Celebrating the contribution of viral sequencing to the COVID-19 pandemic response

Sharon Peacock is Master Elect of Churchill College and Professor of Microbiology and Public Health at the University of Cambridge. She was founding Director of the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK), formed in April 2020 to provide SARS-CoV-2 genomes towards the UK pandemic response. Prior to this, she dedicated more than a decade to the translation of pathogen sequencing into clinical and public health microbiology, as well as using sequencing to examine the transmission of antibiotic-resistant bacteria between humans, livestock, and the environment. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and an elected Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). Sharon was awarded the Unilever Colworth Prize in 2018 and the Marjorie Stephenson Prize in 2023 for outstanding contributions to the discipline of microbiology. Sharon was awarded a CBE for services to Medical Microbiology in 2015, and in 2021 received the Medical Research Council Millennium Medal.

The Sandbach Tinne Project: a family that shaped the British empire for almost two centuries

Malik Al Nasir, PhD candidate, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge St Catharine’s College.

“Researching family history should be relatively straightforward; births, deaths, banns marriages, baptisms, census data etc., are readily available in the west, but for someone of Afro Caribbean descent, tracing your lineage is far more complex. Slavery and colonialism categorised Africans as ‘livestock’ and ‘property’ rather than people, and recorded their existence in a way that renders it almost impossible to trace the African lineage with any precision. Faced with this challenge when researching my own Afro-Caribbean heritage, I set about using prosopography to understand the ontology of the familial networks of my ancestors enslavers, and by a process of deduction, came to understand something of my own origins. However, what I never expected to discover, was an epic tale of empire, that will rewrite elements of British history and recontextualise some of its most prominent characters. The Sandbach Tinne mercantile dynasty counted a Prime Minister of the UK, a Governor General of Australia, the founder of Britain’s first joint stock bank and the originators of the global rail networks amongst their brood to name but a few. Described in the 19th century as ‘The Rothschilds of Demerara’ this family shaped the British empire for almost two centuries. Their influence was lost to history until my research sparked a global conversation in 2019 with a viral article on the BBC entitled ‘Searching for my slave roots’.

The article spurned a whole new field of study, which led to a Sandbach Tinne conference, a book deal, a series of exhibits, documentaries and a multi-agency project (The Sandbach Tinne Project) to identify, collate, digitise related collections in the UK, USA and the Caribbean. Consequently a £10m funding bid has been submitted to the Leverhulme Trust for the establishment of a Colonial Research Centre at University of Liverpool in partnership with Cambridge Digital Humanities, using my Sandbach Tinne Project as the flagship, upon which nine other projects will be based, using the same prosopographical approach. The CSAR award helped fund a field trip to Guyana, which had been previously impossible due to the pandemic. I now have the final pieces of the puzzle and will explain how I reverse engineered my connection to Sandbach Tinne.