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Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is a collegiate public research institution. Its 800-year history makes it the fourth-oldest surviving university in the world and the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world.
Cambridge serves more than 18,000 students from all cultures and corners of the world. Nearly 4,000 of its students are international and hail from over 120 different countries. In addition, the university’s International Summer Schools offer 150 courses to students from more than 50 countries.
The university is split into 31 autonomous colleges where students receive small group teaching sessions known as college supervisions.
Six schools are spread across the university’s colleges, housing roughly 150 faculties and other institutions. The six schools are: Arts and Humanities, Biological Sciences, Clinical Medicine, Humanities and Social Sciences, Physical Sciences and Technology.
The campus is located in the centre of the city of Cambridge, with its numerous listed buildings and many of the older colleges situated on or near the river Cam.
The university is home to over 100 libraries, which, between them, hold more than 15 million books in total. In the main Cambridge University library alone, which is a legal depository, there are eight million holdings. The university also owns nine arts, scientific and cultural museums that are open to the public throughout the year, as well as a botanical garden.
Cambridge University Press is a non-school institution and operates as the university’s publishing business. With over 50 offices worldwide, its publishing list is made up of 45,000 titles spanning academic research, professional development, research journals, education and bible publishing.
In total, 92 affiliates of the university have been awarded Nobel Prizes, covering every category.
The university’s endowment is valued at nearly £6 billion.
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Category of Education
Business and Economics, Technology and Engineering, Computer Sciense and IT, Medicine and Healthcare, Life Science and Biology, Social Science, Law, Physical Science, Arts and Humanities, Education, Psychology
Location
United Kingdom
The Old Schools, Trinity Lane, Cambridge , CB2 1TN, East of England, United Kingdom
The Old Schools, Trinity Lane, Cambridge , CB2 1TN, East of England, United Kingdom
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Celebrating Lord Sainsbury of Turville’s ‘selfless’ service as ChancellorWednesday, 25 June 2025At a reception at the Vice-Chancellor’s Lodge this week, which celebrated his service to the University, Lord Sainsbury talked fondly about his own time as a student at Cambridge, and said: “It has been a great honour and pleasure to be Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, one of the world’s greatest universities. “Over the years, I have watched with awe how the University has produced an endless stream of brilliant research and an enlightened education for its undergraduates and postgraduates, and I hope that by being Chancellor, and in a number of other ways, I have to some extent repaid my debt to the University. I will always look back at my time as Chancellor with the greatest pleasure.” The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Deborah Prentice, paid a warm tribute to the Chancellor and thanked him for his service and contribution to the life of the University, and his support for her. In a recent edition of CAM – the University's alumni magazine – other friends and former colleagues recounted the unique qualities Lord Sainsbury has brought to the post during almost a decade and a half of unwavering commitment. With high-level experience in government and industry alike, Lord Sainsbury has been a highly effective advocate for the best interests of the University on both the national and global stage. “He’s a man of great ability and thoughtfulness,” says Professor Mike Proctor, 2013-2023 Provost of King’s College, Lord Sainsbury’s alma mater. “He’s very well connected in both the public and private sectors. And that’s been very helpful to the University at large.” Professor Stephen Toope, the 346th Vice-Chancellor, says that although the role is technically ceremonial, Lord Sainsbury was always willing to go above and beyond. “If I asked him to do something for the University – connect me with the right person, give me a piece of advice – he always did it. He was very generous in making introductions, and saw his role as trying to strengthen the University where he could. And that was largely by supporting the people who’d been asked to do the big jobs – on the Council and in the leadership of Cambridge.” As a former Minister of Science and Innovation, Lord Sainsbury has brought a wealth of experience to the University. But he has also brought his own love of research and innovation to bear, as Rebecca Simmons, the VC’s former Chief of Staff and now COO of quantum computing company Riverlane, saw first-hand. “He liked to get into the detail beforehand, so he could make good connections with people,” she remembers. “And sometimes, he would come back to see the same people over several years. For example, he stayed in touch with the CEO of Endomag, a cancer diagnostics spinout, and made a point of going back to meet them at key moments. In fact, accompanying him on visits was one of the most fun parts of my job.” Dr Regina Sachers, former Head of the Vice-Chancellor’s Office and now Director of Governance and Compliance, agrees. “He found it easy to connect with academics because he was genuinely interested in the work. He would always ask very informed questions, and would frequently offer his card and put people in touch with his own connections. It felt like a very genuine and low-key approach.” The role of Vice-Chancellor can be lonely, says Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor 2010-17: often, the only person you can talk to is the Chancellor. “And Lord Sainsbury always made himself available. He was a friend, a mentor, an adviser. We