University of Cambridge

In the final episode of our season, Science Advice & Government, host Dr Rob Doubleday is joined by Sharon Peacock, Director of the COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) Consortium and Professor of Public Health and Microbiology in the Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge, and James Wood, Head of Cambridge Vet School and infectious disease epidemiologist.

The episode explores how science advice has been used in the UK's response to the current COVID-19 pandemic and what lessons can be learnt to help prepare for future pandemics.

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Season 5 is produced in partnership with the research project Expertise Under Pressure, Centre for the Humanities and Social Change at the University of Cambridge.

CSaP: The Science & Policy Podcast is hosted by CSaP Executive Director Dr Rob Doubleday, and is edited and produced by CSaP Communications Coordinator Jessica Foster. Research for this series is supported by CSaP Policy Researcher Nick Cosstick.

Podcast theme music by Transistor.fm. Learn how to start a podcast here.

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Resources relevant to this episode (click on the below):

COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium. COG-Train. Exercise Cygnus.

Sign up to our CSaP newsletter by clicking here.

How have scientists contributed to UK government decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic? What are the structures and mechanisms that have drawn science into the policy process? In today’s episode we’re exploring what the past two years have been like for the scientists involved in government and SPI-M, the experts providing the advice based on COVID modelling and epidemiology.

In today’s episode, host Dr Rob Doubleday is joined by Julia Gog, Professor of Mathematical Biology at the University of Cambridge, who has been heavily involved throughout the pandemic within SPI-M, the specialist advisory group on modelling pandemics which feeds into the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) process. Plus, Sir John Aston, Harding Professor of Statistics in Public Life, University of Cambridge. He was Chief Scientific Adviser in the Home Office from 2017-2020 and during the COVID pandemic was heavily involved in SAGE and advising the Secretary of State in the Home Office.

As part of our series on science advice and government, we’re looking ahead to the public inquiry into the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic this spring. We hope the episodes will highlight lessons on what worked well, how scientific advice has helped governments make difficult decisions, and how this process can be improved for the future.

Season 5 is produced in partnership with the research project Expertise Under Pressure, Centre for the Humanities and Social Change at the University of Cambridge.

CSaP: The Science & Policy Podcast is hosted by CSaP Executive Director Dr Rob Doubleday, and is edited and produced by CSaP Communications Coordinator Jessica Foster. Research for this series is supported by CSaP Policy Researcher Nick Cosstick.

Podcast theme music by Transistor.fm. Learn how to start a podcast here.

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Resources relevant to this episode:

Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M): https://bit.ly/35G8jgt Chief Scientific Advisors: https://bit.ly/3KzNPEY Scientific evidence supporting the government response to coronavirus (COVID-19): https://bit.ly/3JhBaq1

Sign up to our CSaP newsletter by clicking here.

This special edition of Crossing Channels was organised in response to the invasion of Ukraine that began in February 2022. It covers how the Ukrainian people, policymakers, and government have responded during the first ten days of the war, its geopolitical context and implications, and the scale of the information war taking place, within both Ukraine and Russia.

This episode is hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones, and features expert guests Nataliia Shapoval from the Kyiv School of Economics, Horacio Larreguy from the IAST, and Ayse Zarakol from the University of Cambridge.

Listen to this episode on your preferred podcast platform.

Episode 6 transcript

For more information about the conflict, the BBC is running a live webpage with up-to-date coverage of the war here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-europe-60532634

The Kyiv School of Economics has on its website a summary of ways you can support it and Ukraine during the crisis: https://kse.ua/. This includes their lecture marathon to enhance Ukrainian intellectual sovereignty, along with ways to donate and apply political pressure.

For more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk and www.iast.fr/.

Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse.

Audio production by Steve Hankey.

