Cambridge and India
Cambridge-India Activity
April 2013
Professor Christoph Loch, Director, Cambridge Judge Business School, and Professor Jaideep Prabhu (Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business & Enterprise and Director of the Centre for India & Global Business) visited Delhi on 4-5 April for an executive education session on Leadership and Strategic Thinking Programme for a group of senior Indian civil servants from the Indian Administrative Service.
March 2013
The Jesus College choir visited Mumbai and Goa in March 2013 where they worked with disadvantaged communities bringing music to children living in slums in the city.
Prof CNR Rao, Head of the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister of India, and a team of distinguished delegates visited Cambridge to attend an EPSRC-funded workshop on Advanced Materials for Energy, held at St John's College on 21-22 March. The workshop was part of a collaboration between teams in Cambridge (led by Prof Sir Richard Friend), JNCASR and IISc in Bangalore.
February 2013
The Vice-Chancellor made a two-day visit to India as part of the largest ever UK trade delegation led by a British Prime Minister. The Vice-Chancellor announced that "We look forward to building on the relations established on the visit to further enhance our existing Cambridge-India partnership".
January 2013
On 31 January 2013, Professor Robert Glen (Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics, Department of Chemistry) delivered an invited lecture at the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Chemical Research Society of India's joint symposium at the Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi.
December 2012
Professor Sir Mike Gregory, Head of The Institute for Manufacturing, was presented with a Lifetime Achievement award at the Society of Management's annual conference held at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. The conference had a special track on food supply chains, which are the focus of a joint project between IfM and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Lucknow.
September 2012
As part of the Vice-Chancellor's visit to India, two major events took place aimed at strengthening Cambridge's long-standing ties with India and developing them for the twenty-first century.
On Monday 10 September 2012 the India-Cambridge Summit, India in the Global Age, took place at the Taj Mahal Hotel, New Delhi. Panels considered the future of the university, India's response to the contemporary global economic crisis, Delhi's century as India's captial city, social policy and development, art and cultural politics and ideas of Indian democracy.
The Vice-Chancellor also attended the meeting of the Bangalore-Cambridge Innovation Network, which took place at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, on 13 September 2012. The theme of the event was Science, Innovation and Entrepreneurship and it included discussions of frugal innovation, cleantech, life science, entrepreneurship, commercialisation and intellectual property and corporate innovation.
July 2012
2012 marks the third year in which the Cambridge Hamied Visiting Lectures Scheme, supported by generous donations from Dr Yusuf Hamied, has operated. The scheme supports professorial and senior level visits both to India by Cambridge academics and to Cambridge by Indian academics.
The first award announced for 2012 will support activity in India by Professor Sharon Peacock (Department of Medicine). Professor Peacock's visit, scheduled for October 2012, will build on her existing work with Dr Chiranjay Mukhopadhyay, Professor of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at Kasturba Medical College, Manipal University, Karnataka, as part of a collaborative consortium to map the bacterium responsible for melioidosis and produce a risk map for India. The visit will advance this work through a series of interactive seminars designed to provide practical training in environmental sampling methodology. This will allow the generation of preliminary data for a risk map for meliodosis across southern India and Professor Peacock will also provide assistance in the writing of the first review of meliodosis in India.
A future award will enable Dr Andreas Bender (Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics, Department of Chemistry) to visit India. Dr Bender will build on his existing links in India through a series of trips that will enable him to deliver lectures, further a number of new collaborations and undertake joint research projects. The award will allow Dr Bender to visit established research contacts including Professor Nagasuma Chandra (IISc), Dr Muthukumarasamy Karthikeyan (NCL Pune), Dr Tushar Chakraborty (Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow), and Professor Prasad Bharatam (NIPER).
Senior academics, from India or Cambridge, interested in applying to the scheme are encouraged to do so using the application form found here.
May 2012
A team headed by Professor Sir Richard Friend (Department of Physics) has won funding from the EPSRC for a project of 12 months' duration to develop and extend research collaboration between Cambridge and Bangalore in the areas of materials for energy and sustainable manufacturing. Both Cambridge and Bangalore have broad strengths in the underpinning basic science, and both are working to bring early-stage science rapidly through to engineering and to translation to manufacturing. The global objective of this project is to develop together structures that allow the essential 'bottom up' basic science to be placed within an institution-wide context, and to enable new coordinated research between the two institutions.
Five research projects will be built off some of the current one-on-one links between researchers in Cambridge and in Bangalore (the JNCASR and the IISc) in the general area of materials for energy and sustainable manufacturing. All projects will have significant exchange of researchers from UK to India and vice versa at various career levels. These interactions will be strengthened and broadened through the networking events and workshops in both countries. The five projects involve researchers at the Departments of Physics, Materials Science and Engineering in Cambridge, and cover the following topics: (a) Advanced Optoelectronics Materials Development, (b) Nanostructured Metal-Organic Frameworks, (c) Polythiophene-based Photovoltaics, (d) The optimisation of lightweight structural parts, based on mechanical tests in-situ inside a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), and (e) Sustainable Materials Processing of Strategic Metals.