Research Roundup

Director of Studies in Archaeology, Dr Katherine Boyle has completed extensive work this year on investigating Upper Palaeolithic adaptation to climate change.

“This work has looked at the impact of deteriorating climate conditions on variability in the archaeological record around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum. It addresses adaptive tradeoffs triggered by this general climatic downturn in North-Western Europe, investigating the impact of local climate and habitat on behavioural variability in Gravettian technological organisation compared to the previous Aurignacian. It looks at two assemblages from Walou Cave, Belgium, one of few well-stratified sites in NorthWestern Europe with evidence for multiple occupation events accompanied by a fine-grained palaeoenvironmental record.

Combining well established and new analytical techniques (AMS, LA-ICP-MS and ZooMS) to evaluate questions concerning hunter-gatherer adaptations, results suggest that Gravettian technologies are unlikely to be solely a result of heightened risk in relation to a significant reshuffling of food resources compared to the Aurignacian, but that the period is a significant, if frequently underestimated, episode in longterm development of prehistoric hunter-gatherer behavioural complexity.”

Luc Moreau, Christelle Draily, Jean-Marie Cordy, Katherine Boyle, Michael Buckley, Erik Gjesfjeld, Peter Filzmoser, Valentina Borgia, Sally A. Gibson, Jason Day, Robert Beyer, Andrea Manica, Marc Vander Linden, Marjorie de Grooth & Stéphane Pirson (2021) Adaptive Trade-offs Towards the Last Glacial Maximum in North-Western Europe: a Multidisciplinary View from Walou Cave. J Paleo Arch 4, 11 (2021).

Fellow in Politics Dr Robin Bunce has contributed to various film and television projects over the past year. “October 2020 saw the premiere of Mangrove, a film by Oscar award-winning director Steve McQueen. I had been working on the film as a historical consultant since 2017, so it was a real thrill to see the movie complete. COVID meant that the film only had a limited run in cinemas, but I was really pleased with the reception it got when it aired on television, and the BAFTA nominations that followed.

Following the film, Steve McQueen wanted to showcase the research on the British Black Power movement that went into the movie, so I collaborated with Rogan Productions on the documentary Black Power: a story of British resistance, which aired on BBC 2 in March. The documentary was subsequently picked up by Amazon, and is now reaching an international audience. I’m glad to say it has been nominated for a prestigious IDM award.

Since the spring, I‘ve been working with BBC Studios and SKY Documentaries on a film about the British black radical Michael de Freitas. Michael X: Hustler, Revolutionary, Outlaw. came out in October, and was well received by audiences and critics.”

Robin has also contributed a chapter, in collaboration with Samara Linton, to the book Rethinking Labour’s Past: Rethinking the History of the Labour Party. The essay explores the campaign to get black and Asian MPs elected to Parliament

in 1987, and the book will be published by Bloomsbury in the New Year.

Dr Stephen Burgess leads a research group based on the Addenbrooke’s campus divided between the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit and the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit. His work uses large datasets that combine information on genetics with medical records of diseases and other medicallyrelevant traits.

His research this year has provided evidence supporting a specific effect of body fat on digestive cancers, rather than a generic effect of body size on all cancers, and a beneficial effect of vitamin D supplementation on mortality risk that is isolated to those who are vitamin D deficient.

He has also provided input to the national debate on the pandemic, including work together with Homerton’s Dr Julia Kenyon on the relationship between viral dosage (i.e. the amount of virus that an individual is exposed to at the point of infection) and severity of illness, and on the relationship between COVID-19 and acute cardiovascular disease.

Dr Ross Cole, Fellow in Music, saw his book The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination published by University of California Press in September 2021. The book traces the Janus-like politics of folk song in Britain and the US from 1870 to 1930, and beyond to the contemporary alt-right. It has been described as ‘gracefully written and compelling’.

Ross’s article Vaporwave a e s t h e t i c s: Internet Nostalgia and the Utopian Impulse’(ASAP/ Journal, 2020) received an honourable mention for the Royal Musical Association’s Jerome Roche Prize 2021. He has been invited to speak at New York University and was awarded a Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University.

Led by colleagues at the University of Copenhagen Professor Matthew Collins, McDonald Chair in Palaeoproteomics, has been part of an innovative project devised by Luise Øersted Brandt and funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which brings together high school students and archaeologists to explore the vast amounts of leather recovered during urban redevelopment.

So much leather is recovered from these wet dark deposits that archaeologists are faced with problems of conservation and identification. Luise’s idea is that one person’s problem could be a great teaching tool for someone else. In her Next Generation lab these pieces of dark unrecognisable leather are the starting point for new stories uncovered by school pupils. Brought into the lab, they are first shown examples of modern leather prepared from many different animals and are asked to carefully examine the skins for evidence of hair follicles and the pattern of the grain. They then get to analyse an ancient leather object. Having examined this carefully, they don lab coats and pull on gloves to extract proteins from the object ready for analysis by mass spectrometer. Once back at school they are shared into the data output and identify from peptide masses which species the objects were made from.

