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We are delighted to welcome five new members to our Steering Committee:
Postdoctoral Researcher Representatives
 Dr Felipe Karam Teixeira is a Group Leader in the Department of Genetics, where his lab focuses on focuses on the development of the germline.
 Dr Rachell Sanchez-Rivera is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology, working on the project What Happened to Mexican Eugenics: Racism and the Reproduction of the Nation.
Dr Lucy van de Wiel is a Research Associate in ReproSoc, where her research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of assisted reproductive technologies and their relation to contemporary conceptualisations and practices of ageing.
Postgraduate Student Representatives
 Dafni Lima is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Law, where her research focuses on the concept of parenthood and on how to regulate parent-child relations in cases of multiple parental ties.
Staša Stanković is a PhD candidate in the MRC Epidemiology Unit; her research is oriented towards identifying the mechanisms related to ovarian ageing, as well as their relevance for susceptibility of non-cancer ageing traits and disease outcomes.
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Save the date!
The Cambridge Reproduction SRI will hold its first annual meeting on Friday 2 July! We are still in the early stages of planning this meeting, but hope to involve as many members as possible. If you would like to join the planning team, please email Christina Rozeik.
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New SRI funding opportunities
We are delighted to announce that the Cambridge Reproduction SRI will be launching several new funding opportunities very soon! The schemes will be:
- Incubator fund, to provide seed funding for researchers at all levels
- Conceptions, for early career researchers to run creative, interdisciplinary projects
- Training and development fund, for early career researchers
- Events fund, for researchers at any level to run an SRI-supported event
We are now looking for volunteers from within the SRI to join the sub-committee for each of these funding schemes. Committee members will be involved with drawing up the terms of reference for each fund, assessing applications and allocating grants. We are especially keen to involve more senior researchers, but anyone with experience of managing similar funds would be welcomed.
If you are interested in joining one of these sub-committees, please email Christina Rozeik with a brief statement about your relevant experience, indicating which fund(s) you would be interested in. Please send expressions of interest by Monday 1 February.
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Call for abstracts: Early Researchers Seminar Series
The ERSS coordinators are issuing a call for additional abstracts for the second half of the series that will run from April to June 2021 on Zoom. Applications from early career researchers in Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities are especially encouraged.
If you are a PhD student or ECR based at the University of Cambridge or affiliated institutions researching reproduction and would be interested in presenting your research to members of the SRI, please send a brief abstract (150-200 words) of what you would like to present, your name, and affiliation to Dr Grace Jean Campbell (gc621@mrc-tox.cam.ac.uk) by Friday 19 February 2021.
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Male butterflies mark their mates with a repulsive smell during sex to ‘turn off’ other suitors
Butterflies have evolved to produce a strongly scented chemical in their genitals, which they leave behind after sex to deter other males from pursuing their mates. A team led by Professor Chris Jiggins in the Department of Zoology mapped production of the scented chemical compound to the genome of a species of butterfly called Heliconius melponene, and discovered a new gene. They also discovered that the chemical is identical to a chemical produced by flowers to attract butterflies. The study, published in PLOS Biology, shows that butterflies and flowers independently evolved to make the same chemical for different purposes.
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Mathematics explains how giant ‘whirlpools’ form in developing egg cells
Egg cells are among the largest cells in the animal kingdom. Unpropelled, a protein could take hours or even days to drift from one side of a forming egg cell to the other. Luckily, nature has developed a faster way: scientists have spotted cell-spanning whirlpools in the immature egg cells of animals such as mice, zebrafish and fruit flies. These vortices make cross-cell commutes take just a fraction of the time. Using mathematical modeling, researchers at the University of Cambridge and the Flatiron Institute say they now have an answer. The gyres result from the collective behavior of rodlike molecular tubes called microtubules that extend inward from the cells’ membranes.
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Family court decisions distorted by misuse of key research, say experts
Family courts are misunderstanding and misusing research around how children form close relationships with their caregivers, say an international group of experts. Dr Robbie Duschinsky said: “The decisions reached by family courts can have a major impact on a child’s life, but as we’ve seen, these decisions may be based on incorrect understanding and assumptions. By outlining potential issues and presenting principles to guide the decision-making process, we hope to better inform and hence empower courts to act in a child’s best interests.”