had differences of opinion, but we could always talk. Having that open debate meant you could road-test the strength of an argument – and, sometimes, backpedal, because he’d made some very valid points that were critical for the University. And I can attest that during my time as Vice-Chancellor, he was always there for the difficult issues. He was quiet and understated, but very thoughtful and very wise – and never interfered with the executive functions that the Vice-Chancellor has to exercise.” “Lord Sainsbury does not have an agenda of his own: he seeks to do what the University needs, and always has its best interests at heart,” says current Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Prentice. “He approaches the job with selflessness and the mentality of a public servant. I like the fact that sometimes he just turns up to things; he’s such a curious and interested person. I think he very much embodies the values of the University.” Professor Toope says that he has always been struck by Lord Sainsbury’s “complete lack of pomposity. Some people think they are the role. He always understood that the role is the role: he just happened to be occupying it for a period. And he brought a personal and political integrity to it.” The election for Lord Sainsbury’s successor as Chancellor takes place next month. Read about the election of a Chancellor at the University. After 14 years as Chancellor of the University, Lord Sainsbury of Turville has formally stood down from the role. I will always look back at my time as Chancellor with the greatest pleasure.Lord Sainsbury of Turville The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms. Yes
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Celebrating Lord Sainsbury of Turville’s ‘selfless’ service as ChancellorWednesday, 25 June 2025At a reception at the Vice-Chancellor’s Lodge this week, which celebrated his service to the University, Lord Sainsbury talked fondly about his own time as a student at Cambridge, and said: “It has been a great honour and pleasure to be Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, one of the world’s greatest universities. “Over the years, I have watched with awe how the University has produced an endless stream of brilliant research and an enlightened education for its undergraduates and postgraduates, and I hope that by being Chancellor, and in a number of other ways, I have to some extent repaid my debt to the University. I will always look back at my time as Chancellor with the greatest pleasure.” The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Deborah Prentice, paid a warm tribute to the Chancellor and thanked him for his service and contribution to the life of the University, and his support for her. In a recent edition of CAM – the University's alumni magazine – other friends and former colleagues recounted the unique qualities Lord Sainsbury has brought to the post during almost a decade and a half of unwavering commitment. With high-level experience in government and industry alike, Lord Sainsbury has been a highly effective advocate for the best interests of the University on both the national and global stage. “He’s a man of great ability and thoughtfulness,” says Professor Mike Proctor, 2013-2023 Provost of King’s College, Lord Sainsbury’s alma mater. “He’s very well connected in both the public and private sectors. And that’s been very helpful to the University at large.” Professor Stephen Toope, the 346th Vice-Chancellor, says that although the role is technically ceremonial, Lord Sainsbury was always willing to go above and beyond. “If I asked him to do something for the University – connect me with the right person, give me a piece of advice – he always did it. He was very generous in making introductions, and saw his role as trying to strengthen the University where he could. And that was largely by supporting the people who’d been asked to do the big jobs – on the Council and in the leadership of Cambridge.” As a former Minister of Science and Innovation, Lord Sainsbury has brought a wealth of experience to the University. But he has also brought his own love of research and innovation to bear, as Rebecca Simmons, the VC’s former Chief of Staff and now COO of quantum computing company Riverlane, saw first-hand. “He liked to get into the detail beforehand, so he could make good connections with people,” she remembers. “And sometimes, he would come back to see the same people over several years. For example, he stayed in touch with the CEO of Endomag, a cancer diagnostics spinout, and made a point of going back to meet them at key moments. In fact, accompanying him on visits was one of the most fun parts of my job.” Dr Regina Sachers, former Head of the Vice-Chancellor’s Office and now Director of Governance and Compliance, agrees. “He found it easy to connect with academics because he was genuinely interested in the work. He would always ask very informed questions, and would frequently offer his card and put people in touch with his own connections. It felt like a very genuine and low-key approach.” The role of Vice-Chancellor can be lonely, says Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor 2010-17: often, the only person you can talk to is the Chancellor. “And Lord Sainsbury always made himself available. He was a friend, a mentor, an adviser. We had differences of opinion, but we could always talk. Having that open debate meant you could road-test the strength of an argument – and, sometimes, backpedal, because he’d made some very valid points that were critical for the University. And I can attest that during my time as Vice-Chancellor, he was always there for the difficult issues. He was quiet and understated, but very thoughtful and very wise – and never interfered with the executive functions that the Vice-Chancellor has to exercise.” “Lord Sainsbury does not have an agenda of his own: he seeks to do what the University needs, and always has its best interests at heart,” says current Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Prentice. “He approaches the job with selflessness and the mentality of a public servant. I like the fact that sometimes he just turns up to things; he’s such a curious and interested person. I think he very much embodies the values of the University.” Prof Toope says that he has always been struck by Lord Sainsbury’s “complete lack of pomposity. Some people think they are the role. He always understood that the role is the role: he just happened to be occupying it for a period. And he brought a personal and political integrity to it.” The election for Lord Sainsbury’s successor as Chancellor takes place next month Read about the election of a Chancellor at the University. After 14 years as Chancellor of the University, Lord Sainsbury of Turville has formally stood down from the role. I will always look back at my time as Chancellor with the greatest pleasure.Lord Sainsbury of Turville The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms. Yes
