At a time of heightened political tension and policy confusion about the refugee crisis, this lecture will explore why record numbers of people are fleeing their homes; what conditions they are living in; and what should be done to help them.

Rt Hon David Miliband will make the case that support for refugees is a global public good, which requires reform of international policy. It will also argue that winning the argument for supporting refugees is vital to the moral standing of western societies which constructed the international order after World War 2.

Our societies are increasingly dependent on, and shaped by, our information technologies. We read, watch, communicate, interact, and monitor digitally, both as individuals and in our institutions.

As we document and store every conceivable facet of our lives we expose tensions between the availability of information and the freedoms that we enjoy. We rightly expect a level of personal privacy and freedom of expression while, equally justifiably, expecting transparency from our governments and businesses. In practice, we all too often see the reverse.

In this talk Dr Joss Wright, Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, will examine technologies that seek to assert, resist, or subvert control over information, and assess the balance of the information we share as individuals and as a society. We will look at technologies such as the ‘dark web’ and Bitcoin, that seek to resist traditional observation and control, and the new forms of control introduced by broad-scale gathering of personal data and the algorithms used to act on it.

By understanding the consequences of hiding and sharing information, and the technologies and policies that we use to do so, we take a necessary step towards consciously guiding the shape of the future societies that we wish to see.

Professor Vlatko Vedral, Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Bio-Inspired Quantum Technologies will explore the possibility of basing quantum technologies on organic molecules, namely using natural systems to support quantum bit for quantum computation.

Although criteria for identifying autism have been established based on behavioral factors, researchers are still exploring and developing models to describe the cognitive and affective differences that lead to the known behaviors. Some of these models offer competing ways of understanding autism; some simply describe characteristics of autism. Significantly, these models tend to involve cognitive functions that are also cited in accounts of moral responsibility. This suggests that autism may be a reason not to blame an autistic person for some actions that transgress social, ethical, or legal expectations even when we would certainly blame a neurotypical person for the same action. Whether to treat autism as exculpatory in any given circumstance appears to be influenced both by models of autism and by theories of moral responsibility. This talk will focus on a limited range of theories: autism as characterized in terms of executive function deficit, and moral responsibility based on access to appropriate reactive attitudes. In pursuing this particular combination of ideas, I do not intend to endorse them. The goal is, instead, to explore the implications of this combination of influential ideas about autism and about moral responsibility. These implications can be quite serious and practical for autists and those who interact directly with autists, as well as for broader communities as they attend to the fair, compassionate, and respectful treatment of increasing numbers of autistic adults.

Public event, all welcome. Booking essential.

By 2050, a quarter of humanity will be African. The continent is in profound transition, the scale of which matters not just for the citizens of Africa’s 54 nations, but for the world. It is the fastest urbanising continent, and experiencing rapid industrialisation.

Its economic growth has outperformed Latin America and most developed economies over recent years, yet 55% of Africa’s labour force today is still employed in agriculture, and the challenges of peace and security continue to occupy the headlines about the continent. Six hundred million of its citizens live without access to electricity, yet by 2014 more than 80% of the population had a mobile phone.

The facts about Africa’s growth and development leave no doubt about its unique trajectory, but how will the continent navigate these changes, and how will the world engage with this unprecedented scale and pace of change?

In Oxford, new approaches are being forged to studying and understanding Africa, including the Africa-Oxford Initiative and the inclusion of Africa within Oxford Martin School’s new research theme ‘Great Transitions’. Join us on 7 March to hear from Winnie Byanyima, the Executive Director of Oxfam International, Dr Carlos Lopes, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and current Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow, and Achim Steiner, Director of the Oxford Martin School, and be part of the debate as they discuss the range of African futures that could emerge over the coming decades.

This panel discussion will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome

Africa currently has the highest disease burden of any region of the world and the least resources in terms of health personnel and health systems. But things are changing rapidly, many countries are in the process of major epidemiologic transitions with falling childhood mortality and the prospects of controlling many of the traditional infectious causes of ill health. At the same time the combined effects of economic development and rapid demographic expansion against a background of increasing urbanisation will pose enormous new challenges for the health of African populations.

In this talk Kevin Marsh, Professor of Tropical Medicine at the University of Oxford, will examine the possible trends for the health of the continent.

Rio gold medallist, Grace Clough, will talk about the experience of competing at sport’s highest levels. When not studying towards an MSc in Sociology, Grace is a member of the British Rowing Squad and won gold in rowing at the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio. Grace will describe the unique training regime undertaken by British paralympic athletes with the aid of a short Team GB video. Join us to find out about the Rio experience, from the gruelling preparations to the exhilaration of competing and ultimately winning. There will be ample opportunity to ask questions.