Podcast editing by Annabel Manley

More information about our guests:

Nataliia Shapoval is the Vice President for Policy Research and Director of the Center of Excellence in Procurement at the Kyiv School of Economics in Ukraine. She worked on policy research projects on public health’s cost and resource allocation, and on youth unemployment in Ukraine and Europe. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of Vox Ukraine, and a contributor to the Ukraine reform monitoring project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Ayse Zarakol is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests are at the intersection of historical sociology and international relations, focussing on East-West relations. She is the author of two books, her first being After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (2011) which covers the integration of defeated non-Western powers into the international system. Her second, Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, which looks at an alternative global history for international relations focussed on (Eur)asia, was released in March 2022. This book is available for purchase here: https://tinyurl.com/2p9xddxp

Horacio Larreguy is an Associate Professor of Economics and Political Science at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM), and is currently a visiting researcher at the Toulouse School of Economics and IAST. His research interests are in political accountability and voting behaviour, including the importance of information for political accountability. More recently, he has worked on projects on misinformation and the Covid-19 infodemic.

The UK is currently one of the most regionally unequal countries in the developed world. The government's White Paper on Levelling Up sets out 12 “missions” to increase economic opportunities across all regions.

The UK is far from the first country to try and “level up” regional areas. Countries including France, Germany and China are also making efforts to tackle similar regional inequalities.

But just how easy is it to tackle regional economic imbalances for levelling up to work?

Rory Cellan-Jones talks to Sylvain Chabé-Ferret from the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, and Professor Michael Kenny and Dame Fiona Reynolds from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy about just how far public policies can really go to address regional inequalities.

Listen to this episode on your preferred podcast platform including Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Episode 5 transcript

The Crossing Channels podcast series is produced by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy and IAST.

Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse #CrossingChannels

Audio production by Steve Hankey.

Podcast editing by Annabel Manley

More about our guests:

Professor Michael Kenny is the inaugural director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, and leads its Policy and Engagement programme on ‘Place’. He is leading research projects on left-behind communities, social infrastructure and devolution, and is writing a book about the UK’s constitutional future.

Dame Fiona Reynolds DBE is the Chair of the Management Board for the Bennett Institute, and chair of the National Audit Office and Chair of the Governing Council of the Royal Agricultural University.

Dr Sylvain Chabé-Ferret is Assistant Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics, Research Fellow at Inrae and member of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Toulouse. He specialises in the econometrics of causal inference with applications to the evaluation of Payments for Environmental Services and of Job Training Programs. Sylvain has also set The Social Science Knowledge Accumulation Initiative (SKY), which aims to summarise evidence in social science, mainly via meta-analyses.

www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk

www.iast.fr

This episode discusses the potential of digital technologies to change infrastructure priorities in developing countries. Experts from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, Cambridge, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) consider what counts as infrastructure, whether ‘leapfrogging’ is a useful term, emerging digital divides, and the impact of foreign (particularly American and Chinese) tech giants in this space.

This fourth episode in the Crossing Channels podcast series is hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones, and features guest experts Dr Stephanie Diepeveen (Bennett Institute), Professor Stéphane Straub (IAST), and Dr Rehema Msulwa (Bennett Institute).

Listen on your preferred podcast platform including Spotify and Apple podcasts.

Episode 4 transcript

The Crossing Channels podcast series is produced by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy and IAST.

Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse #CrossingChannels

Audio production by Steve Hankey.

Podcast editing by Annabel Manley

More about our guests:

Dr Stephanie Diepeveen is a research associate at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, as well as a research fellow at Overseas Development Institute. Her research focuses on digitalisation and politics. She recently published the book, "Searching for a New Kenya: Politics and Social Media on the Streets of Mombasa", which investigates the democratic value of street-based and online public debates.

Dr Rehema Msulwa is a Research Associate at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. Her research is on the intersection of policy and the design and delivery of capital-intensive infrastructure projects. She has engaged and worked with government bodies, research institutes and consultancies in several countries, including the UK, India, Nigeria, and South Africa.