Next Generation Lab gives pupils exposure to history, archaeology, fashion as well as protein biochemistry and mass spectrometry, demonstrating the diversity of a discipline, archaeology, rarely taught in schools. The data is then shared with the museum, for whom it can pose unexpected questions. What was this thick belt used for, and why was it made from horse leather, when use of horse skins was banned?

College Research Associate in Geography, Dr Shreyashi Dasgupta was named runner-up in the Bayly Prize 2021 by the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland for her PhD thesis The Accommodation City: Private low-income housing and urban space in Dhaka and Mumbai.

The prize, which commemorates Professor Sir Christopher Bayly’s outstanding contribution to the study of world history, is awarded each year to a distinguished thesis in Asian studies. The award ceremony was held on 11 November at the Royal Asiatic Society, London.

Professor Mary DixonWoods, Professorial fellow and Director of THIS Institute in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, was named as one of the 100 most influential and powerful people in healthcare by the Health Service Journal. Under her leadership, THIS Institute was commissioned by the Department of Health and Social Care in a unique partnership with the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Royal College of Midwives to co-design new, evidence-based approaches to reduce brain injury in childbirth.

Her work on adapting clinical processes for COVID scenarios has been endorsed by major professional and NHS bodies. Her research with co-authors has been cited in a Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology briefing on the mental health impacts of the pandemic. She has participated in “Doctor Informed”, a new joint BMJ/THIS Institute podcast. She gave this year’s Otto Wolff lecture at UCL, the annual public lecture for the Mercer Institute at Trinity College Dublin, and a Grand Rounds presentation at Massachusetts General Hospital, as well as 12 other invited presentations. Dr Amelia Drew, Junior Research Fellow in Theoretical Physics, provided a talk with Dr Will Fawcett, Research Associate in Particle Physics, as part of the Alumni Festival. Their talk, which they had also given exclusively to Homerton alumni earlier in the year, explored the impact on fundamental understanding of physics of recent findings at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago.

She also recorded a podcast with Cambridge University science magazine Bluesci, called Mysteries of the Early Universe.

Amelia is also part of GRChombo, a collaboration of numerical relativists developing open source code, which published a paper in The Journal of Open Source Software entitled An adaptable numerical relativity code for fundamental physics.

Library assistant Gabriel Duckels is a Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholar at Hughes Hall, where he is completing his PhD in HIV/AIDS and Queer Youth in Young Adult Fiction and Nonfiction. His collection of young adult fiction reflecting the HIV/AIDS crisis was awarded the Rose Book-Collecting prize by Cambridge University Library this year.

Professor Doug Easton, Homerton Fellow and Director of the Centre for Cancer Genetic Epidemiology, has led a study described by Cancer Research UK as ‘the most ambitious research ever conducted on the inheritance of breast cancer.’

Published in the New England Journal of Medicine in January 2021, the study analysed samples from 113,000 women using research

undertaken by 250 researchers from more than 25 countries. The findings reveal the most important genes increasing the risk of breast cancer, and will be used to develop risk prediction tests and to help improve prevention programmes.

Fellow in Engineering Dr Shery Huang was part of a multi-disciplinary team developing a 3D microvessel-on-a-chip device for the study of glioblastoma – a fastgrowing and aggressive form of brain tumour that develops chemo-resistance over current treatments.

“We look forward to seeing engineering tool kits making an increasing impact on clinical treatments,” she said.

Shery also co-led research into the ‘upsizing’ of organoids, miniature collections of cells which mimic the behaviour of various organs for research purposes. “Mini-organs are very small and highly fragile,” she said. “In order to scale them up, which would increase their usefulness in medical research, we need to find the right conditions to help the cells self-organise.”

In addition she was part of a cross-disciplinary team of engineers and clinicians using 3D printing to create intricate replicas of human cochleae – the spiral-shaped hollow bone of the auditory inner ear – and combine it with machine learning to advance clinical predictions of ‘current spread’ inside the ear for cochlear implant (CI) patients.

Homerton Junior Research Fellow in Economics, Dr Ines Lee, has won the Bracken Bower Prize 2021 with her book proposal Failing the Class. Supported by the Financial Times and McKinsey, the prize is awarded to the best business book proposal by an author under 35, “that provides a compelling and enjoyable insight into future trends in business, economics, finance or management.”

Ines is working on the book in collaboration with Dr Eileen Tipoe, Senior Lecturer in Economics at Queen Mary University of London. The pair will share prize money of £15,000, and attend a session with publishers where they will receive guidance on making the book a reality. The book will explore a perceived transition in the purpose of education from an inherent benefit in itself, to a tool for employment, and the impact of this shift on the nature of learning and social cohesion.

Dr Ros McLellan, University Associate Professor in Teacher Education and Development/Pedagogical Innovation, gave a keynote entitled ‘Supporting wellbeing in school: Enabling young people to fulfil their potential’ to an audience of over 1200 international teachers, organised by Cambridge International as part of their Cambridge Schools Conference.

Linked to this, Ros published an article ‘Prioritising Wellbeing’ in Cambridge International’s in-house magazine, as well as writing a blog on the same subject.

Ros is now Chair of the Publications Committee at BERA, the British Education Research Association.