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AI art protection tools still leave creators at risk, researchers sayTuesday, 24 June 2025So say a team of researchers who have uncovered significant weaknesses in two of the art protection tools most used by artists to safeguard their work. According to their creators, Glaze and NightShade were both developed to protect human creatives against the invasive uses of generative artificial intelligence. The tools are popular with digital artists who want to stop artificial intelligence models (like the AI art generator Stable Diffusion) from copying their unique styles without consent. Together, Glaze and NightShade have been downloaded almost nine million times. But according to an international group of researchers, these tools have critical weaknesses that mean they cannot reliably stop AI models from training on artists’ work. The tools add subtle, invisible distortions (known as poisoning perturbations) to digital images. These ‘poisons’ are designed to confuse AI models during training. Glaze takes a passive approach, hindering the AI model’s ability to extract key stylistic features. NightShade goes further, actively corrupting the learning process by causing the AI model to associate an artist’s style with unrelated concepts. But the researchers have created a method – called LightShed – that can bypass these protections. LightShed can detect, reverse-engineer and remove these distortions, effectively stripping away the poisons and rendering the images usable again for Generative AI model training. It was developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge along with colleagues at the Technical University Darmstadt and the University of Texas at San Antonio. The researchers hope that by publicising their work – which will be presented at the USENIX Security Symposium, a major security conference, in August – they can let creatives know that there are major issues with art protection tools. LightShed works through a three-step process. It first identifies whether an image has been altered with known poisoning techniques. In a second, reverse engineering step, it learns the characteristics of the perturbations using publicly available poisoned examples. Finally, it eliminates the poison to restore the image to its original, unprotected form. In experimental evaluations, LightShed detected NightShade-protected images with 99.98% accuracy and effectively removed the embedded protections from those images. “This shows that even when using tools like NightShade, artists are still at risk of their work being used for training AI models without their consent,” said first author Hanna Foerster from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, who conducted the work during an internship at TU Darmstadt. Although LightShed reveals serious vulnerabilities in art protection tools, the researchers stress that it was developed not as an attack on them – but rather an urgent call to action to produce better, more adaptive ones. “We see this as a chance to co-evolve defenses,” said co-author Professor Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi from the Technical University of Darmstadt. “Our goal is to collaborate with other scientists in this field and support the artistic community in developing tools that can withstand advanced adversaries.” The landscape of AI and digital creativity is rapidly evolving. In March this year, OpenAI rolled out a ChatGPT image model that could instantly produce artwork in the style of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio. This sparked a wide range of viral memes – and equally wide discussions about image copyright, in which legal analysts noted that Studio Ghibli would be limited in how it could respond to this since copyright law protects specific expression, not a specific artistic ‘style’. Following these discussions, OpenAI announced prompt safeguards to block some user requests to generate images in the styles of living artists. But issues over generative AI and copyright are ongoing, as highlighted by the copyright and trademark infringement case currently being heard in London’s high court. Global photography agency Getty Images is alleging that London-based AI company Stability AI trained its image generation model on the agency’s huge archive of copyrighted pictures. Stability AI is fighting Getty’s claim and arguing that the case represents an “overt threat” to the generative AI industry. And earlier this month, Disney and Universal announced they are suing AI firm Midjourney over its image generator, which the two companies said is a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” “What we hope to do with our work is to highlight the urgent need for a roadmap towards more resilient, artist-centred protection strategies,” said Foerster. “We must let creatives know that they are still at risk and collaborate with others to develop better art protection tools in future.” Hanna Foerster is a member of Darwin College, Cambridge. Reference: Hanna Foerster et al. ‘LightShed: Defeating Perturbation-based Image Copyright Protections.’ Paper presented at the 34th USENIX Security Symposium. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity25/presentation/foerster Artists urgently need stronger defences to protect their work from being used to train AI models without their consent. Even when using tools like NightShade, artists are still at risk of their work being used for training AI models without their consentHanna FoersterAnastasia Babenko via Getty ImagesArtist at work The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms. Yes