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Managing obstetric emergencies during COVID-19
The Healthcare Improvement Studies (THIS) Institute has launched new materials to support managing obstetric emergencies during COVID-19, including a new film plus an information sheet and infographic, which are freely available on the THIS website. It is hoped that these will be valuable and very timely resources for staff who are facing continued safety challenges when providing maternity care. They may have broader applicability to situations requiring rapid response in healthcare settings during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Freezing Fertility: oocyte cryopreservation and the gender politics of aging
Lucy van de Wiel
Published December 2020 by NYU Press, ISBN: 9781479817900, $35.00.
In Freezing Fertility, Lucy van de Wiel takes us inside the world of fertility preservation—with its egg freezing parties, contested age limits, proactive anticipations and equity investments—and shows how the popularisation of egg freezing has profound consequences for the way in which female fertility and reproductive ageing are understood, commercialised and politicised.
Beyond an individual reproductive choice for people who may want to have children later in life, Freezing Fertility explores how the rise of egg freezing also reveals broader cultural, political and economic negotiations about reproductive politics, gender inequities, age normativities and the financialisation of healthcare. Van de Wiel investigates these issues by analysing a wide range of sources—varying from sparkly online platforms to heart-breaking court cases and intimate autobiographical accounts—that are emblematic of each stage of the egg freezing procedure. By following the egg’s journey, Freezing Fertility examines how contemporary egg freezing practices both reflect broader social, regulatory and economic power asymmetries and repoliticise fertility and ageing in ways that affect the public at large. In doing so, the book explores how the possibility of egg freezing shifts our relation to the beginning and end of life.
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Women's medicine: sex, family planning and British female doctors in transnational perspective, 1920–70
Caroline Rusterholz
Published December 2020 by Manchester University Press, ISBN: 9781526149121, £25.
Women's Medicine highlights British female doctors' key contribution to the production and circulation of scientific knowledge around contraception, family planning and sexual disorders between 1920-70. It argues that women doctors were pivotal in developing a holistic approach to family planning and transmitting this knowledge across borders, playing a more prominent role in shaping scientific and medical knowledge than previously acknowledged.
The book locates women doctors' involvement within the changing landscape of national and international reproductive politics. Illuminating women doctors' agency in the male-dominated field of medicine, this book reveals their practical engagement with birth control and later family planning clinics in Britain, their participation in the development of the international movement of birth control and family planning and their influence on French doctors. Drawing on a wide range of archived and published medical materials, Caroline Rusterholz sheds light on the strategies British female doctors used and the alliances they made to put forward their medical agenda and position themselves as experts and leaders in birth control and family planning research and practice.
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Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith has been appointed as Acting Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research for one year from 1 January 2021. She takes over the role from Professor Chris Abell, who died suddenly in October. Anne has been an energetic and supportive Deputy Chair of the SRI since its inception, and we wish her all the best in her new role!
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Dr Yuliya Hilevych has left the University to take up a post as Senior Lecturer and Deputy Programme Leader in Sociology at the University of Lincoln. Yuliya remains affiliated with ReproSoc, and we look forward to staying in touch with her in the SRI!
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Nick Hopwood has been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to write a book, “The Many Births of the Test-Tube Baby”. Born following in vitro fertilization [[not “IVF”]] in 1978, Louise Brown made global news. Some five million children later, she won the Cambridge physiologist Robert Edwards a Nobel Prize.
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Yet Brown was far from the first "test-tube baby” to be announced and some experts initially doubted even this claim. To understand why her birth is nevertheless recognized as the founding achievement of reproductive biomedicine, it is important to consider the full web of communication: the constant interplay between journals and newspapers, television and press conferences, symposia and magazines. Conversely, a close analysis of claims to human in vitro fertilization will reveal how the operation of that web changed in the 1960s and 1970s, when commentators began to write about "science and the media". Nick's book will explain how shifting standards of evidence were caught up in new norms of publication that shape science to this day. Funding for three years from 1 September 2021 will pay for a replacement lecturer and research expenses.
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Congratulations to Dr Amanda Sferruzzi-Perri, who has won the Hans Sigrist Prize, which recognises an academic researcher or scientist who has done exceptional work in an annually selected research field, and who shows promise for more. Awarded by the Hans Sigrist Foundation at the University of Bern in Switzerland, she will receive 100,000 Swiss francs (around £82,000) to dedicate to her pioneering research in maternal-fetal communication during pregnancy, which is this year’s Prize field. You can read more about this award here.
