All courses

Cambridge Admissions Office have organised a series of briefing sessions in the coming weeks aimed at Schools Liaison Officers, Faculty/Department Outreach Staff, and any academics and staff members who will communicate with potential students.

This will be an informative session detailing examples of good practice in monitoring and evaluation, specifically related to outreach projects including those funded by the Widening Participation Project Fund. The session will cover general good practice in monitoring and evaluation, as well as featuring presentations from previous outreach projects detailing specific examples of monitoring and evaluation in practice.

The Project Management Community of Practice brings you project management topics in bite sized chunks. Listen to your colleagues from across Collegiate Cambridge discuss all things project management. Click the links below to listen to the podcast:

Podcast 1: Meet the Core Group - Hosted by Ellie Wolmark from the CRUK Cambridge Centre, the Core Team tell you who they are, what their role is and discuss why they joined the CoP.

Podcast 2: Interesting Routes into Project Management part 1 - There is no one route into project management. Tori Helmer and Heather Biggs tell us their stories and give insights into their career journeys.

Podcast 3: Interesting Routes into Project Management part 2 - The second part of this podcast features Bethan Everson and Katie Light telling their stories.

Podcast 4: An Introduction to Communications - Katie Edwards and Craig Brierley give a fantastic overview of what comms entails, and how you can use it within a project for maximum impact.

Podcast 5: An Introduction to Stakeholder Management - Greg Strachan and Sally Measures give their take on Stakeholder Management within a project.

Podcast 6: An introduction to Retrospectives - Holly Cox and Signe Jensen talk about what retrospectives mean within project management.

Podcast 7: Data Management - Carrie Brennan talks about data management within a project.

Imagine your manager has asked you to achieve a certain goal by a particular time, with or without a budget, and you'll need to involve multiple groups of people. Where do you start and how do you create a project framework to set yourself up for success?

What are the key elements for a successful project?

Join us for the basics of how to organise a simple project- a chance to hear advice and guidance from experienced project managers and ask your questions

Look forward to seeing you there!

Behaviour management training for outreach staff delivered by the Cambridge Admissions Office.

This training focuses on managing the needs and behaviour of both the group you and individual pupils. It will provide you with techniques and strategies you can use when delivering sessions to students. In this session, you’ll explore how your own behaviour influences your students’, and learn how to control your emotional responses when you’re interacting in the classroom. You’ll discover the latest techniques in classroom management and develop your capability to achieve consistency.

The training will take place in A329 - Counselling Service (Student Services Centre).

Propensity score matching (PSM) is a technique that simulates an experimental study in an observational data set in order to estimate a causal effect. In an experimental study, subjects are randomly allocated to “treatment” and “control” groups; if the randomisation is done correctly, there should be no differences in the background characteristics of the treated and non-treated groups, so any differences in the outcome between the two groups may be attributed to a causal effect of the treatment. An observational survey, by contrast, will contain some people who have been subject to the “treatment” and some people who have not, but they will not have not been randomly allocated to those groups. The characteristics of people in the treatment and control groups may differ, so differences in the outcome cannot be attributed to the treatment. PSM attempts to mimic the experimental situation trial by creating two groups from the sample, whose background characteristics are virtually identical. People in the treatment group are “matched” with similar people in the control group. The difference between the treatment and control groups in this case should may therefore more plausibly be attributed to the treatment itself. PSM is widely applied in many disciplines, including sociology, criminology, economics, politics, and epidemiology. The module covers the basic theory of PSM, the steps in the implementation (e.g. variable choice for matching and types of matching algorithms), and assessment of matching quality. We will also work through practical exercises using Stata, in which students will learn how to apply the technique to the analysis of real data and how to interpret the results.

The University’s one-year Rights Retention pilot has taught the library a great deal about the practicalities of supporting self-archiving through rights retention. In a meeting in November 2022, the Research Policy Committee considered the findings from the pilot so far and endorsed the development of a self-archiving policy for researchers. We would like to invite you to attend a briefing session to gather your feedback.

