Join Revd Mpho Tutu, daughter of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as she discusses The Book of Forgiving, written jointly with her father.
In the book, Desmond and Mpho Tutu offer guidance from their own lives and all they have witnessed along the four-fold path of forgiveness. The Book of Forgiving is an inspiring, personal and practical guide to forgiveness and to creating a more united world by learning to let go of resentment and realise that we can forgive and still pursue justice.

Mpho will be in discussion with Broadcaster and University Challenge host Jeremy Paxman.

For tickets email: Sophia@childrensradiofoundation.org

Dress code: Lounge suits or blazer and shirt (no jeans and for ladies no above the knee)

speaker:

Vincent Courcelle-Labrousse, Defence Counsel at the ICTR and Special Tribunal for Lebanon

Speaker: Dr Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen (The Danish Institute for Human Rights)

Part of the Refugee Studies Centre Trinity term Public Seminar Series

Book your tickets here: http://www.scienceoxford.com/live/whats-on-so/the-future-of-the-universe

What is the future of our universe?
Are we alone or could other universes exist?
When and how might it end, or will it go on forever?

These and other questions have been in our thoughts since humanity first began to think beyond the next meal. New insights into the nature or our universe and how it was formed are forcing us to rethink our answers to these fundamental questions.

Science Oxford invites you to join a stellar panel of speakers including Professor Jim Gates, science advisor to the US Presidency from the University of Maryland, Oxford University’s Professor Frank Close and cosmologist Jo Dunkley. All under the chairmanship of Quentin Cooper, science broadcaster extraordinaire, in a mind-expanding and not to be missed evening of discussion and exploration at the Mathematical Institute, one of Oxford’s newest and exciting public venues.

Al Jazeera host Mehdi Hasan will challenge Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins sans Frontieres and former French Foreign Minister, on France’s military interventionism. Are the country’s motives altruistic or do they respond to a neo-colonialist agenda? And is there a tipping point when intervening becomes essential? Syria, Mali, Libya, Kosovo and more.

This debate will be filmed and aired on Al Jazeera English at a later date. Audience members will be invited to participate in a Q&A section during the second half of the conversation.

Order free tickets here: http://bernardkouchner.eventbrite.co.uk

A new report by the Humanitarian Innovation Project, Refugee Economies: Rethinking Popular Assumptions, will be launched to coincide with World Refugee Day, on Friday 20 June 2014. It is one of the very first studies on the economic life of refugees and fundamentally challenges existing models of refugee assistance.

The report is based on participatory, mixed methods research including about 1,600 surveys in Uganda, one of the few refugee-hosting countries in Africa that allows refugees the right to work and freedom of movement. However, it has wider implications for the emerging refugee crises around the world.

Far from being uniformly dependent, refugees are part of complex and vibrant economic systems. They are often entrepreneurial and, if given the opportunity, can help themselves and their communities, as well as contributing to the host economy. The data in the new report challenges five popular myths about refugees’ economic lives:

that refugees are economically isolated;
that they are a burden on host states;
that they are economically homogenous;
that they are technologically illiterate;
that they are dependent on humanitarian assistance.

Read more about the report: http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/refugeeeconomies

Oxford Transitional Justice Research is pleased to invite you to its 2014 Summer Conference ‘Borders and Boundaries in Transitional Justice’.

This year’s conference, hosted with the support of the Planethood Foundation, Law Faculty, and the Centre for Criminology, will explore the issue of how borders and boundaries affect transitional justice processes across the world. The conference is organised around four panels:

The interplay between local, regional, and foreign transnational processes;
The role of diaspora and stateless communities in transitional justice;
The ways in which international law is dealing with cross-border transitional justice concerns; and
How local, national, and global approaches are affecting the theory and practice of transitional justice.

Registration is now open and we encourage all potential participants to register as soon as possible. Spaces are limited. We particularly welcome graduate students and early career researchers working on issues of transitional justice. A small registration fee includes tea and coffee and a light lunch.

In 2014 Barnett House is celebrating its centenary. The celebrations culminate with the Reunion Weekend on 12-13 July 2014.

This includes:
– Keynote talk from Magdalena Sepulveda, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
– The 100th birthday tea party (the V-C Andrew Hamilton will cut the birthday cake!)
– A talk on the history of Barnett House and the launch of the book on the history.
– Open house at the department with displays of historic material and current research.
– Drinks and dinner with an after dinner talk from Prof Jonathan Bradshaw.
– Showing of the film Rich Man, Poor Man based on research carried out by Robert Walker and Elaine Chase with a discussion with the director of the film.