Homerton Research Associate Dr Jwalin Patel took up the ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Faculty of Education in 2021. He has been awarded the University’s Public Engagement Starter Grant, and published the following articles:

• The Zoo Task: A novel metacognitive problemsolving task developed with a sample of African

American children from schools in high poverty communities (in the journal of the American

Psychological Association); • Learning to Live Together Harmoniously: a conceptual framework (in the Cambridge Journal of Education); • and The role of dissent, conflict, and open dialogue in learning to live together harmoniously (in the

Cambridge Journal of Education).

Dr. Roberto B. Sileo, the College’s Fellow and Director of Studies in Linguistics, was appointed as the Academic Director of the new MSt. in English Language Assessment, a blended learning programme delivered by the University’s Institute of Continuing Education in collaboration with different faculties and departments. Roberto also joined the Scientific Committee of the Global Council for Anthropological Linguistics at SOAS, University of London and the Editorial Board of Intercultural Pragmatics, a fully peer-reviewed journal for cross-disciplinary research in theoretical and applied pragmatics.

Dr Beth Singler, Junior Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence gave a research seminar at KU Leuven: “Blessed by the Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence and Religion in Online and Offline Discourse”; a public talk at Homerton entitled “Preparing for the Robopocalypse: the Real Dangers of Artificial Intelligence and Robots”; a talk at CHAIR on “The Dreams our Stuff is Made of: Trust, Agency and Super-agency”; and the Annual Digital Religion Research Award Lecture.

She was also announced as the 2021 Digital Religion Research Award Winner by the Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies.

Homerton Research Associate and Newton-Kavli Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, Dr Sunny Vagnozzi, has led research on a new study suggesting that unexplained results from the XENON1T experiment may have been caused by dark energy, and not the dark matter the experiment was designed to detect. The study was widely reported and is listed by Wikipedia as one of the most important scientific discoveries of 2021.

Sunny was awarded the Symmetry 2020 Young Investigator Award, in acknowledgement that his “research at the interface of cosmology, astrophysics, and particle physics has provided remarkable insight into the composition and fate of the universe”.

He also received the Alfredo di Braccio award, given by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei for his important contributions at the intersection of cosmology, astrophysics and particle physics. The prize was awarded by this year’s Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Giorgio Parisi n

Giorgio Parisi presents the Alfredo di Braccio award to Sunny Vagnozzi

Paintings for These Times: March 2020 – July 2021

Philip Stephenson, Fellow in Education

On 23 March 2020, Boris Johnson announced to the nation that there was to be a full lockdown commencing the next morning. There had been an initial lockdown-lite announced on 16 March but on the Sunday that followed immediately after, with the non-essential shops closed as well as pubs and restaurants, everyone headed for the park in their thousands.

This event gave me an idea that also gave me the opportunity to promote the wonderful Fitzwilliam Museum with which I’ve had a longstanding association. The idea of people in the park reminded me of a painting in the Fitz by French impressionist Georges Seurat entitled A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Using this as the springboard, I put together a 1500 word article that began with the news item and then went into a description and analysis of the painting. As I recall, the opening lines were:

“Well there’s nothing for it, the pubs are closed, the cinemas are closed, the coffee shops are closed – let’s head for the park … and so they do, in their droves.

And from Whitstable to the Wrekin, from Southwold to Snowdonia en masse they go - into the wide-open spaces for a communal close encounter. It’s the end of course, it couldn’t last and at 8.30 the following evening they hear their leader’s command.

From this evening I must give the British people a very simple instruction - you must stay at home.

In today’s painting, we have a lingering reminiscence of that last day of freedom, this time in a riverside park in Paris, 1884”.

A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte, by Georges Seurat

The Martyrdom of St Sebastian by Tomasso di Piero I concluded with some appropriate music choices linked to the relevant YouTube videos. This got circulated to staff, Fellows and the Retired Senior Members initially as a one-off. However, some positive feedback filtered in and, encouraged, I found another news item a few days later. This told of the locked-down people of the Italian city of Sienna singing to each other across the street from their balconies.

The ideal painting sprung to mind, a beautiful early renaissance altarpiece of an enthroned Virgin and Child by Sienese artist Lucca di Tomme. Made in 1368 at a time when Siena was being ravaged by the Peste Negra or Black Death it served as a source of salvation for those who attended the church where it was installed.

And so it went on: every few days, another news item, another painting so that by 19 July 2021 on what was supposedly Freedom Day, I’d reached number 100. This seemed an appropriate time to stop. It was also about time that I gave Clare Ryan in the Bursary a break as she was the one who had to circulate these for me.

Looking back, the series gives quite a good personal account, inadvertently becoming some sort of Journal of a Plague Year for contemporary times. As I peruse the final article (The Martyrdom of St Sebastian by Tomasso di Piero, since you ask) I see that I wrote in conclusion:

“So, at this point, we’ll call it a day. My every best wish to all you readers out there, and many thanks to those of you who have responded with such enthusiasm. However, my final words are simply an expression of heartfelt thanks to Leslie Stephenson, the man who introduced his seven-year-old little boy to the divine representations of truth and beauty that are to be found in art galleries everywhere”n