Jalview hands-on training course is for anyone who works with sequence data and multiple sequence alignments from proteins, RNA and DNA.

Jalview is free software for protein and nucleic acid sequence alignment generation, visualisation and analysis. It includes sophisticated editing options and provides a range of analysis tools to investigate the structure and function of macromolecules through a multiple window interface. For example, Jalview supports 8 popular methods for multiple sequence alignment, prediction of protein secondary structure by JPred and disorder prediction by four methods. Jalview also has options to generate phylogenetic trees, and assess consensus and conservation across sequence families. Sequences, alignments and additional annotation can be accessed directly from public databases and journal-quality figures generated for publication.

The course involves of a mixture of talks and hands-on exercises.

Day 1 is an introduction to protein multiple sequence alignment editing and analysis with Jalview.

Day 2 focuses on using Jalview for RNA sequence analysis, and also integrating cDNA and protein analysis and covers more advanced applications after lunch.

Day 3 concentrates on protein secondary structure prediction with JPred version 4 as well as protein sub-family analysis to identify functionally important residues.

There will be opportunities for attendees to get advice on analysis of their own sequence families.

Further information, including some training videos, is also available.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book by linking here.

This course covers data resources and analytical approaches for the discovery and interpretation of biomacromolecular structures.

Day 1 focuses on public repositories of structural data (Protein Data Bank and Electron Microscopy Data Bank) and resources for protein analysis and classification (Pfam, InterPro and HMMER).

Day 2 covers how to find information about the structure and function of your protein sequence using CATH, principles of modern state-of-the-art protein modelling with Phyre2 and methods for predicting the effects of mutations on protein structure and function using the SAAP family of tools.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book by linking here.

This course covers analytical approaches for the interpretation of biomacromolecular structures including how to find information about the structure and function of your protein sequence using CATH, principles of modern state-of-the-art protein modelling with Phyre2 and methods for predicting the effects of mutations on protein structure and function using the SAAP family of tools. In addition, we will look at mapping genetic variants onto structures as well as visualisation and basic analysis of protein structures.

The training room is located on the first floor and there is currently no wheelchair or level access available to this level.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book or register your interest by linking here.

Philip Guildford, Director of Research for the Department of Engineering will offer a unique perspective on the life of postdocs during this engaging interactive session.

This workshop, led by Understanding Animal Research, outlines the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research and provides advice and practical information on how best to talk about the use of animals in your research.

Introduction to Public Engagement at Cambridge: Why do you want to engage, who do you want to engage with and why should they care? It’s only once researchers have considered these questions do we talk about what they would like to do. Join us to find out how we support public engagement across the University from activity that inspires to coproduced research with global impact.

A series of 30-minute drop-in sessions to talk with a member of the Public Engagement team. We offer expert advice to support your public engagement work, engagement processes and activities. These include:

• engagement types and the appropriate format to engage effectively and collaboratively
• engagement opportunities
• extensive training portfolio for researchers and professional staff to build skills and confidence
• funding schemes and resources to inform and support develop projects, events and activities

These sessions are not workshops or taught sessions.

Based on your area of expertise and depending on your School affiliation, you can book a time with one of our public engagement professionals:

• Dr Tana Joseph, Public Engagement and Impact Manager for the Schools of Arts and Humanities and Social Science - Monday, 15:00-15:30 and 15:30-16:00
• Dr Lucinda Spokes, Head of Public Engagement, all areas and schools - Monday, 16:00-16:30 and 16:30-17:00
• Dr Diogo Martins-Gomes, Public Engagement and Communications Manager, Clinical School and School of Biological Sciences - Wednesday, 12:00-12:30 and 12:30-13:00
• Dr Claudia Antolini, Public Engagement Manager, School of Physical Sciences and School of Technology - Thursday 14:00-14:30 and 14:30-15:00

The team will be available every week, each mentor offering two sessions of 30 minutes in the day and time indicated above. We will release new slots in the same days and times a couple of months in advance.

