David’s research focuses on innovation in under exploited and high potential fish and seafood sectors to benefit human health and environmental sustainability as well as thought leadership to guide policy.
A key component of his work is the development of novel ‘breakthrough’ aquaculture production systems. Much of this work focuses on bivalve shellfish – clams, mussels, and oysters – which are rich in protein, omega-3, and essential micronutrients, and have a lower environmental footprint than meat and many terrestrial crops. For example, David is investigating the development of a new ‘Naked Clam’ aquaculture sector, involving shell-less clams which feed on wood and grow an order of magnitude faster than other bivalves. His team is also looking at developing ‘Urban Bivalve’ production systems to enable production of bivalves more rapidly, to a higher quality and food safety level, and to enable access in new locations. He collaborates with innovative global food manufacturers on research across the supply chain to help bring bivalve-based foods to the consumer mass market.
David also looks at mechanisms that could be used to drive demand of sustainable nutritious fish and seafood in place of other meat and fish products. Behavioural choice experiments have been run across University Canteens, aiming to find ways to increase consumption of sustainable bivalves and low-trophic fish. Other areas under investigation include the importance of processing to drive mass-market consumption of bivalves, the role of fish and seafood in mother, baby and brain health, and systems to drive consumption of underutilised components and by-products of fish and seafood.
David works extensively on thought leading policy related projects which aim to improve the global sustainability and performance of fishery and aquaculture food systems. This includes developing new metrics and tools to assess production efficiency and footprint in for example in high-value finfish aquaculture and cephalopod fisheries. It also includes projects aiming to better define our global marine activities in order to more effectively enforce policy. This work also helps to inform David’s work on seafood production and demand to ensure that it is highly relevant and makes wise use of resources.
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Dementia is a topic of considerable public interest. How empirical evidence has contributed to this societal awareness and indeed fear will be covered in this talk. It will span research from the 1980s when not much was understood about dementia up to contemporary perspectives. The focus will be on the epidemiological and public health evidence base, and how this relates to the results published from clinical and lab based research. The findings from UK and other high income countries of reduced age specific prevalence (%) will be explored, and the implications of results from brain based studies that dementia is not inevitable in the presence of ‘alzheimer’ type changes. The role of inequalities, risk varying across countries and time and our knowledge about protective factors have strengthened during recent years, and the balance of high risk with whole population approaches to reducing risk for society will be considered.
One of the many outstanding achievements of G I Taylor was the discovery of relatively simple statistical laws that apply to highly complex turbulent flows. The emergence of simple laws from complexity is well known in other branches of physics, for example the emergence of the laws of heat conduction from molecular dynamics. Complexity can also arise at large scales, and the structural vibration of an aircraft or a car can be a surprisingly difficult phenomenon to analyse, partly because millions of degrees of freedom may be involved, and partly because the vibration can be extremely sensitive to small changes or imperfections in the system. In this talk it is shown that the prediction of vibration levels can be much simplified by the derivation and exploitation of emergent laws, analogous to some extent to the heat conduction equations, but with an added statistical aspect, as in turbulent flow. The emergent laws are discussed and their application to the design of aerospace, marine, and automotive structures is described. As an aside it will be shown that the same emergent theory can be applied to a range of problems involving electromagnetic fields.
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Please contact philosoc@group.cam.ac.uk to agree a timing before visiting the office.