What it is like for a black student to go to Cambridge

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Campus Life, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2018-06-22 16:55Z by Steven

What it is like for a black student to go to Cambridge

The Financial Times
2018-05-30

Rianna Croxford


Rianna Croxford

Trailblazer discovers confidence sought by top universities can be learned

I am the first in my family to go to university and faced a lot of the obstacles students of colour encounter when aiming for Oxford and Cambridge.

Educated at state school, I graduated from Cambridge last year as one of only seven women of mixed white and black heritage in my year of 3,371 undergraduates.

As one of the first black students to read English at Trinity Hall college, I had to deal with different degrees of racism day to day, as well as cultural challenges that my background had not prepared me for.

I want to help make it easier for other students like myself to enter elite institutions that can offer a fast track to a successful career…

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Interracial relationships and the ‘brown baby’ problem: black GIs, white women and their mixed race offspring in World War II Britain

Posted in History, Live Events, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2015-11-12 04:28Z by Steven

Interracial relationships and the ‘brown baby’ problem: black GIs, white women and their mixed race offspring in World War II Britain

University of Cambridge
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Seminar Room 1
Tuesday, 2015-11-17, 17:00-18:30Z

Lucy Bland, Reader in History
Anglia Ruskin University

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Genetic diversity of Sub-Saharan Africa revealed

Posted in Africa, Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive on 2014-12-16 02:40Z by Steven

Genetic diversity of Sub-Saharan Africa revealed

BBC News
2014-12-04

Rebecca Morelle, Science Correspondent

Scientists have completed a comprehensive study of genetic diversity in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The African Genome Variation Project analysed the DNA of 1,800 people living across the continent.

The data is helping scientists to understand how susceptibility to disease varies across the region and has provided more insight into how populations have moved within Africa.

The research is published in the journal Nature.

Until now, most studies examining genetic risk factors for disease have focused on Europe. Little has been known about Africa, the most genetically diverse region in the world.

Dr Manj Sandhu, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge, said: “We originally set out to look at chronic diseases in Africa, and one strategy to understand the causes of those diseases is to look at the underlying genetic susceptibility.

“But to do that, you need a pretty good grasp of the variation in genomes across the region, but we realised that information wasn’t available.”…

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