On Wednesday of Week 2, we will be hosting Dr Joao Pedro Magalhaes who leads the Integrative Genomics of Aging Group at the Institute of Integrative Biology, University of Liverpool.

As usual, our talks cost £2 per entry, and are free for our members. Membership sign-ups available at the door!

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Talk abstract
Ageing is the major biomedical challenge of the 21st century, yet it remains largely mysterious, partly because the ageing process involves multiple genes and their interactions with each other and with the environment that remain poorly understood. Our work has focused on various high-throughput genomic approaches aimed at deciphering the genome and increasing our knowledge about how genes and pathways impact on ageing. Dietary manipulations of ageing are also of immense interest, which we have been studying using a combination of computational and experimental approaches in model organisms ranging from yeast to rats. Lastly, I will discuss our recent work in sequencing and analyzing the genome of the longest-lived mammal, the bowhead whale, to identify longevity assurance mechanisms.

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Speaker Profile

João Pedro graduated in Microbiology in Portugal. As a doctoral fellow, he studied the mechanisms of aging by joining the Aging and Stress Group at the University of Namur in Namur, Belgium. Fascinated by the genome and by the opportunities its sequencing opened, João Pedro then did a postdoc from 2004 to 2008 with genomics pioneer George Church at Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA. He developed high-throughput approaches for studying aging, including computational tools and databases, statistical models of mortality, and comparative genomics methods for investigating the evolution of longevity.

In 2008, he joined the Institute of Integrative Biology at the University of Liverpool as a Lecturer to develop his own group on genomic approaches to aging. “

In this talk Professor Paul Aveyard, Professor of Behavioural Medicine at the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Health Care Sciences will look at how our brains respond to cigarette smoking and the way that those responses drive continued smoking, sometimes against our will. Almost everyone who smokes believes smoking relieves stress, but I will discuss our research which seems to show the opposite is true. Understanding the way these brain processes work can help us understand how we can help people stop smoking

As adults can tell us when they are feeling pain we can often simply ask them whether pain medication is working. As babies cannot talk, we need to rely on other measures to find out whether they are feeling pain. It is not always possible to know whether a baby is in pain by looking at their behaviour. Join us to hear Dr Rebeccah Slater, discuss whether the use of modern brain imaging techniques can tell us whether a baby can feel pain. This is particularly important for babies admitted to intensive care after birth who may need lots of medical interventions to be performed everyday as part of their essential medical care.

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Could extinct species, like mammoths and passenger pigeons, be brought back to life? The science says yes. In ‘How to Clone a Mammoth’, Beth Shapiro, evolutionary biologist and pioneer in “ancient DNA” research, walks readers through the astonishing and controversial process of de-extinction.

Join us for this fascinating talk, where Beth will be talking us through her research and the the extraordinary cutting-edge science that is being used–today–to resurrect the past.

Part of Book at Lunchtime, a fortnightly series of bite size book discussions, with commentators from a range of disciplines. Free, all welcome – no booking required. Join us for a sandwich lunch from 12:45, with discussion from 13:00 to 13:45.

Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (Associate Professor of Modern Drama, University of Oxford) will discuss her book Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett with:

Michael Billington (Theatre Critic, The Guardian)
Morten Kringlebach (Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford)
Laura Marcus (Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature)

About the book

Evolutionary theory made its stage debut as early as the 1840s, reflecting a scientific advancement that was fast changing the world. Tracing this development in dozens of mainstream European and American plays, as well as in circus, vaudeville, pantomime, and “missing link” performances, Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett reveals the deep, transformative entanglement among science, art, and culture in modern times.

The stage proved to be no mere handmaiden to evolutionary science, though, often resisting and altering the ideas at its core. Many dramatists cast suspicion on the arguments of evolutionary theory and rejected its claims, even as they entertained its thrilling possibilities. Engaging directly with the relation of science and culture, this book considers the influence of not only Darwin but also Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, Wallace, Haeckel, de Vries, and other evolutionists on 150 years of theater. It shares significant new insights into the work of Ibsen, Shaw, Wilder, and Beckett, and writes female playwrights, such as Susan Glaspell and Elizabeth Baker, into the theatrical record, unpacking their dramatic explorations of biological determinism, gender essentialism, the maternal instinct, and the “cult of motherhood.”

It is likely that more people encountered evolution at the theater than through any other art form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Considering the liveliness and immediacy of the theater and its reliance on a diverse community of spectators and the power that entails, this book is a key text for grasping the extent of the public’s adaptation to the new theory and the legacy of its representation on the perceived legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of scientific work.

