening team. We hope that this, too, will be well worth the wait.
Pictures: Beethoven 9 rehearsal (top) Boubakiki in the Chapel (above left) Terry Riley ‘In C’ (above right) Rebecca Severy with Director of Music Catherine Groom (far right) Tom Peirce (right)
For all things music at Fitzwilliam, visit: fitz.cam.ac.uk/college-life/music
Books by Members The Final Innings: The Cricketers of Summer 1939 Using unpublished letters, diaries and memoirs, Christopher Sandford recreates the summer of 1939, which marked the end of the second Golden Age of English cricket and the start of World War Two.
Laughing with Llamas A travelogue of the author’s trek in South America, specifically Peru in the present and the past. It’s a celebration of travel in a fascinating part of the world.
Christopher Sandford (History 1974)
David Kitching (Law 1978)
Principles of Land Law
Mediterranean Vegetarian Cooking
The core principles of land law are articulated clearly in this new textbook, providing a framework through which students can gain a sophisticated understanding of the modern land law system.
Delicious Mediterranean-inspired vegetarian recipes suitable for the entire family and for entertaining friends, with no sacrifice of taste or quality.
Dr Emma Lees (Fellow)
Robin Ellis (History 1961)
Blooming Flowers: A Seasonal History of Plants and People
Churchill’s Few
An evocative and richly illustrated exploration of flowers and how, over the centuries, they have given us so much sustenance, meaning, and pleasure.
Eighty years after the Battle of Britain this vivid and dramatic book tells the story, in their own words, of six brave young men who fought courageously in the skies above England to prevent Hitler’s invasion of Britain.
Dr Kasia Boddy (Fellow)
John Willis (History 1965)
Finding the ‘Ring of Truth’
Battle Ground
The story of a Scottish Spitfire pilot from RAF 234 Squadron, Missing in Action in late July 1944, and the odyssey of 2003–2015 to identify his war grave in southern Brittany.
The Battle Ground series is set in a dystopian near-future UK, after Brexit and Scottish independence.
Richard Lyon (Architecture 1967)
Rachel Churcher (Geography 1993)
Please email Matt McGeehan (alumni.comms@fitz.cam.ac.uk) if you would like your book to be considered for publication in the next Optima. Optima 29
Silverware boom amid the pandemic Fitzwilliam’s name is on the Cuppers rugby union trophy, but not in the circumstances the players had hoped
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or more than 50 years, Cuppers men’s rugby union success proved elusive for Fitzwilliam College. The wait has ended, but not in the manner in which Fitz wanted it to.
Fitz pair up with Sidney Sussex for college competitions, but make up the majority of the team. For Lockhart and his team-mates, when Lent term ended and lockdown began, rugby was at the forefront of their minds.
The coronavirus pandemic means Fitzwilliam are the holders of the Cuppers trophies for cricket, football, and now rugby union.
Lockhart, who graduated in the summer, added: “There were concerns with exams and stuff but in the short term I was thinking about rugby! It was pretty clear pretty early on that organised sport was going to be banned.”