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Congratulations also to Clare Pearson, a 4th-year student in Clinical Medicine, whose essay titled 'How could the introduction of the biobag influence the ethical and legal issues surrounding a fetus?' won the Institute of Medical Ethics' 2020 Student Competition. Clare's essay was also awarded the 2020 Stewart Rhind Science Writing Prize by the Society for Reproduction and Fertility.
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New network members
We were delighted to welcome the following new members to our SRI network in November and December 2020:
Ms Tara Asgarilaleh (Department of Sociology)
Dr Enrica Bianchi (Wellcome Sanger Institute)
Dr Grace Jean Campbell (MRC Toxicology Unit)
Dr Juan Castillo-Fernandez (Babraham Institute)
Mr Ali Giritlioglu (Department of Archaeology)
Ms Dafni Lima (Faculty of Law)
Mrs Konstantina Nikolakopoulou (Department of Pathology)
Dr Mathew van de Pette (MRC Toxicology Unit)
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Please send details of any forthcoming events to the SRI Coordinator, for inclusion on our website and in our newsletter. There is a full events listing on our website.
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Renaissance Eugenics
Tuesday 2 February, 5 - 6.30 pm
Online
Mackenzie Cooley (Hamilton College) will speak about her forthcoming book The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance. Part of HPS's Generation to Reproduction seminar series.
external event
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Early Researchers Seminar Series (ERSS)
Thursday 11 February, 1 - 2 pm
Online
This month's seminar will be presented by Staci Weiss (Psychology) and Amanda Rodgers (PDN). Pre-registration is essential. All are very welcome!
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Doctors v. Midwives: Caribbean Medical Encounters in the Age of Pronatal Abolition
Thursday 11 February, 4 - 5.30 pm
Online
Dr Sasha Turner (Johns Hopkins University) will be giving the 16th Cambridge Wellcome Lecture. Pre-registration is essential.
external event
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As Small as a Grain of Barley: The Bourbon State and the Caesarean Operation in New Spain, 1771-1810s
Tuesday 2 March, 5 - 6.30 pm
Online
The speaker is Elizabeth O'Brien (Johns Hopkins). Part of HPS's Generation to Reproduction seminar series.
external event
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Cambridge Reproduction SRI @ the Cambridge Festival 2021
We have three exciting events planned for the new Cambridge Festival! Booking opens at the beginning of February: more information on our website.
 Queer Conceptions: screening of Seahorse (2019)
Friday 26 March, 7.30 - 9 pm
Seahorse (2019) charts one trans man’s pioneering quest to fulfil an age-old desire: to start his own family. It is an intimate, audacious and lyrical story for the cinema about conception, pregnancy, birth and what makes us who we are.
 Set up for life
Monday 29 March, 6.30 - 7.45 pm
How does the environment in the womb programme us for diseases later in life – and even the health of our grandchildren? Our experts unpick how the lived experiences of our parents and grandparents affect us before we are born.
 Queer Conceptions: families in the 21st century
Tuesday 30 March, 7.30 - 9 pm
Same-sex adoption, trans pregnancies and advances in reproductive biology have made our understanding of ‘family’ more diverse and inclusive than ever. Join us to discuss what queer parenthood means for the 21st century.
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Critical Conversations on Reproductive Health/Care: Past, Present, and Future
external event
3 - 7 February 2021
The COVID Vaccine: A Shot in the Arm for Fertility Treatment?
external event
4 February 2021, 5.30 - 7 pm
‘Women’s Medicine. Sex, Family Planning and British Female Doctors’
external event
9 February 2021, 5 - 7 pm
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Repro Grads Networking Event
external event
15 February 2021, 2 - 3.30 pm
Early Researchers Seminar Series (ERSS)
11 March 2021
Synthetic Gametes and Germline Development for Science and Society
23 March 2021
Cambridge Reproduction SRI annual meeting
2 July 2021
SAVE THE DATE!
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Restricted call: Rothschild Foundation Post Doctoral Fellowships in Jewish Studies
Internal deadline: 1 February 2021
Jewish Studies encompasses the study of many different aspects of Jewish civilization, including but not limited to architecture, languages, literature, liturgy and ritual, philosophy and theology, as well as the history and sociology of the Jewish people. The Foundation particularly welcomes applications from those engaged in the study of contemporary Jewish life in Europe from a social science perspective and those whose proposals involve digital humanities research techniques.