Grace visits schools to advocate better integration of disability and to encourage students to persist in the face of obstacles. Her academic research looks at the media portrayal of disability and its impacts. Her own story is inspirational. She only took up rowing in late 2013, yet in an impressive unbeaten run she was a member of the LTA mixed coxed four that won gold at the 2014 and 2015 World Championships, then won gold again at the Paralympic Games at Rio 2016. In recognition of this, Grace was honoured with the award of the MBE in the New Year’s Honours list.

Join Grace in the Mawby Room at Kellogg College from 17:30 for refreshments. The seminar will begin at 17:45. It is free and open to all, and there is no need to book.

The Diseases of Modern Life project is hosting an event on ‘Germs Revisited’.

Bad germs? Friendly bacteria? Do we need to rethink our relationships with the microscopic world? Join us for an interdisciplinary lunch time talk. All welcome. Lunch provided.

Using past and present ideas drawn from medicine, fiction, and art, Dr Emilie Taylor-Brown (Faculty of English), Dr Jamie Lorimer (School of Geography and the Environment), and Dr Nicola Fawcett (Medical Sciences Division) come together to discuss new ways of thinking about human-microbe relationships in dialogue with developing trends in microbiome studies.

The Diseases of Modern Life is supported by the European Research Council.

Jeffrey Aronson presents a light-hearted talk on spelling in systematic reviewing.

Jeff is a Consultant Physician and Clinical Pharmacologist at the Oxford University Department for Primary Health Care.

His research expertise includes methods of classifying, detecting, and reporting adverse drug reactions, including systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

This talk is part of the Meta-analysis course which is one of our Postgraduate modules in Evidence-Based Health Care.

This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend by registering

Saïd Business School is pleased to welcome Lubomira Rochet, Global Chief Digital Officer of the L’Oréal Group, to speak at the School on Wednesday 26 April.

Leading digital transformation at L’Oréal

L’Oréal is the world’s number one beauty company with leading brands such as Maybelline New York, L’Oréal Paris, Garnier, Lancome, Kiehl’s, and Kerastase. The group was also named by Adweek as 2017’s hottest digital marketer. How did one of the world’s oldest consumer goods companies get to this position? Lubomira Rochet, the Chief Digital Officer for L’Oréal globally and member of the group’s executive committee, will talk about the digital transformation of L’Oréal’s businesses that she and her team have enacted since she joined the company in 2014.

The seminar is open for anyone to attend and will take place at Saïd Business School on Wednesday 26 April followed by a short networking drinks reception until around 7.30pm. Please remember that registration is required to attend this event.

This talk will outline some of the challenges of mixed methods research and illustrate how they can be addressed in health psychology and other health research. Felicity will critically reflect on mixed methods research that she has conducted and discuss the philosophical and technical challenges of mixed methods, grounding the discussion in a brief review of methodological literature.

Mixed methods research is characterized as having philosophical and technical challenges; the former can be addressed by drawing on pragmatism, the latter by considering formal mixed methods research designs proposed in a number of design typologies. There are important differences among the design typologies which provide diverse examples of designs that health researchers can adapt for their own mixed methods research. There are also similarities; in particular, many typologies explicitly orient to the technical challenges of deciding on the respective timing of qualitative and quantitative methods and the relative emphasis placed on each method. Characteristics, strengths, and limitations of different sequential and concurrent designs are identified by reviewing a series of mixed methods projects each conducted for a different purpose.

Adapting formal mixed methods designs can help health psychologists and other health researchers address the technical challenges of mixed methods research and identify the approach that best fits the research questions and purpose. This does not obfuscate the need to address philosophical challenges of mixing qualitative and quantitative methods.

Dr Felicity Bishop is a health psychologist leading an interdisciplinary programme of mixed methods research around complementary therapies and placebo effects in health care within Psychology at the University of Southampton.

This talk is part of the Mixed Methods in Health Research module, which is part of the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care.

This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend.

As part of the Surgical Grand Rounds Lecture Series, Professor François Pattou will be presenting ‘Gastric bypass; from intestinal glucose transport to diabetes. What is the expected duration?’.

François Pattou is Professor of Surgery at the Faculty of Medicine of Lille, France, and Head of the Department of General and Endocrine Surgery at Lille University Hospital. Professor Pattou also leads a research group at the University of Lille, INSERM U1190, devoted to the clinical development of biotherapies for treating diabetes and a funding member of the LABEX European Genomic Institute for Diabetes (EGID).

“Diamonds are a rebel’s best friend” is one striking way to sum up the belief that valuable minerals spur violent conflict. The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme and the US Dodd Frank Act Section 1502, now on the chopping block under the Trump administration, are meant to counteract this: they aim to prevent trade in minerals unless it can be proven that revenues from these do not support armed groups.