There are currently more than 2.8 million registered refugees from Syria. Ninety-six percent of these refugees are hosted by neighbouring countries – Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. With the exception of Germany and a few other limited initiatives, the primary aim of the European response has been to contain the crisis in the Syrian region and to reinforce Europe’s borders.

This event marks the launch of a new RSC Policy Briefing, ‘Protection in Europe for refugees from Syria’. Report authors, Cynthia Orchard and Andrew Miller, will provide an overview of the European reaction generally, as well as brief summaries of selected countries’ responses. They argue that containment of the refugee crisis to the Syrian region is unsustainable and advocate for European countries to open their doors to refugees from the region and to expand safe and legal routes of entry.

Also being launched at this event is issue 47 of Forced Migration Review on ‘The Syria crisis, displacement and protection’. Professor Roger Zetter, co-author (with Héloïse Ruaudel) of a major article in the issue entitled ‘Development and protection challenges of the Syrian refugee crisis’, will look at early recovery and social cohesion interventions and the transition from assistance to development-led interventions in Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan. FMR47 is funded by the Regional Development and Protection Programme, a Denmark-led initiative with contributions from the EU, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, UK and Czech Republic, for whose inception report Professor Zetter was the lead author.

The event will be followed by a reception at 4pm. If you are unable to attend in person, you can watch live via a video link. For more information, please visit: www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/syrialaunch

A public meeting with a short introductory talk followed by questions and discussion.

The end of violence
Thursday 25 September, 7:30pm to 9:00pm
Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates
All welcome

Organised by Oxford Communist Corresponding Society.
This is the last in a three-part series of public meetings on violence and war. The three meetings of the series are:

Thursday 17 July
The war to end all wars

Thursday 21 August
The anti-war movement

Thursday 25 September
The end of violence

All are from 7:30pm to 9:00pm in the Town Hall

Speakers: Professor Deborah E Anker (Harvard University), Professor Efrat A Arbel (University of British Columbia)

Based on a recent report published by the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic (HIRC), entitled Bordering on Failure: Canada–U.S. Border Policy and the Politics of Refugee Exclusion, this talk will examine the Canada–US Safe Third Country Agreement, a ‘refugee sharing’ agreement implemented by Canada and the United States to exercise more control over their shared border. Drawing on interview data collected along the Canada–US border, it will evaluate how the Agreement has altered the Canada–US border landscape, and the effects it has had on asylum seekers.

The HIRC report concludes that the Safe Third Country Agreement not only closes Canada’s borders to asylum seekers, but also diminishes the legal protections available to them under domestic and international law. It further concludes that the Agreement has failed in its goal of enhancing the integrity of the Canada–US border, and has in fact prompted a rise in human smuggling and unauthorised border crossings, making the border more dangerous and disorderly, and placing the lives and safety of asylum seekers at risk. The talk will highlight these central findings, and, situating the Agreement in its global context, also examine the broader effects of its implementation.

About the speakers:

Deborah E Anker

Deborah Anker is Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRC). She has taught law students at Harvard for over 25 years. Author of a leading treatise, Law of Asylum in the United States, Anker has co-drafted ground-breaking gender asylum guidelines and amicus curiae briefs. Professor Anker is one of the most widely known asylum scholars and practitioners in the United States; she is cited frequently by international and domestic courts and tribunals, including the United States Supreme Court. Professor Anker is a pioneer in the development of clinical legal education in the immigration field, training students in direct representation of refugees and creating a foundation for clinics at law schools around the country.

Efrat A Arbel

Efrat Arbel is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia. She completed her masters and doctoral studies at Harvard Law School, during which time she was actively involved with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Law Clinic. Dr Arbel researches in the areas of constitutional law, refugee law, Aboriginal law, and prison law, in Canada and the United States. She has published widely in these fields, and is co-author (with Alletta Brenner) of Bordering on Failure: Canada–U.S. Border Policy and the Politics of Refugee Exclusion. Combining her scholarly work with legal practice, Dr Arbel is also engaged in advocacy and litigation involving refugee and prisoner rights, and is an executive member of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers.

Christian Fuchs, Professor of Social Media at Westminster University, will lead the discussion of his recently published book Social Media: A Critical Introduction, which navigates the controversies and contradictions of the complex digital media landscape.

