Some face-to-face events are returning. Check carefully for any requirements.
speaker:
Vincent Courcelle-Labrousse, Defence Counsel at the ICTR and Special Tribunal for Lebanon
You are cordially invited to the Magdalen College Trinity Term Libraries & Archives Talk:
Liam Dolan, Sherardian Professor of Botany, will speak on early botany.
A talk in Magdalen Summer Common Room (Cloisters III) followed by a chance to see our Early Botanical Books exhibition in the Old Library.
Rheumatoid arthritis is a complex autoimmune disease affecting up to 1% of the population, causing a disabling inflammatory arthritis. The disease has two clinical similar subsets: autoantibody positive or seropositive disease, and autoantibody or seronegative disease. Recent advances in high-throughout SNP genotyping has resulted in the identification of >100 risk loci, in addition to well-known associations at the MHC. However, understanding the link between genetic loci and disease mechanism, is contingent on investigators identifying causal alleles and elucidating how they function to modify disease susceptibility. Furthermore, the mechanistic relationship between the seropositive and seronegative rheumatoid arthritis clinical subsets is still unclear. We are now just starting to make progress in this direction. Here we present recent work on (1) efforts to localize MHC effects to functional amino acid sites within HLA genes, (2) methodological advances to connect non-MHC loci to functional alleles that influence gene regulation in a cell-specific manner, and (3) how genetics is giving us a clear picture on the heterogeneity of the genetic bases of the two clinically similar conditions of seronegative and seropositive rheumatoid arthritis.
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
The use of GM technologies is growing beyond agricultural crops. GM vaccines and GM animals are available and their use may need different regulatory considerations. In this talk, Dr Michael Bonsall from the Dept of Zoology, University of Oxford, will cover some of the scientific, policy and regulatory issues that challenge the use and implementation of GM organisms.
All cancers are caused by somatic mutations. However, the processes underlying the genesis of somatic mutations in human cancer are remarkably poorly understood. Recent large-scale cancer genome sequencing initiatives have provided us with new insights into these mutational processes through the mutational signatures they leave on the cancer genome. In this talk I will review the mutational signatures found across cancer and consider the underlying mutational processes that have been operative.
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.
Simon Singh will be discussing ‘Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial’.
The World Humanist Congress is taking place from Friday 8th August until Sunday 10th August in Oxford. Held every three years in different locations around the world, this years theme of the meeting is ‘Freedom of Thought and Expression’. We are pleased to announce during the conference period, 10 world-class speakers will be visiting the bookshop for a series of free 20 minute talks taking place in the Norrington Room. You do not need tickets to attend any of the talks but seating is limited, so please arrive early to get a ensure your place.
Sue Bolton and Fiona Ruck, smoking cessation specialists, look at the effects of passive smoking and their campaign for smoke-free homes and cars across Oxfordshire.
The talk will include myth-busting statistics and facts covering the effects of passive smoking on both adults and children, as well as a detailed look into what is in the cigarette smoke that is causing the adverse effects. Sue and Fiona will also look at local and national responses to this public health issue, including the Smoke Free Homes and Cars Pledge project.
Our speakers have worked as registered nurses and health visitors and worked for years in smoking cessation, including as a smoking and pregnancy specialist and as a smoking and young person’s specialist for Oxford Smoking Advice Service.
The Prime Minister wants to defeat dementia by 2025 and says: “Dementia now stands alongside cancer as one of the greatest enemies of humanity.” It affects over 800,000 people in Britain, at huge cost to the UK economy and at a huge personal price to the families and carers of those affected.
We have ideas about how dementia could be tackled in terms of management and treatment: including better drug delivery to the brain, improving early detection methods and providing an environment in which dementia patients can live safely and at relative peace.
But there are still more questions than answers in terms of the speed of research, care provision and the ethical debate around early diagnosis.
Join experts from the Medical Research Council and Oxford Dementia and Ageing Research (OxDARE) in an open and enlightening discussion on how we can defeat dementia: or at least manage it in light of new early detection methods. Defeating Dementia will be hosted by writer and broadcaster Quentin Cooper.
From the struggle to get up on a Monday morning to coping with jet-lag, the body has to carefully balance our need to be alert or to be at rest. But how does the
brain control this? How much sleep do we really need? Join us to hear Dr Peter Oliver discuss some of the facts and myths surrounding sleep; highlighting new research in this area as well as the role of genetics in the control of circadian rhythms. Plus, why do flamingos sleep on one leg??? Come along and find out!
twitter @oxfordscibar
facebook ‘British Science Association Oxfordshire Branch
Egyptomania: The Allure of Ancient Egypt
With Henrietta McCall, Department of the Middle East, British Museum
2pm Saturday, 11 October 2014 at Ashmolean Museum | Venue Information
Henrietta McCall talks about the enduring appeal of ancient Egypt in western culture. She assesses how it began with Napoleon in the early 19th century; how symbols and imagery from antiquity inspired architecture, gardens, furniture and fashion; and how in the 1920s that appeal reached its climax with the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun.
‘Tutankhamun and Co. Ltd’: Arthur Weigall and the Discovery of Tutankhamun’s Tomb
With Julie Hankey, author of ‘A Passion for Egypt: Arthur Weigall, Tutankhamun and the Curse of the Pharaohs’
Ashmolean Lecture Theatre
Tue 14 Oct, 2.30‒3.30pm
From 1905 to 1912, Arthur Weigall was Howard Carter’s successor as Chief Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt. He used his position to conduct a campaign against government practice of allowing amateur collectors to excavate for private profit. With Tutankhamun’s discovery, Weigall came into open conflict with Carter’s patron, Lord Carnarvon, over his exclusive contract with The Times, and ‒ at a time of political unrest in Egypt ‒ over his assumption of rights to the contents of the tomb.