Stéphane Straub is Professor of Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics, where he is the head of the Behaviour, Institutions and Development group. He works on issues of infrastructure, procurement, and more generally institutional development in the context of developing countries. He has held academic positions in the US, the UK and France, has been a lead Economist with the Sustainable Development Practice Group at the World Bank in Washington DC (2016-17), and is a consultant for several international institutions such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the European Union, and the Asian Development Bank among others. He is currently president of the European Development Network (EUDN).

Hope versus fear in artificial intelligence

In this third episode of Crossing Channels, experts from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, Cambridge, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), discuss the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), including why we need to care about it, who is responsible for it, and whether there’s a double standard for AI and humans.

Host Rory Cellan-Jones talks to Dr Jean-Francois Bonnefon and Professor Daniel Chen from IAST, and Professor Diane Coyle from the Bennett Institute.

Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

Episode 3 transcript

For more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk and www.iast.fr/.

Tweet us your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse.

Audio production by Steve Hankey.

Podcast editing by Annabel Manley

More about our guests

Dr Jean-Francois Bonnefon is the Scientific Director at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), and a Research Director for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is also the President of the European Commission expert group on the ethics of driverless mobility, Head of the Artificial Intelligenve and Society programme of the Toulouse School of Economics Digital Center, and Chair of Moral AI at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute. His research interests are decision-making and moral preferences, and the applications of this in the ethics of self-driving cars and other intelligent machines.

Professor Daniel Chen is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, a Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics, and a Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). His research interests include AI and the Rule of Law, with an overarching focus on normative commitments and the justice system. He is also Lead Principal Investigator for the World Bank DE JURE (Data and Evidence for Justice Reform) programme, which aims to update how legitimacy and equality in the justice system is measured and interpreted.

Professor Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. She co-directs the Bennett Institute for Public Policy where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Diane is also a Director of The Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, an expert adviser to the National Infrastructure Commission, and Senior Independent Member of the ESRC Council. Her research interests cover economic statistics, the digital economy, competition policy and digital markets, and the economics of new technologies.

Rory Cellan- Jones (host) is a former technology correspondent for the BBC. His 40 years in journalism saw him take a particular interest in the impact of the internet and digital technology on society and business. He has written multiple books, including his latest “Always On” which was published in 2021.

Why have economists ignored nature for so long - and now they have discovered it, are they measuring it correctly?

This episode tackles the issue of incorporating nature into economic measurements. These include whether there is still a trade-off between economic growth and the environment, what is still missing from economic measures, and how to get academics and policymakers to work together.

This episode is hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones, and features expert guests Dr Matthew Agarwala and Dr Cristina Peñasco from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, and Nicolas Treich, from the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse.

Episode 2 transcript

For more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk and www.iast.fr/.

Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse.

Audio production by Steve Hankey.

Podcast editing by Annabel Manley

More about our guests:

Dr Matthew Agawala is an economist at the Bennett Institute, and project lead for their Wealth Economy project. He is interested in wealth-based approaches to measuring and delivering sustainability, wellbeing, and productivity. This is motivated by the belief that 21st century progress cannot be described by 20th century statistics.

Dr Cristina Peñasco is a University Lecturer in Public Policy at POLIS, a Centre Fellow at Centre for the Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (C-EENRG) hosted at the Department of Land Economy, and an associate researcher of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. Her research brings together work in environmental economics, innovation policy and energy economics in green and energy efficiency technologies, with a focus on the policy instruments enabling the transition to low-carbon economy.

Nicolas Treich is a research associate at Toulouse School of Economics and INRAE (French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment). His work focuses on decision theory, environmental economics, and, more recently, on animal welfare.

Why has it become so hard to run government? The role of civil servants and decision-making in society today.

This episode tackles the issue of running government in the modern age. These include how the public perceptions of the government have changed, why there are so many civil service reforms, and what governments learn during crises.

This episode is hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones, and features expert guests Dennis Grube, Mohamed Saleh, and Catherine Haddon.

For more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk, and www.iast.fr/.

Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse.

Audio production by Steve Hankey

Podcast editing by Annabel Manley

More information about our guests:

Dennis Grube has been a researcher on Politics and Public Policy at the University since 2016, and was previously an Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow with the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of Tasmania. His research interests are around political decision-making, the role of civil servants in that and how that then passes through to institutional memory.

Mohamed Saleh is a Professor of Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics, and a member of the IAST. His research interests are in economic history, and the economic history of the Middle East and North Africa in particular.

Catherine Haddon is the resident historian at the Institute for Government. Catherine also leads the Institute's work on changes of government, ministers and the workings of the constitution, and heads the Institute's professional development programme of ministers and opposition parties.

In today's uncertain world, the sixth episode of our series on science advice and government, explores how governments can better understand and respond to unforeseeable and challenging extreme risk scenarios, such as cyber hacking, biological hazards, climate change, and future pandemics, following the COVID-19 outbreak.

Host Dr Rob Doubleday is joined by:

-Lord Martin Rees, the UK's Astronomer Royal, a Cosmologist and Member of the House of Lords, which in December 2021 published the report, ‘Preparing for Extreme Risks, Building a Resilient Society’, which tackled some of the questions about how governments learn, react to, and prepare for extreme risks.

-Suzanne Raine, an Affiliate Lecturer at the Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge. She was formerly a civil servant and was Head of the UK's Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre from 2015-2017.

-Dr Kristen MacAskill, an Assistant Professor in Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Her work is on the governance and resilience of infrastructure and she has spent years in industry looking at disaster response.

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Season 5 is produced in partnership with the research project Expertise Under Pressure, Centre for the Humanities and Social Change at the University of Cambridge.

CSaP: The Science & Policy Podcast is hosted by CSaP Executive Director Dr Rob Doubleday, and is edited and produced by CSaP Communications Coordinator Jessica Foster. Research for this series is supported by CSaP Policy Researcher Nick Cosstick.

Podcast theme music by Transistor.fm. Learn how to start a podcast here.

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Resources relevant to this episode:

- House of Lords Risk Assessment and Risk Planning’s Report: Preparing for Extreme Risks: Building a Resilient Society

-Cabinet Office Guidance: Risk Assessment: How the Risk of Emergencies in the UK is Assessed

-National Risk Register 2020

-Introduction to the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre

- Lord Martin Rees’ book about existential risks: On the Future: Prospects for Humanity

In the fifth episode of our new series on science advice and government, host Dr Rob Doubleday discusses how SAGE and modelling advice were used during the Nepal Earthquake in April 2015. He's joined by James Jackson, an Earthquake Geologist and Professor in Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and Professor Emily So, an Artchitectural Engineer and Director of the Cambridge University Centre for Risk in the Built Environment (CURBE). Both James and Emily work on earthquakes, what causes them and what damage they do.

Season 5 is produced in partnership with the research project Expertise Under Pressure, Centre for the Humanities and Social Change at the University of Cambridge.

CSaP: The Science & Policy Podcast is hosted by CSaP Executive Director Dr Rob Doubleday, and is edited and produced by CSaP Communications Coordinator Jessica Foster. Research for this series is supported by CSaP Policy Researcher Nick Cosstick.

Podcast theme music by Transistor.fm. Learn how to start a podcast here.

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Resources relevant to this episode:

Summary Note of the SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) meeting on the Nepal Earthquake, 27 April 2015 Scientific background on PAGER (Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response): https://on.doi.gov/359qgn4 NSET (Earthquake Safe Communities in Nepal): https://www.nset.org.np/nset2012/ Final Report of the Earthquakes Without Frontiers project: https://bit.ly/3htYB37 Global Earthquake Model: https://www.globalquakemodel.org/ World Housing Encyclopaedia: http://www.world-housing.net/ Robin Spence and Emily So’s book Why Do Buildings Collapse in Earthquakes: Building for Safety in Seismic Areas.