Exploring the role of social media in contemporary popular movements including the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring, and drawing on theorists including Marx, Weber, Habermas, and Durkheim, Professor Fuchs asks:

Is Google good or evil?
Is Facebook a surveillance threat to privacy?
Does Twitter enhance democracy?
What did WikiLeaks reveal about political accountability, the transparency of power, and new forms of cultural censorship?

Speakers: Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (University College London) and Professor Gil Loescher (Refugee Studies Centre)

Refugee and Forced Migration Studies has grown from being a concern of a relatively small number of scholars and policy researchers in the 1980s to a global field of interest with thousands of students worldwide studying displacement either from traditional disciplinary perspectives or as a core component of newer programmes across the Humanities and Social and Political Sciences. Today the field encompasses both rigorous academic research which may or may not ultimately inform policy and practice, as well as action-research focused on advocating in favour of refugees’ needs and rights. This authoritative Handbook critically evaluates the birth and development of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, and analyses the key contemporary and future challenges faced by academics and practitioners working with and for forcibly displaced populations around the world.

In this talk, Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Professor Gil Loescher, two of the Handbook’s editors, will discuss how the book provides a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the key intellectual, political, social and institutional challenges arising from mass displacement in the world today. Laying out the thinking behind the Handbook, they will examine how it addresses these challenges and attempts to unify a diverse, evolving and crucial field.

Professor Loescher and Dr Fiddian-Qasmiyeh will be joined by a number of the Handbook’s authors, who will reflect on their own contributions to the volume and highlight some of cutting-edge approaches and challenges emerging in their respective areas of expertise.

Order your copy of the Handbook online from Oxford University Press by 30 December 2014 and receive a 30% discount. Click here for details.

Light refreshments will be provided after the event.

In this lecture, Rory O. Millson, Partner at Cravath, Swaine and Moore LLP, will explore the legality and ethics of the increasingly common use of military drones to kill ‘enemy combatants’ in the ongoing fight against terrorist groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Professor Peter Piot, Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine; Professor of Global Health; and Commissioner on the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations, will provide his perspective on the key long-term challenges in global health, addressing the burden of both communicable and non-communicable disease.

This seminar will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome.

Join in on twitter with #c21health

This seminar will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEwlBU7bNrA

About the speaker:
Professor Peter Piot is the Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a Professor of Global Health. Professor Piot is also a Commissioner on the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations. In 2009-2010 he was the Director of the Institute for Global Health at Imperial College for Science, Technology and Medicine, London. He was the founding Executive Director of UNAIDS and Under Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1995 until 2008, and was an Associate Director of the Global Programme on AIDS of WHO. Under his leadership UNAIDS became the chief advocate for worldwide action against AIDS, also spear heading UN reform by bringing together 10 UN system organizations.

Professor Piot has a medical degree from the University of Ghent (1974) and a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Antwerp (1980). In 1976 he co-discovered the Ebola virus in Zaire while working at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium. He was a professor of microbiology, and of public health at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, the Free University of Brussels, and the University of Nairobi, was a Senior Fellow at the University of Washington, a Scholar in Residence at the Ford Foundation, and a Senior Fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He held the chair 2009/2010 “Knowledge against poverty” at the College de France in Paris, and is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and was elected a foreign member of the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences, and is also an elected member of the Académie Nationale de Médicine of France, and of the Royal Academy of Medicine of his native Belgium, and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.

He was knighted as a baron in 1995 and has published over 550 scientific articles and 16 books, including his memior No Time to Lose. In 2013 he was the laureate of the Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize for Medical Research and in 2014 he received the Prince Mahidol Award for Public Health.

We have yet to discover other life in our Galaxy, but we have a good idea where it might be! Join the astrophysicists Chris Lintott (BBC’s Sky at Night) and Grant Miller from Zooniverse, the largest, most successful online citizen science project, discuss exoplanets and their potential habitability.

Speaker: Lina Molokotos-Liederman (Uppsala University)
The first part of the seminar will look at the Orthodox Christian approach of addressing social issues of poverty, injustice and inequality, and the concept of Orthodox diakonia. The second part will focus on Greece as a case study, discussing the response of the Church to the social costs of the economic crisis (its charitable social welfare activities), but also the impact of this crisis on the Church itself.

As the dust settles after the Scottish referendum and the UK gears up for the next general election, the Oxford Martin School and the Department of Politics and International Relations bring constitutional experts together to debate what next for the United Kingdom?