This talk is being held as part of the Practice of Evidence-Based Health Care module which is part of the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care. Members of the public are welcome to attend.
Carl Heneghan is Director of the Centre of Evidence-Based Medicine, a General Practitioner and Senior Tutor of Kellogg College.
Carl has been the author and principal investigator on the Cochrane reviews on Tamiflu in adults and children and for 6 years he has worked alongside an international Cochrane group to obtain the missing unpublished evidence. This work has proved controversial in questioning the £500 million spent by the UK stockpiling the drug and has led to parliamentary appearances and substantial news coverage. The talk will detail the journey to obtain the evidence, the new methods including the use of clinical study reports and the effect of the drug once all the evidence became available.

As part of this year’s community outreach program, Oxford Brookes University’s 150th anniversary, and as a way showing our appreciation to all participants, clinicians, researchers, members of the public and organisations that have supported our work, we will be holding an open day on Saturday, 30th of May 2015. Over the past decade, the Movement Science Group, which now falls within the Centre for Rehabilitation at Oxford Brookes University, has conducted extensive research on a variety of topics related to rehabilitation and physical activity. Topics include measuring and understanding movement in those with movement difficulties, exercising benefits in people with neurological conditions, and developing novel rehabilitation strategies.

Susan Jebb is a nutrition scientist who has spent more than 25 years studying the links between what we eat and the effect on our weight and risk of cardiovascular disease. Her research includes a mix of observational analyses from prospective cohorts, experimental studies and both controlled and more pragmatic dietary intervention studies.

In this talk she will consider how evidence from these diverse sources informs dietary recommendations. Drawing on her experience as a scientific advisor to the Department of Health on obesity and food policy and a raft of public engagement activities, including the recent Horizon series “What’s the right diet for you?” she will also consider how the scientific evidence is translated into policy and practice.

Join us at the Museum of Natural History for an evening of talks and networking to celebrate the research behind our new exhibition,‘Biosense’.
The exhibition features contemporary research, including how bacteria sense their micro-world, why oxygen sensing could revolutionise human medical treatment, and the way that the light around us affects our behaviour.

Professor Sir John Bell has been invited to Oxford Brookes to discuss the future of medicine and the role of the Oxford Academic Health Science Centre. His research interests are in the area of autoimmune disease and immunology where he has contributed to the understanding of immune activation in a range of autoimmune diseases. In 1993, he founded the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, one of the world’s leading centres for complex trait common disease genetics.

So many of us are desperately busy doing what’s immediately in front of us rather than the things that make a real difference.

Ben will tell the story of the GB men’s rowing 8+ in the build up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where they won the gold medal, and how they challenged everything to make the boat go faster. For Ben it was the culmination of nine years in the national team.

Ben’s story is a call to action, challenging you to examine how you spend your time in a way that ensures you are travelling in the direction that you want to go.

About the Speaker
Ben Hunt-David MBE
BEN HUNT-DAVIS MBE

Former Brookes student, Ben Hunt- Davis is a performance coach, speaker and author. Ben has been involved in five Olympic Games – three as a competitor and two as a member of the headquarters team. He was also Chairman of the Organising Committee for both the 2011 World Rowing Junior Championships and the 2013 Rowing World Cup. He now runs a performance consulting company helping companies to make their ‘boats go faster’. His first book is entitled Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?

The charity Oxford Student Minds and the Mind Your Head Campaign are excited to bring you the biggest event on the mental health awareness calendar – a night of celebration as the culmination of Testimonials week. The SpeakEasy is an event unlike any other in Oxford, combining support for mental health with food, drink and music.

We will begin the night with the opportunity to learn more about mental health conditions including depression, anxiety and eating disorders from our invited specialist guests. Interspersed throughout this portion of the night will be student testimonials of prose and poetry regarding their experiences tackling both Oxford and a mental illness. We encourage open discussion following these testimonials to establish how as a community we can come together to improve wellbeing in Oxford. By doing this, soon we will all be able to ‘SpeakEasy’ about matters of mental health.

Following this, to celebrate both the end of the year and the work of Student Minds and Mind Your Head, Oxford volunteers we will be providing food, drink and music. Along with other special guests, we are thrilled to announce that DJs Tom Stafford, Nick Byrne and OUSU’s own Louis Trup will be on the decks to bring you the best night possible. Food will be provided in the form of alcoholic ‘ice cream’ by Annie Zimmerman’s ‘Scooperfood’ and the Student Minds’ Pick N Mix table. Please bring spare cash to enjoy the delights of our Food Courtyard.

