Message from the Vice Chancellor
Cambridge has been welcoming Indian students for 150 years, with steadily increasing numbers in recent times. More than 1,000 Indian students have received financial support from Cambridge in the past two decades. The interests of these students span the academic spectrum: business and economics, the physical and biological sciences, medicine, law, history, and languages. Students flourish in the Cambridge environment, working one-on-one with teachers who are world-class scholars and scientists, and their educational experience is frequently transformative.
"In many ways, Cambridge made me". This recognition of the transformative quality of education at Cambridge, came from the Prime Minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh, when he spoke at the ceremony awarding him a Cambridge Honorary Doctorate in October 2006.
Increasingly, boundaries at Cambridge exist to be crossed! Let me explain. Interdisciplinary teaching and research flourish, from the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities to Cambridge Neuroscience, launched this autumn. The Cambridge Neuroscience network brings together over 500 academics from 31 departments � including philosophers and physiologists, economists and engineers.
But there are other kinds of boundary-crossing activity too. The University and the private sector have collaborated for 40 years, producing the Cambridge Phenomenon, or �Silicon Fen�. Nokia, Kodak, and Genzyme all decided to locate major research labs in and around Cambridge in the last two years, joining Microsoft Research, Schlumberger, Toshiba, and Hitachi. I am proud that Cambridge has attracted more venture capital to its start-up businesses in the last five years than any other university in the world except one � Stanford � and that Cambridge has the highest per capita venture capital investment in Europe. In short, Cambridge crackles with entrepreneurial excitement and activity as new discoveries are put to use for the benefit of society � right alongside fundamental research opening up new frontiers of understanding.
Boundary-crossing in the geographical sense is at the heart of this website, and it is certainly an ever more common hallmark of activities at Cambridge. No single nation, let alone a single university, can solve many of the world�s great challenges. Whether the issue is climate change, religious conflict, poverty, or contagious disease, the importance of working and collaborating internationally grows stronger by the day. You will find in this website examples of how Cambridge and India work together � and I am confident that we shall establish yet more productive partnerships in the future.