More information on the call can be found here.
Restricted Call: Leverhulme Research Centres
Internal deadline: 2 February 2021
The Leverhulme Trust has pre-announced the 2021 call for the Leverhulme Research Centres, to open in January 2021.
The aim of this call is to encourage new and transformative approaches that may establish or reshape a field of study and the understanding of a significant contemporary topic. The Trust has a reputation for encouraging higher-risk research which is often therefore fundamental or curiosity-driven – so-called 'blue skies' – and pan-disciplinary. The expectation is that Centres will draw upon a range of disciplinary perspectives and expertise, and applicants are invited to be bold in compiling their bids.
Restricted Call: Rosetrees Trust Interdisciplinary Award
Internal deadline: 21 February 2021
Applications are now open for the Rosetrees Trust Interdisciplinary Award 2021 to stimulate collaborative research between Medicine and Engineering, including the field of healthcare technology. The aim of the interdisciplinary award is to foster innovative research that is at the interface between disciplines, stimulating new research collaborations that will result in breakthroughs with real potential to improve human health.
Proposals are invited for projects with a value of up to £300,000 over 3 years, which can be used to support any aspect of the proposed research.
Internal Call: BBSRC Impact Acceleration Account pump-priming grants
Internal deadline: 1 March 2021, 4pm
The University of Cambridge has been awarded an Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) by the BBSRC to facilitate the impact agenda, including forging new collaborations with industry and strengthening external non-academic collaborations. Funding is available for pump-priming projects to support knowledge exchange and early-stage commercialisation projects to progress research outputs and outcomes to the point at which further translational funding can be sought. Awards of up to £40,000 per application are available.
Funding is open to Principal Investigators employed within a University department who currently hold or have previously held BBSRC funding.
Restricted call: Challenge-led KEN Pump Priming Fund
Internal deadline: 9 March 2021, 4pm
The eighth round of the Knowledge Exchange Network (KEN) Pump Priming Funding Scheme is now open for application, and KEN colleagues are invited to apply for up to £20k of ‘pump priming’ funding for challenge-led activities, to support collaborative research between the University and industry.
Applications should be submitted by KEN colleagues as the lead applicant(s), so if you are interested in submitting an application to this fund, please contact Christina Rozeik in the first instance.
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CRASSH Conference Fund
The CRASSH annual conference and workshop programme is a highly regarded series of events, showcasing interdisciplinary research across the arts, social sciences, and humanities. Attracting academics and practitioners from across the globe, CRASSH conferences provide a platform for developing collaborations, holding stimulating and fruitful discussions and finding new ways of working together.
Funding of up to £2,500, plus in-kind support, is available to Faculty, College Members and Graduate Students of the University of Cambridge. The competition for conference support in 2021-22 is now open. Applications will close on 2 February 2021.
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Promoting Cambridge's COVID-19 research to the wider world
The Research Communications team in the University’s Office of External Affairs and Communications has been working hard this year writing articles to promote the University of Cambridge’s COVID-19-related research, and researchers, to the outside world.
Many of these articles have led to national and international media coverage for the researchers in newspapers, websites, on radio and TV, and are helping to inform discussions to make progress in tackling the pandemic.
Researcher profiles: https://www.cam.ac.uk/topics/tackling-covid-19
Research stories: https://www.cam.ac.uk/topics/covid-19
If your research is helping to tackle any aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact, please get in touch with the Research Communications Team at researchcommunications@admin.cam.ac.uk to discuss potentially promoting it to a wider audience.
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'Does Blood Run Thicker Than Water?': call for collaborators
Help us develop a short film about family, biology and relatedness!
We (Kate Shaw, Centre for Family Research) and Naomi Moris, Genetics) have been awarded Conceptions funding by the Cambridge Reproduction SRI for our project Does Blood Run Thicker Than Water?. As part of this project, we will co-create a short film exploring the complexity of perceptions and preconceptions of the role of biology in embryo development.
We are now looking for collaborators to help us develop ideas for the film. We would love to hear from researchers in any field, but those from the biomedical sciences would be particular welcome.