Panel:

Professor Iain McLean, Professor of Politics, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford and specialist in devolution
Dr Scot Peterson, Bingham Research Fellow in Constitutional Studies and Junior Research Fellow in the Social Sciences, University of Oxford
Chair: Mure Dickie, Financial Times Scotland Correspondent

There will be a drinks reception after the debate, all welcome

About the speakers

Professor Iain McLean was born in Edinburgh and went to school there. He came to England for the first time as a student at Oxford where he obtained his MA, M.Phil and D.Phil. He was a college tutor in an undergraduate college for 13 years, during which the college scaled the heights of PPE. He has worked at the Universities of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Warwick, and Oxford, and has held visiting professorships at Washington & Lee, Stanford, Yale, and the Australian National University.

He has been an elected councillor on Tyne & Wear County Council (committee chair) and Oxford City Council (group leader). In recent years he has principally worked on UK public policy, and started the Department of Politics and International Relations Public Policy Unit in 2005.

His research areas and insterests are:

Public policy, especially UK. Specialisms in devolution; spatial issues in taxation and public expenditure; electoral systems; constitutional reform; church and state.
The Union (of the United Kingdom) since 1707. Rational-choice approaches to political history
Dr Scot Peterson primarily in Colorado, in the United States, where he did his undergraduate work in Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He earned a Master of Arts degree from the University of Chicago in Political Science, and attended law school at the University of California (Boalt Hall) in Berkeley. After practicing law for fifteen years in Colorado he came to Oxford, where he earned his doctoral degree.

He is interested in the constitutional history of the United Kingdom and of the United States, focusing particularly on matters arising from the relationship between church and state. His D.Phil. thesis was about the religious establishments, or the lack of them, in the three nations that make up Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland) in the early twentieth century. He is concerned with questions of why those relationships have been maintained in recent history, despite the supposed ‘secularization’ inherent in modern Western democracies. He analyzes them as political and historical phenomena, engaging in archive research and applying rational choice methodology.

Directed by the Oscar Award winning documentary maker Alex Gibney, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks tells the story of Julian Assange’s rise and fall as the founder of Wikileaks and self-proclaimed defender of truth and freedom. The film draws on the testimony of over twenty witnesses and charts the role of Bradley Manning and other key players in the birth of a new age of digitial whistle-blowing and citizen journalism.

This free screening is being held as part of the new FLJS programme examining the socio-legal implications of the rise of social media in the digital age, and raises questions in relation to freedom of speech, censorship, and the respective roles of the citizen and the state in the twenty-first century.

Dr Jonathan Bright, Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, will give a short talk before the film highlighting some of the main issues raised.

Eating Restoration Glue to Stay Alive: A History of Hermitage
With Dr Rosalind P. Blakesley, University of Cambridge

Ashmolean Lecture Theatre

Wed 22 Oct, 11am–12pm

The Hermitage is an institute like no other,
 housing over 3 million objects in buildings as iconic as the Winter Palace, seat of the Romanov dynasty until its spectacular fall from grace in 1917. As the Hermitage celebrates its 250th anniversary, Dr Blakesley charts its history from the lavish patronage of Catherine the Great to the unparalleled acquisitions of Impressionist and Post- Impressionist works.

Professor Virginia Held, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Hunter College, City University of New York, USA speaks on ‘Care and Justice in Society’
More info: http://www.ageing.ox.ac.uk/events/ethics-of-care

Speaker: Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (University College London)

Refugee camps are typically perceived as militarised and patriarchal spaces, and yet the Sahrawi refugee camps and their inhabitants have consistently been represented as ideal in nature: uniquely secular and democratic spaces, and characterised by gender equality. Drawing on extensive research with and about Sahrawi refugees in Algeria, Cuba, Spain, South Africa and Syria, Dr Fiddian-Qasmiyeh explores how, why and to what effect such idealised depictions have been projected onto the international arena. In this talk, she will argue that secularism and the empowerment of Sahrawi refugee women have been strategically invoked to secure the humanitarian and political support of Western state and non-state actors who ensure the continued survival of the camps and their inhabitants. She will challenge listeners to reflect critically on who benefits from assertions of good, bad and ideal refugees, and whose interests are advanced by interwoven discourses about the empowerment of women and secularism in contexts of war and peace.

Light refreshments will be provided after the event.

No other large-scale health intervention can have as big an impact on child mortality as vaccination. Across the world millions of lives have been saved by innoculation, and in the past ten years the annual number of measles cases worldwide has dropped from one million to 200,000. But just as important as creating new vaccines is ensuring that children have access to them. Join us at the Oxford Martin School as Dr Matthew Snape, Consultant in Vaccinology at the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS trust and Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at the University of Oxford, looks at the challenges involved in making sure the success story of childhood vaccination can be a global one.

