Last week, I was lucky enough to be invited to a Frontiers of Development symposium, entitled “Wellbeing and Inclusivity in the First 2000 Days of Life”, at the Wellcome Genome Campus just outside of Cambridge. The symposia are part of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), and the result of a collaboration between the British Academy, the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Academy of Medical Sciences, with the purpose of facilitating interdisciplinary approaches to addressing the Strategic Development Goals, linked to the world’s global challenges. What this looks like in reality is three packed days in which 60 academics, practitioners, industry partners and NGOs from 17 nations work incredibly hard to share expertise, create connections, and start making plans for future collaborations. “Our” symposium was chaired by Sir Ian Diamond (FBA) and Professor Anthony Costello (FMedSci), and focused around three particular themes – child mortality, thriving in the first 2000 days of life, and climate change. Each theme had keynote input from speakers from all around the world, before working groups began to discuss interdisciplinary approaches to address identified issues – and to identify new ones.
The discussions are not just idle speculations – the Frontiers of Development Programme is linked to concrete seed funding of up to £20,000, to facilitate pilot projects and future networking. For three days, none of us stopped talking – theories and ideas raised in workshops were continued over coffee and dinner, slowly crystallising into concrete project ideas. The symposium was a fantastic opportunity to connect – and to establish common ground and opportunities for collaborations in sometimes surprising places. The participants were so diverse that everybody ended up talking to people from fields they never would normally engage with, and the event was organised flawlessly. At the end of the three days, even the journey home (for as long as it was shared with somebody else) was taken as an opportunity to continue talks and discussions, and, thanks to social media, these connections will be easy to maintain with many participants, even while the various project groups are now feverishly working away on their funding bids.