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Job opportunities in Cambridge
Research Associate: Genetic interrogation of epigenetic pathways (fixed-term)
Deadline for applications: 7 February 2021
Postdoctoral Fellow, Vento-Tormo Group (Sanger Institute)
Deadline for applications: 9 February 2021
Staff Scientist, Vento-Tormo Group (Sanger Institute)
Deadline for applications: 16 February 2021
Unestablished Lecturer in History of Modern Medicine (fixed-term)
Deadline for applications: 28 February 2021
University Lecturer in Medical Anthropology
Deadline for applications: 5 March 2021
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Please send details of recent publications relating to any aspect of reproduction to the SRI Coordinator, for inclusion in our newsletter.
Hanna H Allerkamp, Alys R Clark, Tet Chuan Lee, Terry K Morgan, Graham J Burton and Joanna L James, ‘Something old, something new: digital quantification of uterine vascular remodelling and trophoblast plugging in historical collections provides new insight into adaptation of the utero-placental circulation’, Human Reproduction: deaa303 (online first, 2020). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/deaa303.
Gianluca Amadei, Kasey Y.C. Lau, Joachim De Jonghe, Carlos W. Gantner, Berna Sozen, Christopher Chan, Meng Zhu, Christos Kyprianou, Florian Hollfelder and Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, ‘Inducible stem-cell-derived embryos capture mouse morphogenetic events in vitro’, Developmental Cell 56 (online first; 2021). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.devcel.2020.12.004.
Susan Imrie and Susan Golombok, ‘Impact of new family forms on parenting and child development’, Annual Review of Developmental Psychology 2: 295–316 (2020). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-devpsych-070220-122704.
Eric Jauniaux and Graham J. Burton, ‘Implantation and placentation’. In: Gray’s Anatomy, 42nd Ed. (ed. S Standring), 178–187 (Elsevier, 2020).
Amarpreet Kaur, ‘The implications of the gender-based prohibitions relating to human germline genome editing in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act’, Reproductive Biomedicine Online (in press, 2020). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rbmo.2020.11.009.
A. Marphatia, N. Saville, D. Manandhar, M. Cortina Borja, A. Reid, and J. Wells, ‘Independent associations of women’s age at marriage and first pregnancy with their height in rural lowland Nepal’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology (early view, 2020). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.24168.
Noémie Merleau-Ponty, ‘In-vitro gametogenesis on YouTube – Epistemological performances from Strasbourg and Los Angeles’, Reproductive Biomedicine and Society Online 11: 96–103 (2020). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rbms.2020.12.001.
Vicente Perez-Garcia, Pablo Lopez-Jimenez, Graham J Burton, Ashley Moffett, Margherita Y. Turco and Myriam Hemberger, ‘BAP1/ASXL complex modulation regulates Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition during trophoblast differentiation and invasion’, bioRXiv (preprint, 2020). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.01.405902.
Robert Pralat, Fiona Burns, Jane Anderson and Tristan J. Barber, 'Can HIV‐positive gay men become parents? How men living with HIV and HIV clinicians talk about the possibility of having children', Sociology of Health & Illness (early view, November 2020). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13218.
Caroline Rusterholz, Women's medicine: sex, family planning and British female doctors in transnational perspective, 1920–70 (University of Manchester Press, 2020).
Brian Sloan, ‘The “chimera” of parenthood’, Modern Law Review (early view, 10 December 2020). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12602.
Jake R. Thomas, Anna Appios, Xiaohui Zhao, Roksana Dutkiewicz, Maria Donde, Colin Y.C. Lee, Praveena Naidu, Christopher Lee, Joana Cerveira, Bing Liu, Florent Ginhoux, Graham Burton, Russell S. Hamilton, Ashley Moffett, Andrew Sharkey and Naomi McGovern, ‘Phenotypic and functional characterization of first-trimester human placental macrophages, Hofbauer cells’, Journal of Experimental Medicine 218 (1): e20200891 (2020). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1084/jem.20200891.
Lucy van de Wiel, Freezing Fertility: oocyte cryopreservation and the gender politics of aging (NYU Press, 2020).
Sijia Yao, Jorge Lopez-Tello and Amanda N. Sferruzzi-Perri, ‘Developmental programming of the female reproductive system—a review’, Biology of Reproduction: ioaa232 (online first, 2020). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/biolre/ioaa232.
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