Cambridge Contributors

Bill Adams has worked for over 30 years on problems of conservation and development in Sub-Saharan Africa. He is Moran Professor of Conservation and Development in the Department of Geography at Cambridge, and has a particular interest in both the evolution of ideas in conservation and resource development, and what happens when these are applied. Current research includes the conservation of nature in landscapes extensively transformed by human action; the political ecology of landscape-scale conservation; the institutional politics of large-scale ecological restoration; and ecosystems services and the conservation imagination.

Bill has written and edited a number of books on conservation, most recently Trade-offs in Conservation: deciding what to save (with Nigel Leader-Williams and Robert J Smith; Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford 2010), and Recreational Hunting, Conservation and Rural Livelihoods: science and practice (with Barney Dickson and Jonathan Hutton; Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). The third edition of his Green Development: environment and sustainability in a developing world (Routledge, London) came out in 2008.

Bill is a Trustee of ResourceAfrica and of Fauna & Flora International. In 2004, he was awarded the Busk Medal by the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers.

Julian leads the Low Carbon and Materials Processing research group in the Department of Engineering at Cambridge. His work spans innovative materials processing technologies and low carbon manufacturing. Currently, the group is developing innovative processes for computer-controlled metal forming and for direct re-use of materials, and exploring the systems and technologies of material and energy efficiency. Projects include: the development of second-generation incremental sheet forming processes with Ford, Novelis, Metal Spinners and Cummins; technologies for toner print removal to allow paper-reuse with Xerox; identification and evaluation of options for future carbon emissions reductions with Unilever; and a global study of energy efficiency options.

After gaining his PhD and an MBA from Imperial College, Julian spent the first 10 years of his career working on the modelling and control of hot and cold strip rolling for the Alcoa Technical Centre in Pittsburgh. He became a lecturer in mechanical engineering in 1996 and moved to Cambridge in 2000. In 2009 he received a £1.5m EPSRC Leadership Fellowship grant to run a major four-year collaborative project on achieving global carbon emissions targets.

Julian is also joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Materials Processing Technology and Vice-Chairman of the Scientific Technical Committee on metal forming of the International Academy of Production Engineering (CIRP). He is a Lead Author of the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with a focus on Mitigation in Industry.

Professor David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, and a Senior Scientist in the MRC Biostatistics Unit. His background in medical statistics, particularly the use of Bayesian methods in clinical trials, health technology assessment and drug safety, also led him to head the statistical team during the Bristol Royal Infirmary Inquiry and give evidence in the Shipman Inquiry. He has acted as a consultant to a number of public and private organisations including pharmaceutical companies.

At the University, David leads a small team attempting to improve the way in which the quantitative aspects of risk and uncertainty are discussed in society. He undertakes a wide range of outreach activities, including talks for schools through the Millennium Mathematics Project and Royal Institution Masterclasses, guest columns for The Times and The Guardian, and appearances on radio and television. In 2009–10 he led a series of interdisciplinary seminars on understanding risk and uncertainty, exploring the advantages and limitations of formal models for prediction in the light of pervasive societal and scientific uncertainty. His website Understanding Uncertainty provides a critical commentary on portrayals of risk and statistics in the media.

David was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005 and awarded an OBE in 2006 for his services to medical statistics.