Research however, suggests that the relationship between minerals and violent conflict may be more complex than this quote presumes. Valuable minerals may indeed fund or motivate rebel movements. But they may also provide a livelihood to millions of people, making them better off and less vulnerable to be recruited into armed groups. And revenue from minerals can also flows to countries’ governments and their armies.

In this lecture Dr Anouk S. Rigterink, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, Department of Economics’ Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, will address the contradictory faces of ‘conflict minerals’ and their implications for how effective we think current policies to tackle them can be.

As part of the Surgical Grand Rounds lecture series, Mr James Gilbert (Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust) and Dr Simon Knight (Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, Oxford University) will discuss innovations in access surgery.

This is a joint event between the Oxford Martin School and the Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests

One of our biggest technological innovations is that of time keeping. From the atomic to the astronomical scales, our technology has enabled us to precisely measure time. Our timekeeping uses clocks that all tick along the same time scale – a time scale that is also relative to how we perceive the passage of time.

For biology, the passage of time, however, is not only different but reveals deep truths about life. Across the diversity of life, the passage of time from bacteria to humans to giant Redwood trees is perceived differently. Instead of a constant ticking of a clock – the pace of life is reflected in scaling laws that characterise the variation in the cycles of heartbeats, metabolism, growth and reproduction.

In this lecture Professor Brian J. Enquist, Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow, will introduce a second concept of time – physiological time. Physiological time enables us to better understand why we age, the emergence of disease and cancer, the functioning of ecosystems, and the diversity of life. Physiological time is one of the most significant characteristics of life and helps unite the study of biology. A deeper question is what ultimately sets the pace of life.

As will be discussed, the search for a universal biological clock that unites life’s cycles is the most intriguing Holy Grail of biology.

This event will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome

For Dr Kanade, good research derives from solving real-world problems and delivering useful results to society. As a roboticist, he participated in developing a wide range of computer-vision systems and autonomous robots, including human-face recognition, autonomously-driven cars, computer-assisted surgical robots, robot helicopters, biological live cell tracking through a microscope, and EyeVision, a system used for sports broadcast. Dr Kanade will share insights into his projects and discuss how his “Think like an amateur, do as an expert” maxim interacts with problems and people.

Dr Takeo Kanade is the 2016 Kyoto Prize Laureate for Advanced Technology.

Recent research purports that climate change is creating conflict, and leads to unchecked migration. But three distinct flaws characterise such research efforts; they often ask the wrong questions, present poor evidence, and remove references to other, more likely factors that cause conflict. It often gets translated into a perception that poor people act violently for ‘natural’ reasons, or are spurred by physical hazards. We all know that high climate vulnerability and conflict co-occur in the same general regions, but we know far less about what does shape the power and competition dynamics at the local level. Basically, who are the winners and losers of environmental change?

The reality from local research is that far more cooperation is occurring at the local level to mitigate and adapt to environmental challenges; and that a tremendous amount of development money is being directed towards adaptation and risk management. This changes the local calculus for violence. As a result, conflict, when and where it does occur, is often between the ‘winners’ from climate change, development and transitions to democracy.

Who’s listening? Communicating research in a noisy world

Dan Richards-Doran, Communications Manager, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford

The proliferation of social and digital media tools, combined with the availability of camera-equipped smartphones, means anyone can set themselves up as an online channel. Scientists looking to disseminate their research findings now no longer have to simply rely on their press office or publisher, they have at their finger-tips a fancy toolbox of tactics to broadcast their evidence to the world, but with the increasingly crowded media landscape how can they ensure their message gets through to the right audience?

This talk will discuss who the “public” actually are and what media they consume when it comes to science. Applying basic communications planning theory, it will briefly overview how to develop a plan before embarking on any communication activity, highlighting the opportunities for getting the most out of social and traditional media and the importance of dialogue to support science communication with impact.

Dan is Communications Manager at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford. He is responsible for communicating the Department’s research communications and supporting researchers to communicate their work.

This talk is part of the Knowledge into Action module, which is part of the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care.

This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend.

A number of developments such as the Arab Spring and on-going famines in Somalia and South Sudan have led to renewed interest among both scholars and policymakers in the role of food insecurity and food-price related grievances as catalysts of conflict. In this lecture Prof Gunnar Sørbø, Senior Researcher at Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), will address such linkages, using case material mainly from Sudan and Somalia, with a particular focus on food insecurity as a risk multiplier and the implications for choice of interventions.

Trials registries are a relatively new phenomenon and are there to ensure that a complete view of research is accessible to all. Yet, half off all trial results go unreported.

The talk will discuss the important of registries the evidence in the registry that matters and discuss how the CEBM and EBM Datalab are working with the WHO to improve clinical trial transparency

Professor Carl Heneghan is an advisor to the World Health Organization’s International Clinical; Trial Registry Platform and co-founder of AllTrials.

