Last week, 18 CAMS board members gathered around a table to review our over-arching and individual Board strategies for 2025/2026 in light of our progress to date.
Our vision is clearer than ever – ‘to be the leading collaborative community that bridges industrial need in analytical measurement science with academic research and innovation’. Our USP has always been that we are ‘industry led’ in our direction and that the academic: industry partnerships catalysed are impactful and help build a thriving talent pipeline of researchers across the UK and Ireland.
Our progress to date highlighted the 62 funded programmes, none of which would be running if it had not been for the co-funding provided by the 33 academic and industry organisations, and the on-going support from the Analytical Chemistry Trust Fund that helped CAMS launch and now maintains the Grand Challenge co-funding and CAMS Fellow funding.
When reviewing our Board strategies (Industry, Academic (including innovation themes) and Skills/Training), well…. what a change in pace, ambition and engagement! We heard about new funding application, white papers, a state of the nation event in sensors and photonics, a fully funded 2-day residential training course for CAMS-funded researchers, webinars on new analytical technologies … (the list is too long for me to carry on!).
CAMS was established to be, and remains, a network that does not replace existing activities but brings the whole analytical community together to focus on partnerships that make a difference - our mission ‘to connect, develop and secure a thriving future talent and innovation pipeline for analytical measurement science’… can you help us?
We are inviting :
- Individual members to join (to benefit from our community activities and events, funding opportunities and signposting to training or jobs)
- Training members (maybe you have training to offer CAMS researchers or maybe we can help you signpost the community to your training?)
- Industry members to join – at the heart of CAMS, operating through 2 tiers: (for information contact secretariat@cams-uk.co.uk) (to benefit from finding new and different solutions from across the UK and Ireland to your specific or industry-shared measurement challenges)
- Networks and professional organisations connected with analytical measurement science to join (to benefit from our community activities and help you extend your reach)
- Academic members to join (to participate in our annual industry and grand challenge calls - dates to be released soon - and to apply for CAMS Fellowships) (more info here)
So –What a great start to 2025. At times this journey has felt slow but I now think we may need to slow ourselves down! Thank you to all of our CAMS members and funders to date. It feels like that stone that has been rolling has gathered some significant momentum… no moss here!
