Annual Report 2009 - Department of Zoology - University of ...

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Museum, combining an active involvement in teaching and research with their role as curators. Together with graduate students and research fellows, they form a research community that encourages inter-disciplinary discussion and encompasses developmental genetics and comparative genomics, as well as taxonomy, comparative anatomy and palaeontology. Details of research within the Museum are provided under the heading ‘Evolution and Diversity’ later in this report. The Museum also receives many external research visitors, and makes loans of specimens to researchers and museums across the world. The Museum website has been greatly improved, with funding from the Museums Libraries and Archives council. The address is now www.museum.zoo.cam.ac.uk/. Staff Developments Our Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, Professor Jenny Clack, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Richard Preece is now a formal associate of the ‘Ancient Human Occupation of Britain’ project. Three new research associates joined the Museum in 2009 - Stephanie Pierce, working with Jenny Clack, Lionel Hautier, working with Rob Asher, and Daniele Gianolla, working with Richard Preece Collections and Archives Ray Symonds, our long-standing collections manager, retired in March 2009 after 40 years service to the Department and Museum. Thanks to funding from the Pilgrim Trust, he was able to dedicate his last 18 months to the completion of a ten-year project to create an online database from our catalogues. We are immensely grateful for all that he has done for the Museum. Care and control of the Museum’s catalogues has now passed to Mathew Lowe, our new collections manager, who continues to be assisted in the care of the collections by Ann Charlton, Russell Stebbings and Stuart Turner. Our archivist Kees Rookmaaker completed work on a calendar of the scientific correspondence of Hugh Edwin Strickland (1811–1853), geologist and ornithologist, whose collections formed a major bequest to the Museum. A project to re-house the exotic (i.e. non-European) insect collections continues. The first phase, funded by the Designation Challenge Fund, is now complete, with 770 5 drawers of insects transferred to new pest-proof metal cabinets Collection security has been improved, with CCTV cameras installed in the galleries, and case alarms in some key areas. Volunteers continue to make a major contribution. Four volunteers are assisting Museum staff to create a specimen-level catalogue of the mollusc collection. Liz Wetton is seven years into a major project, sorting, re-boxing and cataloguing some 10,000 clutches of bird eggs with curator Michael Brooke. Ken Rolfe and Christine Stafford are curating and relocating some of the fossil fish collections. Outreach, Exhibitions and Events in 2009 2009 marked the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 150 th anniversary of the publication of ‘The Origin of Species’. To celebrate, the Museum launched a new permanent display of material collected by Darwin, and hosted events for the Darwin Festival, including Museum tours and a site-specific dance performance from local hip-hop dance collective Sin Cru. Darwin was also the inspiration for an exhibition of sculpture by artist Tolly Nason, presenting scaled reconstructions of the beaks of Galapagos finches in cast glass. Other exhibitions in the Museum included ‘A.R Wallace: the forgotten evolutionist’, an exhibition of photographs and installations by Fred Langford Edwards; and ‘Birds Bugs, Beasts’, an exhibition by students and staff from Supportive Education at Cambridge Regional College. The ‘Fens through a Lens’ photography exhibition developed by the Museum continued to tour around the region, showing at the Haddenham Gallery, Fenland Arts at March Town Hall, Swavesey Church, Ely Museum; the RSPB at Ouse Washes, Peterborough Museum and Stamford Museum. ‘Twilight in the Museum’ attracted over 1,000 visitors during February half term to explore the Museum with the lights down low. For the Cambridge Science Festival, the local Wildlife Trust and the National Trust at Wicken Fen provided displays and activities in the Museum. For the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, artist Alex Hirtzel built ‘The Critter Tree’, a tree of life in the Museum galleries. Celebrations for the 800th Anniversary of the University included the Museum Fair in May, the Cambridge Collectors Cards project
(a set of cards highlighting objects from the collections of the University of Cambridge for children and families to collect), and activities inspired by the finback whale for the grand University Summer Garden Party in the Botanic Garden in July. Beyond the University, we ran a session for the City Council’s ChYPPS (Children and Young Peoples Participatory Scheme) programme, and participated in the Vital Communities project, taking a collection of material from the Museum to communities throughout Cambridgeshire to engage young people with animals and evolution. Museum Big Draw event, October 2009 6 Our Young Zoologists Club has grown throughout 2009, reaching over 500 members by year’s end. The Club’s activities included workshops on ‘Winter Wonders’ led by Jake Snaddon, on cuckoos led by Nick Davies, and on meerkats led by Alex Thornton and other members of the Meerkat Research Group. The year finished with the first Young Zoologists Club Christmas Party in December. Our thanks to Roz Wade, outreach officer of the Museum who coordinated this whole programme, and to continued funding from the AHRC, HEFCE, and the Renaissance programme of the Eastern Regional Museums hub, which made the work possible.
Page 1 and 2: Department of Zoology Annual Report
Page 3 and 4: Malcolm Burrows FRS, Professor of Z
Page 5: Balfour & Newton Library The Balfou
Page 9 and 10: Mathematical Biology (192 students)
Page 11 and 12: Manica, A, FK McMeechan & WA Foster
Page 13 and 14: Behaviour and Behavioural Neuroscie
Page 15 and 16: Mary Caswell Stoddard: Avian colour
Page 17 and 18: c) Control of DNA Replication The i
Page 19 and 20: Tulay Atamert: Fly stocks maintenan
Page 21 and 22: Population and Community Ecology Ou
Page 23 and 24: Evolution and Diversity Much of the
Page 25 and 26: Awards and Prizes Michael Akam Linn
Page 27 and 28: Darwin’s ‘On the origin of spec
Page 29 and 30: Senior Assistant Curator of Malacol
Page 31 and 32: Krude, Dr T. Cancer Research UK, 20
Page 33 and 34: Champagne, F. A., Curley, J. P., Sw
Page 35 and 36: Harcourt, J. L., Ang, T. Z., Sweetm
Page 37: Stevens, M., Winney, I. S., Cantor,

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