The Department of Medicine provides high quality research, teaching and patient care. It is one of the largest Departments in the School of Clinical Medicine and is comprised of 12 divisions, each involved in research related to human disease and aligned to a clinical specialty within the NHS. It houses 26 Professors and over 450 research staff, of which 140+ Postgraduate students are a mix of both clinical and non-clinical scientists.
The Department currently holds research grants totalling in excess of £145m with an annual turnover of over £25m. This represents a large and active research programme. As the Department operates out of several sites around the Cambridge Biomedical Campus and is involved in a number of capital projects it is expanding in size and scope.
Our research
The Department has a major focus on interaction with industry, reinforced by the longstanding presence of the GSK Cambridge Clinical Unit on the Biomedical Campus, and more recently, by the arrival of the Global Research and Corporate Headquarters of AstraZeneca.
The research facilities of the Department of Medicine will be revolutionised in mid to late 2018 by the opening of the Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease (CITIID). This new Institute will unite expert groups in infectious disease and immunity including the microbiome, autoimmune disease, cellular immunology, and inflammatory disease. There will be associated strengths in genomics and genetics. Dedicated groups will focus on computational biology, in collaboration with the MRC Biostatistics Unit, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the European Bioinformatics Institute.
The research environment in Cambridge is also greatly strengthened by support from the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, and of particular relevance is the NIHR BRC Human Immunophenotyping Hub, which will expand over the next five years. This will house investigators focussed on studies of infectious and immune-mediated disease and will be the site for a large part of the NIHR Cambridge BRC Cell Phenotyping Hub.
Teaching
Most members of the Department of Medicine are involved in clinical teaching. The Department organises the weekly Staff Round, which is the main forum for academic medicine on the campus. The Department is also involved in the supervision of over 120 graduate students, and members may also contribute to undergraduate teaching in the School of Biological Sciences.
Members of all divisions of the Department of Medicine are actively involved in providing patient care in the NHS. This is critical not only for service provision but ensures that the Department’s research and teaching is constantly refocused upon the needs of patients.