After being stopped by floodlight failure and a rescheduled fixture which limited availability in 2018-19, it took the global health crisis to stop Fitzwilliam’s rugby players from earning victory on the field in 2019-20. The Nearly Men, as they have come to call themselves, finished the curtailed season with silverware, winning Division One for the first time since 1982. The coveted Cuppers trophy will be adorned with Fitzwilliam’s name, but for the players, at least, that is something of a damp squib. Captain Will Lockhart said: “We got an email from CURUFC to say both names were going to go on the trophy, which is obviously nice on the face of it, but everyone’s pretty competitive and it doesn’t count for us! “We knew we’d had a good season, so to have got to a final and not been able to play it, after beating a very good John’s side in the semis, was a bit frustrating.” 30 Optima
The team felt particularly disappointed the 25 April final with Downing could not be played because a year earlier, in 2019, circumstances conspired against them. Following floodlight failure, when Fitz led, the game was rearranged for Easter Sunday, despite Fitz’s protestations. A year on, Fitz felt they belonged in the final after winning the league. Lockhart developed strong friendships with his team-mates, spending much of the summer, once lockdown was eased, alongside friends he made on the field. Each player also received a Fitz-Sidney tie for the first time. Lockhart anticipates Fitz will improve in 2020-21, under the captaincy of Billy Thomas-Connolly. “A lot of the changes we made over the last
two years that were really good were not really personnel based, it was more around how we operated the team,” he said. “We went from never training at all to training at least once a week and doing additional fitness sessions. The social scene was a lot more often, but it wasn’t about massive rugby socials, it was more about meeting up for food after a game. “We’d done things like getting sponsorship for kit. The guys going into second year now and leaders next season were putting on summer training programmes. In the next two or three years I think they’ll be much better than we were.” This surely must be the first time one college has held the trophies for football, cricket and rugby union at the same time. Fitzwilliam’s footballers did not get a chance to win Cuppers for a fourth straight year, and the cricketers did not get the opportunity to go for five in a row. Cuppers rugby dates from 1923. It was played throughout World War Two and the final was only cancelled when it was frozen off in both 1947 and 1963. Fitz’s only previous win was in 1965, while four times previously the trophy has been shared, due to drawn finals. As alumnus Dick Tyler (Law 1978), the chairman of Cambridge University Rugby
Football Union, says: “There’s a huge number of people who have had extraordinary rugby careers at Cambridge and never won a Cuppers final. Just because you’ve one or two stars, it doesn’t necessarily translate to success in Cuppers.” Dick, a three-time University Blue who also
scored a try for the University against New Zealand, did not win Cuppers. The 2019-20 side can say that they did. The sporting postponements mean Fitzwilliam is in possession of the men’s rugby union, cricket and football Cuppers trophies as part of a memorable athletic
year. The women’s netball team won Division One for the first time in recent memory, the athletics team claimed Cuppers, and the mixed hockey team won ‘Supercuppers’ against Oxford’s best college team. Further success was denied, but Fitz will look to continue excelling in sporting action.
And finally... Do you know anyone who is thinking of attending university in the near future? The Fitzwilliam College Admissions Office has put together a film about Fitzwilliam, featuring students and Fellows. The admissions process will be different this year due to COVID-19 restrictions. Fitzwilliam will guide applicants through each stage and do everything we can to ensure the safety and wellbeing of all involved. For updates about admissions and outreach activities, follow our social media: @FitzSLO: @FitzOutreach:
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optima
Issue 26 | 2020
FITZWILLIAM COLLEGE NEWSLETTER Editor: Matt McGeehan (Development Officer) Editorial advisor: Dr Nicola Jones (Director of Development and Communications)
E: optima@fitz.cam.ac.uk W: fitz.cam.ac.uk/optima Cover: Telephone Campaign callers, September 2020 (photograph by Matt McGeehan) Photography: Martin Bond, Nicola Collenette, Dr John Cleaver, Ariel de Fauconberg, Bluebell Drummond, Leon Reason, Matt McGeehan
Are your contact details correct? We send regular communications, including news updates and event invitations, by email. Please add development@fitz.cam.ac.uk and events@fitz.cam.ac.uk to your ‘safe senders’ list and remember to notify us if you change your contact details, including email address.
Events We are continuing to host events online – please look out for email invitations and please continue to book in advance so we know how many people to expect. If you have any questions, please contact: development@fitz.cam.ac.uk or 01223 332015. Upcoming events Thursday 15 October Fresh Thinking at Fitz: Andy Burnham (English 1988) in conversation with the Master
The magazine’s wrapping film uses natural biopolymers, consisting mainly of potato and maize starch, which are fully sustainable. There is no polythene in this product so when it degrades there are no microplastics left in the soil/watercourse. It conforms to EN13432 so it’s fully compostable in your household compost heap.
Fitzwilliam College Storey’s Way, Cambridge CB3 0DG Registered Charity No. 1137496 @fitzwilliamcoll #FitzwilliamCollege
Monday 9 November Foundation Lecture: Professor Diane Coyle