Michaelmas Term 2014 Seminar Series
‘FERTILITY, REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT’
Thursdays – 12:30 – 14:00
Seminar Room, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing,
66 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PR.
Convener: Dr Melanie Frost
The Jerash and Decapolis Cities
With Linda Farrar, historian and archaeologist
Ashmolean Lecture Theatre
Thurs 16 Oct, 2–4pm (inc. tea & cake),
Today, the ancient Greco-Roman Decapolis region straddles the countries of Jordan, Israel and Syria. This lecture explores the distinct characteristics of the cities of Jerash, Gedara, Pella and Philidelphian (Aman) and tells the stories of each cities unique role in the development of this historic region.
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.
Prof Peter Visscher, Professor and Chair of Quantitative Genetics, Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland
Driven by advances in genome technologies, the last 7 years have witnessed a revolution in our understanding of complex trait variation in human populations. Results from genome-wide association studies and whole-genome exome studies have shown that the mutational target in the genome for most traits appears to be very large, such that many genes are involved in explaining genetic variation. Genetic architecture, the joint distribution of the effect size and frequency of variants that segregate in the population, is becoming clearer and differs between traits. I will show new results from disparate complex traits including height, schizophrenia, motor neurone disease and gene methylation, to illustrate polygenicity and the power of experimental sample size.
“Everywhere the Glint of Gold”: Colourising Tutankhamun’s Tomb
With Liam McNamara, Ashmolean Keeper for Ancient Egypt and Sudan and co-curator of ‘Discovering Tutankhamun’ exhibition
Ashmolean Lecture Theatre
Sat 18 Oct, 2‒3pm
Howard Carter’s evocative description of the ‘wonderful things’ he saw upon entering Tutankhamun’s tomb continues to capture the public’s imagination. The excavation of the tomb and its contents were documented in black and white photographs taken by Harry Burton. This talk explores the various methods by which the excavators – and their successors – sought to ‘colourise’ the contents of the king’s tomb, from 20th-century gouache paintings on ivory, to the latest in 21st-century digital imaging techniques.
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.
The first speaker in Oxford Females in Engineering, Science and Technology brand new speaker series ‘Inspiring STEM’ promises a fascinating talk on her research and personal experiences in combining professional career and personal life, do not miss out:
Professor Helen McShane is a Professor of Vaccinology and Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellow at Oxford University, where she leads a programme of research to develop a new vaccine for Tuberculosis (TB). The BCG vaccine currently administered to children has been around for 90 years and shows only a limited and short-lived effect. Crucially, it does not offer protection against pulmonary TB, which is the most common form of the disease. TB remains a major killer worldwide with 1.4 million victims a year, and resistance has evolved to many drugs used to treat it, so new ways of preventing the disease are badly needed.
Helen originally planned to become a GP, but after 6 months in practice decided to embark on clinical medicine and PhD research into infectious diseases. By the time she arrived at the defense of her thesis, she had been pregnant with her second child and she has successfully juggled home and work life ever since (now, a mum to 3 children).
‘Inspiring STEM’ series of talks aims to bring together Oxford’s Women in STEM, showcase the research performed by the very best scientists and engineers, and inspire the audience to realize their potential. It reflects the academic aspect of OxFEST while providing a glimpse into possible career paths that we can take.
Tutankhaten ‒ Prince and King
With Dr Marianne Eaton-Krauss, independent scholar
Ashmolean Lecture Theatre
Tue 21 Oct, 2.30‒ 3.30pm
The name of Tutankhamun is familiar throughout the world, yet academics continue to dispute not only the identity of the boy king’s parents, but also the meaning of the name he was given at birth, Tutankhaten. This lecture explores these questions and examines objects that document his life up until the moment the decision was taken to alterhis name to Tutankhamun, marking the conclusion of a campaign to restore the god Amun to his traditional place at the head of the pantheon from which he had been toppled by the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten.
What is it like to be a brain surgeon? How does it feel to hold someone’s life in your hands, to cut into the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason? How do you live with the consequences of performing a potentially life-saving operation when it all goes wrong? In neurosurgery, more than in any other branch of medicine, the doctor’s oath to ‘do no harm’ holds a bitter irony. Operations on the brain carry grave risks…
Henry Marsh will be discussing his book, ‘Do No Harm’.
cycle BOOM: Investigating how cities and bicycles shape older peoples’ experiences of cycling.
cycle BOOM is a 3-year study by Oxford Brookes to understand cycling among the older population and how this affects independence, health and wellbeing. The ultimate aim is to advise policy makers and practitioners how our environment and technologies can be designed to help people to continue to cycle in older age or to reconnect with cycling.
Ben Spencer will talk about the project and share some of the early findings from the first wave of research this summer.
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.
The Sick Rose is a beautifully gruesome and strangely fascinating visual tour through disease in an age before colour photography. This stunning volume, combining detailed illustrations of afflicted patients from some of the worlds rarest medical books, forms an unforgettable and profoundly human reminder of mankinds struggle with disease. Incorporating historic maps, pioneering charts and contemporary case notes, Richard Barnetts evocative overview reveals the fears and obsessions of an era gripped by epidemics. Richard will be accompanying his talk with a slide show presentation of the books illustrations in all their glory – not for the squeamish!
Michaelmas Term 2014 Seminar Series
‘FERTILITY, REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT’
Thursdays – 12:30 – 14:00
Seminar Room, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing,
66 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PR.
Convener: Dr Melanie Frost