Join in on twitter with #c21health

This seminar will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CO2L5Rq7tU

Tutankhamun and Revolution
With Dr Paul Collins, Jaleh Hearn Curator for Ancient Near East and co-curator of ‘Discovering Tutankhamun’

Ashmolean Lecture Theatre

Sat 25 Oct, 2‒3pm

This talk considers three historical periods when the image and idea of Tutankhamun became a focus for revolution both in Egypt and beyond. Starting in the ancient world, the revolutions of the Amarna age, into which Tutankhamun was born, witnessed a transformation in the concept of kingship. In the early 20th century, as Egypt claimed independence from British control, Tutankhamun became a symbol of opposition to imperial rule. Finally, in recent years, Egypt has faced political upheaval and revolutionaries
have again employed the image of Tutankhamun.

Despite our extensive knowledge of the major challenges the world faces during coming decades, impasse exists in global attempts to address economic, climate, trade, security, and other key issues. The Chancellor will examine the implications of this gridlock, drawing on the work of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations – of which he is a member – as well as experiences from his distinguished political and diplomatic career.

This lecture is also being live webcast on youtube, please follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB3QmvwvHCk

About the Speaker

Lord Patten joined the Conservative Research Department in 1966. He was seconded to the Cabinet Office in 1970 and was personal assistant and political secretary to Lord Carrington and Lord Whitelaw when they were Chairmen of the Conservative Party from 1972-1974. In 1974 he was appointed the youngest ever Director of the Conservative Research Department, a post which he held until 1979.

Lord Patten was elected as Member of Parliament for Bath in May 1979, a seat he held until April 1992. In 1983 he wrote The Tory Case, a study of Conservatism. Following the General Election of June 1983, Lord Patten was appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Northern Ireland Office and in September 1985 Minister of State at the Department of Education and Science. In September 1986 he became Minister for Overseas Development at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. He was appointed to the Privy Council in 1989 and was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1998. In July 1989 he became Secretary of State for the Environment. In November 1990 he was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Chairman of the Conservative Party.

Lord Patten was appointed Governor of Hong Kong in April 1992, a position he held until 1997, overseeing the return of Hong Kong to China. He was Chairman of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland set up under the Good Friday Peace Agreement, which reported in 1999. From 1999 to 2004 he was European Commissioner for External Relations, and in January 2005 he took his seat in the House of Lords. In 2006 he was appointed Co-Chair of the UK-India Round Table. He was Chairman of the BBC Trust from 2011-2014.

He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, and Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He served as Chancellor of Newcastle University from 1999 to 2009, and was elected Chancellor of the University of Oxford in 2003. His publications include What Next? Surviving the 21st Century (2008); Not Quite the Diplomat: Home Truths About World Affairs (2005) and East and West (1998), about Asia and its relations with the rest of the world.

This lecture is a joint event by the Oxford Martin School and The Oxford International Relations Society (IRSoc)

Speaker: Kate Allen, Director, Amnesty International UK

The lecture is free and open to all and will be followed by a drinks reception for members of IRSoc, membership is available on the night.

About the speaker:
Kate Allen is the Director of Amnesty International UK. She fronts Amnesty’s campaigns which demand respect for women’s rights, stronger restrictions on the arms trade, the release of all prisoners of conscience, and an end to torture and the death penalty.

About IRSoc:
Oxford International Relations Society is one of the most active and dynamic societies at Oxford. Its remit is to educate students about the opportunities and challenges in global affairs, including international law. Our events are widely anticipated as highlights of Oxford’s calendar and we are building an exceptional reputation among our members and throughout the wider student body. (http://irsoc.org/)

Speaker: Dr Kirsten McConnachie (Refugee Studies Centre)

Refugee camps are imbued in the public imagination with assumptions of anarchy, danger and refugee passivity. Governing Refugees: Justice, Order and Legal Pluralism marshals empirical data and ethnographic detail to challenge such assumptions, arguing that refugee camps should be recognised as spaces where social capital can not only survive, but thrive. In this talk, Dr McConnachie will examine themes of community governance, order maintenance and legal pluralism in the context of refugee camps on the Thailand-Burma border. The nature of a refugee situation is such that multiple actors take a role in camp management, creating a complex governance environment which has a significant impact on the lives of refugees. This situation also speaks to deeply important questions of legal and political scholarship, including the production of order beyond the state, justice as a contested site, and the influence of transnational human rights discourses on local justice practice. Dr McConnachie’s book presents valuable new research into the subject of refugee camps as well as an original critical analysis.