Tickets cost £5 on the door and all proceeds will be going directly to the charity Student Minds to help train Eating Disorder support group facilitators, costing £150 per person. It’s our ambition to provide enough money to train a team of 10 new facilitators to better improve support for student sufferers in Oxford. However, to encourage people to provide Testimonials, we will be providing free entry to those who enter to Meredith Leston at meredith.leston@st-annes.ox.ac.uk and a friend.

So come along to ‘SpeakEasy’. Dance, drink and eat for a good cause and help us tackle stigma surround mental health at the same time! The Testimonial part of our event will run from 8 until 9pm with the celebrations kicking off straight after until late.

The Patient Safety Academy at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences are pleased to invite you to a seminar on current safety issues for senior management, led by Dr Ken Catchpole from Cedars Sinai Healthcare, Los Angeles. Dr Catchpole has won international recognition for his work on applying Human Factors to healthcare problems. He will deliver an initial assessment of key problems and potential solutions facing senior managers in Trusts in the NHS in England followed by a question and answer session.

Drinks and canapés will be provided. Places are limited, so please respond to this invitation if you would like to attend by 12 June 2015.

Biomedical instrumentation challenges electronic engineers to create innovative circuits and systems that produce useful, reliable information about the human body.

The electrical signals within the body can be monitored by biomedical equipment to diagnose a whole host of physiological conditions. These signals are often very small and hidden within unwanted electrical noise. The challenge is keeping unwanted signals in the system at extremely low levels compared to the wanted signals.

Poor signal to noise ratios can lead to false readings, errors and the possibility of misinterpreting data, with potentially dangerous or fatal consequences.
For biomedical instruments to work effectively, the signals going into them have to be as free from interference as possible and Khaled will be explaining and demonstrating some of the techniques available to achieve this.

About the speaker
Professor Khaled Hayatleh
PROFESSOR KHALED HAYATLEH

Professor Khaled Hayatleh received his BEng and PhD (in collaboration with Imperial College, London) from Oxford Brookes.

His research interests are electronic circuits and systems for radio frequency and biomedical applications. He also has considerable industry
experience, working with Nokia and Texas Instruments amongst others.

He is currently the lead for electronics in Brookes’ Biomedical Imaging and Instrumentation Research Team, and is a visiting research fellow at Imperial College, London.

Brian Hurwitz is D’Oyly Carte Professor of Medicine and the Arts in the Department of English. He is a medical practitioner affiliated to the Division of Health and Social Care Research, King’s College London, directs the Centre for the Humanities and Health and is a member of the Steering Advisory Board of the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s.

Collectively clinical case reports constitute a huge repository of medical experience. This talk will scrutinise their shape, salient features, and the nature of the hindsight from which they are composed, filtered for coherence, and turned into second order accountsof encounters, observations and reasoning about a patient or series of patients. It asks what case reports are good for and what kinds of knowledge they embody.

Two hour cycle ride with Max as he reveals some surprising facts about the science of cycling. Ride and demonstration.
Please show up 10 minutes before departure at The Story Museum. The ride will finish back at The Story Museum.

Author and cyclist Max Gaskin explores the science of cycling from hydrogen to helmets!
6.30pm – 7.30pm £8/£5 concessions

International table tennis player, broadcaster and writer, Matthew Syed will reflect on the psychology of performance.

“Understanding Trauma & PTSD within the context of the Treatment Room”

This is a CPD event for practitioners run by Morit Heitzler.

This talk will explore:

– The psycho-physiology of trauma (autonomic nervous system)

– Different types of trauma

– Disturbances to self-regulation in trauma

– Understanding dissociation as a body-mind process

– Brain function during and after trauma

– How re-traumatisation occurs and what we can do about it

– Trauma in the therapy room: basic principles of a body based approach

– The ‘safe place’ – establishing a container and working alliance

Recognising and dealing with secondary (vicarious) trauma

The talk will run from 6-8pm at Eau de Vie on Tuesday 30th June.

Places are £35.

B o o k i n g s

t: 01865 200678
e: info@eau-de-vie.co.uk

Professor Trish Greenhalgh will talk about how careful analysis of stories can help us rise above the ontological desert of ‘behaviour change’ research.

Qualified nutritionist and Oxford Fat Loss Specialist looks at the most recent scientific research, scrutinizing the truth about sugar and sweeteners. Are they really that bad for us, are any dangerous, and what should we avoid?