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AI art protection tools still leave creators at risk, researchers sayTuesday, 24 June 2025So say a team of researchers who have uncovered significant weaknesses in two of the art protection tools most used by artists to safeguard their work. According to their creators, Glaze and NightShade were both developed to protect human creatives against the invasive uses of generative artificial intelligence. The tools are popular with digital artists who want to stop artificial intelligence models (like the AI art generator Stable Diffusion) from copying their unique styles without consent. Together, Glaze and NightShade have been downloaded almost nine million times. But according to an international group of researchers, these tools have critical weaknesses that mean they cannot reliably stop AI models from training on artists’ work. The tools add subtle, invisible distortions (known as poisoning perturbations) to digital images. These ‘poisons’ are designed to confuse AI models during training. Glaze takes a passive approach, hindering the AI model’s ability to extract key stylistic features. NightShade goes further, actively corrupting the learning process by causing the AI model to associate an artist’s style with unrelated concepts. But the researchers have created a method – called LightShed – that can bypass these protections. LightShed can detect, reverse-engineer and remove these distortions, effectively stripping away the poisons and rendering the images usable again for Generative AI model training. It was developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge along with colleagues at the Technical University Darmstadt and the University of Texas at San Antonio. The researchers hope that by publicising their work – which will be presented at the USENIX Security Symposium, a major security conference, in August – they can let creatives know that there are major issues with art protection tools. LightShed works through a three-step process. It first identifies whether an image has been altered with known poisoning techniques. In a second, reverse engineering step, it learns the characteristics of the perturbations using publicly available poisoned examples. Finally, it eliminates the poison to restore the image to its original, unprotected form. In experimental evaluations, LightShed detected NightShade-protected images with 99.98% accuracy and effectively removed the embedded protections from those images. “This shows that even when using tools like NightShade, artists are still at risk of their work being used for training AI models without their consent,” said first author Hanna Foerster from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, who conducted the work during an internship at TU Darmstadt. Although LightShed reveals serious vulnerabilities in art protection tools, the researchers stress that it was developed not as an attack on them – but rather an urgent call to action to produce better, more adaptive ones. “We see this as a chance to co-evolve defenses,” said co-author Professor Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi from the Technical University of Darmstadt. “Our goal is to collaborate with other scientists in this field and support the artistic community in developing tools that can withstand advanced adversaries.” The landscape of AI and digital creativity is rapidly evolving. In March this year, OpenAI rolled out a ChatGPT image model that could instantly produce artwork in the style of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio. This sparked a wide range of viral memes – and equally wide discussions about image copyright, in which legal analysts noted that Studio Ghibli would be limited in how it could respond to this since copyright law protects specific expression, not a specific artistic ‘style’. Following these discussions, OpenAI announced prompt safeguards to block some user requests to generate images in the styles of living artists. But issues over generative AI and copyright are ongoing, as highlighted by the copyright and trademark infringement case currently being heard in London’s high court. Global photography agency Getty Images is alleging that London-based AI company Stability AI trained its image generation model on the agency’s huge archive of copyrighted pictures. Stability AI is fighting Getty’s claim and arguing that the case represents an “overt threat” to the generative AI industry. And earlier this month, Disney and Universal announced they are suing AI firm Midjourney over its image generator, which the two companies said is a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” “What we hope to do with our work is to highlight the urgent need for a roadmap towards more resilient, artist-centred protection strategies,” said Foerster. “We must let creatives know that they are still at risk and collaborate with others to develop better art protection tools in future.” Hanna Foerster is a member of Downing College, Cambridge. Reference: Hanna Foerster et al. ‘LightShed: Defeating Perturbation-based Image Copyright Protections.’ Paper presented at the 34th USENIX Security Symposium. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity25/presentation/foerster Artists urgently need stronger defences to protect their work from being used to train AI models without their consent. Even when using tools like NightShade, artists are still at risk of their work being used for training AI models without their consentHanna FoersterAnastasia Babenko via Getty ImagesArtist at work The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms. Yes
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