Dr David Clifton, Royal Academy of Engineering University Fellow in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford, will discuss how healthcare systems world-wide are entering a new, exciting phase: ever-increasing quantities of complex, multiscale data concerning all aspects of patient care are starting to be routinely acquired and stored, a process in which mobile health (or “m-health”) has a key role to play.

This seminar will describe the next generation of mobile healthcare technologies, where much of the key, underpinning research is taking place at Oxford. David will describe how mobile healthcare can improve patient outcomes, allow patients a greater stake in managing their own conditions, and, in underdeveloped regions, improve access to affordable healthcare.

Join in on twitter with #c21health

This seminar will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C4CrjeQsOk

About the speaker:
Dr David Clifton is a tenure-track member of faculty in the Department of Engineering Science of the University of Oxford, and a Governing Body fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is a University Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

A graduate of the Department of Engineering Science, Dr Clifton trained in information engineering and was supervised by Professor Lionel Tarassenko CBE, Chair of Electrical Engineering. He spent four years as a post-doctoral researcher in biomedical engineering at Oxford before his appointment to the faculty, at which point he started the Computational Health Informatics (CHI) lab.

Dr Clifton teaches the undergraduate mathematics syllabus in Engineering Science, runs the graduate course in machine learning at the Oxford Centre for Doctoral Training in Healthcare Innovation, and teaches engineering policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford. He is a founding Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal of Biomedical & Healthcare Informatics (JBHI), an Associate Editor of BMC Medical Informatics, and of the British Journal of Health Informatics & Monitoring (BJHIM). He is the Associate Director of the Oxford Centre for Affordable Healthcare (OxCAHT).

This public lecture is held by the Oxford Martin School in conjunction with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and Wittgenstein Centre

Programme:

A new view on humans in the 21st century: selected results from the book, (World Population and Human Capital in the 21st Century) – Professor Wolfgang Lutz
Panel Discussion:
Professor Wolfgang Lutz, Founding Director, Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital
Professor Francesco Billari, Head of Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, Professor of Sociology and Demography, Fellow of Nuffield College
Professor David Coleman, Supernumerary Fellow in Human Sciences and University Professor in Demography
Professor Sarah Harper, Co-Director, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, Oxford Martin School
Q & A with the audience and lead authors Bilal Barakat, Stuart Basten and Anne Goujon
The lecture will be followed br a drinks reception, all welcome

About the speakers

Wolfgang Lutz is Founding Director of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW, WU), Leader of the World Population Program at IIAS, Director of the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, and Professorial Research Fellow at the Oxford Martin School for 21st Century Studies. He has worked on family demography, fertility analysis, population projections, and the interactions between population and environment. He is author of the series of world population projections produced at IIASA and has developed approaches for projecting education and human capital. He is also principal investigator of the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis. Wolfgang Lutz is author and editor of 28 books and more than 200 refereed articles, including seven in Science and Nature.

Francesco Billari is Head of Department, Professor of Sociology and Demography and Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford University. He is currently President of the European Association for Population Studies, a Fellow of the European Academy of Sociology, and one of the founding members of Population Europe. His research areas include Ageing, Globalisation, Human Development, Gender Practices in Household, Ageing and Social Policy, Anthropological Demography.

David Coleman has been the Professor of Demography at Oxford University since 2002 and was the Reader in Demography between 1996-2002, and Lecturer in Demography since 1980. Between 1985 and 1987 he worked for the British government, as the Special Adviser to the Home Secretary, and then to the Ministers of Housing and of the Environment. Research interests include the comparative demographic trends in the industrial world; the future of fertility, the demographic consequences of migration and the demography of ethnic minorities. International collaborative work continues on these topics at the Vienna Institute of Demography. He has worked as a consultant for the Home Office, for the United Nations and for private business.

Sarah Harper is Professor of Gerontology at the University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, Oxford Martin School and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College. She serves on the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology, which advises the Prime Minister on the scientific evidence for strategic policies and frameworks. She currently chairs the UK government Foresight Review on Ageing Societies, and the European Ageing Index Panel for the UNECE Population Unit and European Commission’s Directorate General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion. Sarah Harper is a Governor of the Pensions Policy Institute, and a Director of the Pension Foundation ClubVita.