How can we use chocolate to understand the neurobiology of depression? Join us to hear Dr Ciara McCabe discuss how we investigate reward function in the human brain and how this is related to depression. Find out how this information can help explain why current medications might not be working and how, with neuroscience, we aim to develop better, targeted personalised treatments for depression.

Exhibition Tour with Paul Teigh

Join Modern Art Oxford’s Production Manager, Paul Teigh, for a tour of the Lynn Hershman Leeson exhibition Origins of the Species (Part 2).

Free, booking essential via https://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/event/exhibition-tour-with-paul-teigh/

Since the discovery that our genes hold the keys to our health, the race has been on to find a precise method to edit our genomes. CRISPR provides the tools to precisely edit genomes with unparalleled simplicity and flexibility, resulting in the potential for a revolutionary step towards curing hereditary disorders and correcting mutations that cause cancer. This breakthrough gene editing technology is barely 3 years old, however it has already attracted tens of millions of dollars from investors, inspiring a multitude of exciting biotech start-ups.

Join us for what is certain to be an informative and inspiring discussion about how entrepreneurs, academics and industry professionals can join in with the battle to exploit, arguably the biggest biotech discovery of the decade.

Are there gender differences in attraction? What are we looking for in a potential mate? Can you find someone attractive online? What other features make us more or less attractive? Join us to hear Dr Martin Graff (Reader and Head of Research
in Psychology, University of South Wales) examine some of the research on romantic attraction and why attraction is important to us.

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Contemplative Neuroscience: Application to Emerging Healthcare Technologies

Dr Christopher Brown
University of Cambridge

Wednesday 30 September 2015 at 1:30pm
Wellcome Building seminar rooms, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford

About Dr Christopher Brown
Dr Brown is a research associate in the CamPAIN research group at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He has conducted research in the neuroimaging of acute and chronic pain as part of his PhD (University of Manchester) and postdoctoral work in clinical neuroscience. He continues to work in multidisciplinary teams of clinicians in pain medicine and rheumatology, and academics in neuroimaging, computational neuroscience and genetics. Dr Brown’s current research focusses on patient phenotyping and real-time monitoring pain and pain-predictive mechanisms in order to translate neuroscience into improved clinical care for patients with chronic pain.

EBM has been transformational for healthcare, however, currently it is poorly understood how this has occurred over time. Using Heart Attack as an example, Prof Carl Heneghan will demonstrate and discuss how EBM has saved lives, and invite the audience to consider the consequence of a health system without evidence.

Demographic changes across the world pose one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. Longer lifespans and shifting fertility rates bring with them an array of global health issues. In this lecture, Professor Sarah Harper, Co-Director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, will talk about the causes and effects of population change and the global age structural shift, and Professor Robyn Norton, Co-Director of The George Institute for Global Health, will address the implications of these changes on global health.

The Oxford Forum for Medical Humanities presents a talk on effective altruism and the true impact of a doctor, by (medical doctor) Dr Gregory Lewis.

Doctors have a pretty solid reputation as do-gooders, and many students go into medicine for altruistic reasons. But how much good do doctors do? If you are deciding whether to become a doctor in the UK, how many lives can you expect to save over the course of your career?

Dr Gregory Lewis, a full-time doctor and ex-Cambridge medical student, will present some of his research into these very questions. This talk should be of interest to medics and non-medics alike who are serious about the impact of their career.

Date: Saturday 24 October (Week 2)
Time: 4:30pm-5:30pm
Venue: Blue Boar Lecture Theatre, Christ Church

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WHY DOCTORS DON’T DO MUCH GOOD

If you want to save lives, should you study medicine? Probably not.

The conclusion of our research is that most people skilled enough to make it in a field as challenging as medicine could have a bigger social impact through an alternative career.

The best research suggests that doctors do much less to improve the health of their patients than you might naturally expect. Health is more determined by lifestyle factors, and most of the treatments that work particularly well could be delivered with a smaller number of doctors than already work in the UK or USA.

However, medicine is high earning and highly fulfilling, and we expect there are more promising opportunities to help others through biomedical research, public health, health policy and (e.g. hospital) management.

Overall, we think going to medical school would be the best way to have a social impact only if someone felt they were a significantly better fit for medicine than the other options we recommend.

Source: 80,000 Hours https://80000hours.org/2012/08/how-many-lives-does-a-doctor-save/

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BIOGRAPHY

Dr Gregory Lewis, a full-time public health doctor training in the east of England. He studied Medicine at Cambridge, where he volunteered for Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours, and he did his FY1 at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

He will present some of his research into these very questions. This talk should be of interest to medics and non-medics alike who are serious about the impact of their career