Our aims, values and strategic priorities

Mission statement

To deliver excellence in education and biomedical research to address the challenges to the health and welfare of animals, humans and the environment in the 21st century

The mission of the Department of Veterinary Medicine is to provide global leadership in education, discovery and clinical care to equip our students with the essential skills to thrive in a rapidly changing profession in a world under pressure from climate change.  We will achieve this through inspirational teaching and training, outstanding basic and clinical research and integration of these to improve the health and welfare of animals and people in the context of the environment they live in.

Aims

The Department of Veterinary Medicine, through inspirational teaching and training, aims to educate individuals who:

• will become exceptional veterinary surgeons, biological scientists, or policy makers
• combine deep scientific understanding with outstanding clinical and communication skills      
• demonstrate a caring, compassionate and professional approach to their patients and the public
• are equipped to become international leaders of their profession.

Through its commitment to the pursuit of excellence, and support of scientists of international standing in basic and clinical research, the Department of Veterinary Medicine aims to:

• understand fundamental biology and thereby the mechanisms underlying disease
• integrate basic and clinical research
• apply a rigorous mechanism-based approach to clinical problems
• innovate to solve the One Health challenges of our society.

Values

We are committed to clinical excellence, scientific excellence, and to create a positive, nurturing and collaborative environment for all members of the department.

Our core values are:

• to uphold the rights of the individual to freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and access to education;
• to foster, and always strive to improve, a culture that respects the diversity of our students, academics, non-academic staff, and value their different expertise and contributions to the life of the Department;
• to instil in our graduates, staff and alumni a life-long passion for the pursuit of excellence in veterinary medicine and an understanding of their responsibility to engage with the public about their research.

Strategic Priorities

The Department of Veterinary Medicine aspires to change the practice of veterinary medicine and improve biological understanding of global One Health challenges.  Our priorities are based on addressing major unmet One Health problems where we can contribute scientific insight and develop solutions.

We have three priority research areas which align with global One Health challenges:

• Infection and Immunity
• Disease Dynamics
• Systems Pathology

Within each of these areas, we focus on specific diseases where we have the expertise and critical mass to be internationally leading. 

To address our priorities we have a number cross-cutting sub-themes involving a number of our research groups in collaboration with departments across the University and with external partners:

• Education and training (see Section: Developing Education and Training)
• Epidemiology and Mathematical modelling
• Genomics and bioinformatics
• Comparative pathology
• Clinical Research
• Imaging (micro to macro scale)

Our priorities (and funding applications) are responsive to global One Health challenges, but are also defined by a strong “bottom-up” research ethos, i.e. where faculty define individual academic priorities to develop areas, because they are principally responsible for generating the resources to support their research programmes. The academic culture in Cambridge encourages an “ideas factory” approach where the most valuable asset is our people, particularly established faculty and early career researchers (ECRs) who conceive, drive, and deliver research through their vision, imagination, and intellectual energy. Our priority areas and cross-cutting sub-themes are flexible, and reviewed regularly such that we can adapt to external opportunities without structural re-organisation.

Compared with competitor veterinary schools Cambridge has fewer veterinary students (60-70 per annum). The Royal Veterinary College in London, for example, has 300 students, Nottingham University 260 students and Bristol University 300 students.  Consequently we have a much smaller faculty than competitor veterinary schools in the UK, Europe or the USA.  Despite this, by focusing on research areas that are relevant to global one-health challenges and not trying to cover every speciality in depth, Cambridge makes a high international impact, allowing us to steadily grow our research income and attract talented new academic staff and ECRs.  After our departmental strategic research review in 2017 we devised a series of strategic goals, which we achieved, and which markedly improved our last REF outputs and impact scores.  A key strategy for our next REF is the development of a Scientific Advisory Board (including international representation) to run periodic peer review exercises and advise the Department about our research areas.  We are successful at attracting funding from UKRI (BBSRC, MRC, EPSRC), the Wellcome Trust, the Royal Society, other charities, industry and philanthropy.  This success translates into impactful research ranging from developing government policy through to generating new therapeutics for humans and animals.

Collaboration

The small size of the department means collaboration is key to our approach.  To address our priorities, we must work in a flexible and agile way, bringing together scientists with different expertise across the Department and University, as well as working with organisations beyond it.  Central to the Department’s mission is to enhance the effectiveness of our collaborations internally and externally. We aim to nurture and develop this actively – through our training and education programmes, the individuals we recruit and appoint, the initiatives we support and the people we empower to lead them, underpinned by our appraisal and promotion processes.

As we evolve, we continue to broaden the disciplinary backgrounds of our faculty beyond Cambridge’s existing core strengths, and further collaborate across biomedical disciplines. A particular challenge we consistently face is to maintain an appropriate balance between staff who are clinically trained and those who are not, and to ensure that we maintain overall cohesion in a coordinated and focused manner to avoid being too broadly dispersed.

Central to achieving our mission is that we continue to draw on the University’s strengths across multiple relevant disciplines including mathematical, physical and social sciences to collaborate even more effectively.  This is in addition to our existing wide collaborations both within our home School of Biological Sciences, but also with the School of Clinical Medicine.  We are strongly aligned with several of the SBS Research Themes including Infection and Immunity (I&I), Functional and Evolutionary Genomics (FEG), Reproduction, Development and Lifelong Health, Molecules and Cells and Organisms and Evolution and Ecology. One of our faculty is theme leads in FEG. We co-lead, with the Clinical School, Cambridge Infectious Diseases IRC which, together with the other IRCs in which we participate, are very important strategically in fostering our collaborative links across the University. 

Our academic endeavour benefits from a very extensive range of partnerships and collaborations that extend beyond the University. The main concentration is on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, which is now the largest biomedical cluster in Europe. Through this we have an extraordinary resource within a short road journey including: The School of Clinical Medicine (institutes and departments), CUH NHS Foundation Trust, Royal Papworth NHS Foundation Trust, The MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology (LMB), Glaxo Smith Kline’s (GSK) clinical research facility and AZ’s global headquarters and major international research hub.  Slightly further away the department faculty already have many excellent collaborations with the Babraham Institute and Campus, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the European Bioinformatics Institute (both at Hinxton) and GSK’s major research facilities at Stevenage.  Our PIs proactively seek and maintain a high number of collaborations with industry.  Our industrial partners include Janssen, GSK, Zoetis and Omeros.  We also host start-up companies (Gyroscope, NoBACZ, DIOSynVax, CellCraft) to foster an environment of commercial collaboration and entrepreneurship.