Please book for the day and time you would like to attend, and you will receive closer to the session the Teams link to meet with the mentor. The link will be sent by RDP Course Administrator. Please make sure that that e-mail does not go to your spam folder.

The analysis of policy depends on many disciplines and techniques and so is difficult for many researchers to access. This module provides a mixed perspective on policy analysis, taking both an academic and a practitioner perspective. This is because the same tools and techniques can be used in academic research on policy options and change as those used in practice in a policy environment. This course is provided as three 2 hour sessions delivered as a mix of lectures and seminars. No direct analysis work will be done in the sessions themselves, but some sample data and questions will be provided for students who wish to take the material into practice.

Academics can make as much of an impact from what they say as what they write whether it be through teaching, conferences or job presentations. Working with a trained actor and an academic, this workshop will take participants through the process of how to write and deliver a speech.

In the first session you will cover how to structure a speech, the use of appropriate language and imagery, audio-visual aids and how to master the Q&A.

In the second session, we will focus on your performance. Drawing on acting techniques, participants will discover how to improve their diction, resonance, range and articulation as well as relaxation and breathing techniques to calm nerves.

This workshop is designed for PhDs and Postdocs at any stage of their academic career.

Dear esteemed author...

So-called predatory publishers regularly approach researchers via email to solicit manuscripts and conference papers. With the emphasis on publishing as a measure of academic success still strong it can be easy to give in to temptation and flattery but this can do more harm than good to a future career.

This session will look at whether these publishers are a problem, how to spot a potential problem publisher or conference and the best advice to offer researchers if they are approached.

Do you want to create more professional publications by having a deeper appreciation of what Publisher can do for you? Through a series of graded exercises this course focuses on practical work giving you ample opportunity to use your PC skills to produce various publications. Please note that this course is largely about learning the software rather than design.

Many researchers consider publishing a book, often in the form of a monograph, and the process can be daunting the first time around. You will get the starter-kit to get your idea off the ground, with a collection of tips and tools to make your life easier. By the end of the session, you'll have the basic knowledge -and more importantly the confidence- to take your publishing project further.

This online course follows the whole process of public a monograph or other academic book, from making the initial decisions, to what to do once you have the finished book in your hands.

You’ll learn:

• key considerations when turning your thesis into a monograph
• how to choose the best publisher for you
• how Open Access monographs work
• how to write a great proposal
• what to expect from the peer review and publishing process

You will receive the URL for the course in the confirmation email after booking.

Publishing is a key part of any academic career: it is the main way researchers share their research findings with colleagues and the world at large, so that knowledge develops over time and helps to change policy and practice.

Through publishing, you will receive feedback on your work and develop your ideas further. In addition, a strong publication record is also important in developing your reputation and career.

Publishing is a key part of any academic career: it is the main way researchers share their research findings with colleagues and the world at large, so that knowledge develops over time and helps to change policy and practice.

Through publishing, you will receive feedback on your work and develop your ideas further. In addition, a strong publication record is also important in developing your reputation and career.

Publishing is a key part of any academic career: it is the main way researchers share their research findings with colleagues and the world at large, so that knowledge develops over time and helps to change policy and practice.

Through publishing, you will receive feedback on your work and develop your ideas further. In addition, a strong publication record is also important in developing your reputation and career.

Publishing is a key part of any academic career: it is the main way researchers share their research findings with colleagues and the world at large, so that knowledge develops over time and helps to change policy and practice.

Through publishing, you will receive feedback on your work and develop your ideas further. In addition, a strong publication record is also important in developing your reputation and career.

Publishing is a key part of any academic career: it is the main way researchers share their research findings with colleagues and the world at large, so that knowledge develops over time and helps to change policy and practice.

Through publishing, you will receive feedback on your work and develop your ideas further. In addition, a strong publication record is also important in developing your reputation and career.

Publishing is a key part of any academic career: it is the main way researchers share their research findings with colleagues and the world at large, so that knowledge develops over time and helps to change policy and practice.

Through publishing, you will receive feedback on your work and develop your ideas further. In addition, a strong publication record is also important in developing your reputation and career.