Glen Clack, Lecturer in Faculty of Health and Life Sciences Department at University of Exeter Medical School, shared on LinkedIn:
“A declaration of interest at the outset, since these things are best got out of the way early: I have held an honorary chair in translational medicine at Sheffield since 2016, so I am not what you would call a disinterested observer.
Sheffield is establishing a Sheffield Centre for Cancer Research.
The intent, as I read it, is not another letterhead. It is strategic leadership for a field with an unhappy habit of fragmenting along faculty lines, each silo gerrymandered by the accidents of funding history rather than by anything resembling scientific logic. The Centre’s own formulation is that Sheffield should be more than the sum of its parts: a coherent external face, and collaboration that does not depend on two investigators happening to share a corridor.
Three things about it strike me as sensible.
It is hosted by the Faculty of Health but explicitly not confined to it; membership is open to any school, any faculty, clinical and non-clinical, students included. It is led by people who do the work, with the Cancer Research Executive under Jim Catto and Penny Ottewell. And it is aimed squarely at partnership with organizations beyond the university, which is where translational ideas either mature or quietly expire.
It launches internally on 7 September; the external launch, with partners, follows at the annual Sheffield Cancer Research Away Day next March.
Detail here for those who want it. Worth watching. Good research has never been Sheffield’s difficulty; making it visible as a whole is the harder trick, and that is what this is for.”
Other articles featuring Glen Clack on OncoDaily.