Science advice and government

Podcast series 5

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CSaP's Science & Policy Podcast has returned in partnership with the research project Expertise Under Pressure, part of the Centre for the Humanities and Social Change, University of Cambridge. Season five is focusing on how science advice, data and evidence are used by decision makers in government.

You can listen to the season's highlights here:

Episode 1 - Chief Scientific Advisers

In the first episode of our new series, host Dr Rob Doubleday is joined by Sir Patrick Vallance, UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser, and Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School. They discuss the role of Chief Scientific Advisers, how science advice and evidence were used by governments during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how science advice operates in other countries.

Episode 2 - One Voice or Many

Which scientific voices are heard in government? How does one voice or many help shape information that is informing decision making? What structures and institutions have evolved over recent decades to try and make that process more open, more diverse and more robust?

In the second episode in our series on science advice and government, host Dr Rob Doubleday is joined by Dr Claire Craig, Provost at The Queen's College, Oxford and Jon Agar, Professor of Science and Technology Studies at UCL.

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Episode 3 - Ebola

In the third episode of our new podcast series on science advice and government, host Dr Rob Doubleday discusses the Ebola outbreak of 2014 and how the government used science and evidence in helping to tackle it. He's joined by three people who were closely involved at the time:

-Dame Sally Davies, Master of Trinity College Cambridge, who was Chief Medical Officer for England from 2010-2019 and co-chaired the SAGE process during the outbreak.
-Sir Oliver Letwin, an MP for over 20 years and was a Senior Minister in the Cabinet Office during the time.
-Professor Melissa Leach, Director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. She's also an Anthropologist who has worked in West Africa and played a crucial role in bringing evidence from the social sciences into the government's response to Ebola.
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Episode 4 - BSE

In the fourth episode of our series on science advice and government, we look back a few decades at what lessons were learnt following the BSE outbreak (Mad Cow Disease) in the 1980s and 1990s. Plus how it led to the establishment of the Food Standards Agency (FSA).

Host Dr Rob Doubleday is joined by Dame Julia Unwin, who was appointed Deputy Chair of the FSA in 2003. Dame Julia's role was to co-lead the agency and develop its relationship with the government and most importantly, the public. In today's episode, Rob is also joined by Erik Millstone, a Professor at the University of Sussex, who's research focuses on the use of science and evidence in the governance of food safety and risk.

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Episode 5 - Earthquakes

In the fifth episode of our new series on science advice and government, host Dr Rob Doubleday discusses how SAGE and modelling advice were used during the Nepal Earthquake in April 2015. He's joined by James Jackson, an Earthquake Geologist and Professor in Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and Professor Emily So, an Artchitectural Engineer and Director of the Cambridge University Centre for Risk in the Built Environment (CURBE). Both James and Emily work on earthquakes, what causes them and what damage they do.

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Episode 6 - Extreme Risks

In today's uncertain world, the sixth episode of our series on science advice and government, explores how governments can better understand and respond to unforeseeable and challenging extreme risk scenarios, such as cyber hacking, biological hazards, climate change, and future pandemics, following the COVID-19 outbreak.

Host Dr Rob Doubleday is joined by:

-Lord Martin Rees, the UK's Astronomer Royal, a Cosmologist and Member of the House of Lords, which in December 2021 published the report, ‘Preparing for Extreme Risks, Building a Resilient Society’, which tackled some of the questions about how governments learn, react to, and prepare for extreme risks.

-Suzanne Raine, an Affiliate Lecturer at the Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge. She was formerly a civil servant and was Head of the UK's Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre from 2015-2017.

-Dr Kristen MacAskill, an Assistant Professor in Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Her work is on the governance and resilience of infrastructure and she has spent years in industry looking at disaster response.

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Episode 7 - COVID Modelling

How have scientists contributed to UK government decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic? What are the structures and mechanisms that have drawn science into the policy process? In today’s episode we’re exploring what the past two years have been like for the scientists involved in government and SPI-M, the experts providing the advice based on COVID modelling and epidemiology.

In today’s episode, host Dr Rob Doubleday is joined by Julia Gog, Professor of Mathematical Biology at the University of Cambridge, who has been heavily involved throughout the pandemic within SPI-M, the specialist advisory group on modelling pandemics which feeds into the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) process. Plus, Sir John Aston, Harding Professor of Statistics in Public Life, University of Cambridge. He was Chief Scientific Adviser in the Home Office from 2017-2020 and during the COVID pandemic was heavily involved in SAGE and advising the Secretary of State in the Home Office.

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Episode 8 - Future Pandemics

In the final episode of our season, host Dr Rob Doubleday is joined by Sharon Peacock, Director of the COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) Consortium and Professor of Public Health and Microbiology in the Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge, and James Wood, Head of Cambridge Vet School and infectious disease epidemiologist.

The episode explores how science advice has been used in the UK's response to the current COVID-19 pandemic and what lessons can be learnt to help prepare for future pandemics.

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