A book colloquium featuring Stuart H Newberger, an international lawyer who represented victims of the terrorist plot hatched by Colonal Qaddafi that brought down French Airlines Flight 772. His latest book The Forgotten Flight: Terrorism, Diplomacy and the Pursuit of Justice tells the story of how he fought for justice for seven of the 170 people killed in one of the deadliest acts of terrorism in history.

This real-life legal thriller combines the international intrigue of le Carré with the courtroom drama of John Grisham, and asks how we can bring leaders of sovereign nations to account for their crimes.

For the first time, Stuart Newberger reveals how French investigators cracked the case and takes us inside the courtroom to witness the litigation against the Libyan state that followed. In the age of globalization, The Forgotten Flight provides a fascinating insight into the pursuit of justice across international borders.

Stuart H. Newberger is a senior partner at international law firm Crowell & Moring. His practice handles complex international disputes, many involving the actions of governments. He lives in McLean, Virginia.

Praise for The Forgotten Flight:

“Gripping, shocking, forensic: a true legal thriller that captured me entirely.”
Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

“In the war against terrorism, lawyers can make a difference. A must read for all those interested in how the rule of law can be an important weapon in the ongoing struggle.”
Kenneth Feinberg, former Special Master of the Federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund

Competition over resources and territory is not just a feature of modern or historical times, but a recurrent theme in the natural world, and a phenomenon that reaches far back in human evolutionary history. While modern conflict has many unique qualities, common patterns across species and time suggest important fundamental insights about human nature and social organisation that may help to address modern problems, especially those which are hard to resolve.

Launch and discussion of Mari Mikkola’s new book, ‘The Wrong of Injustice: Dehumanization and its Role in Feminist Philosophy’

Join the English Faculty Twentieth Century Poetry Reading Group for a special event at the T. S. Eliot Theatre: Kay Redfield Jamison – author of the groundbreaking memoir An Unquiet Mind, and world expert in bipolar disorder – discusses her acclaimed new book, Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire, a study of the American poet’s mental illness, character and creativity.

Professor Jamison will read extracts from the book, before answering questions in conversation with Stephanie Kelley, and discussing Lowell’s life and work more generally.

The event is free and open to the public!

Designing a study usually involves consulting a statistician, typically to check the sample size is adequate and the analysis feasible. In this talk, however, I will discuss my role in the design of some studies that were definitely not typical. I will discuss the ways that some unusual research questions, in alcohol, in clinician behaviour and in alternative medicine, have led me to get involved with some interesting study designs. I will describe my experiences of leaving my statistician’s desk and computer to help collect data in the very real world and present some of the unusual papers that our students have contributed to on blood pressure measurement, alcohol and sobriety, and thermometry.

This talk is part of the Introduction to Study Design and Research Methods module, which is part of the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care.

This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend.

Oil suppliers have more unsellable than unburnable oil: they are more at risk from competition than from climate regulation. Electricity suppliers too, face a swarm of disruptors that will transform their business beyond recognition. As these two vast industries merge and as insurgents in both challenge incumbents, almost everything we thought we knew about energy is ripe for rapid and profound change. In this lecture, physicist and innovator Amory Lovins will consider the changing face of the energy market.

As part of the Surgical Grand Rounds lecture series, Mr Henk Giele (Consultant in Plastic, Reconstructive and Hand Surgery, Oxford University Hospitals NHS) will present ‘Should surgical innovation be taught and encouraged?’

Type 2 diabetes is the epidemic of the 21st Century. There are 415 million people living with diabetes worldwide, and 90 per cent of them have Type 2. It’s increasing, costly and life-changing. Diabetes is the single largest cause of amputations, stroke, blindness and kidney failure. So are we doing enough to prevent it? Can we use our understanding of genetics to improve treatment and care?
Join us to hear Professor Anna Gloyn (University of Oxford) sharing her view.

Dr John Reader launches his new book, published by Palgrave Macmillan – Theology and New Materialism: Spaces of Faithful Dissent. A panel presentation will preface a wider debate following chapters in the book which include not only issues of human agency and transcendence, but also the search for a New Enlightenment and practical issues of politics, aesthetics and technology.

You may love social media, but does it love you back? Explore cyber social networks
through some of the most popular platforms. Jason Nurse will highlight the range of
advantages and risks of maintaining a digital presence, especially as platforms begin
to integrate with the Internet-of-Things. Most importantly, Jason provides tips for how
you can protect yourselves and your families online.
Jason R.C. Nurse is a Research Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Oxford pursuing novel approaches to maintain organisational cybersecurity. Additionally he invstigates creative ways to identify and address the security and privacy risks that individuals face in cyberspace. Find him online @jasonnurse