With the UK population predicted to grow nearly 20% by 2050 (circa 77 million people), over 65s making up around 25% of the population and more and more demands being put on the healthcare system what does the future hold?

Professor Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, will discuss predictions for the future advancement of healthcare in the UK and how these advancements will monitor, diagnose and treat us and how this will change our healthcare system.

Part of the Oxford Martin School Lecture Series: ‘Shaping the future’

Lincoln Leads is a series of seminars tackling a different theme every week. All are warmly invited to attend this year’s Shakespeare Seminar on February 27th which will explore the question ‘Can Editing Influence a Play’s Legacy? with Prof. Henry Woudhuysen (Lincoln College), Prof. Lukas Erne (University of Geneva) and Eirian Yem (DPhil in English Literature). The panel will be chaired by Waqas Mirza (DPhil in French and English Literature).

The seminars take place in the Oakeshott Room at Lincoln College on Thursday evenings during Hilary term. Following a free wine reception from 5pm, each seminar will start at 5.45pm, culminating in a lively audience Q&A session that ends at 7pm. We have a fantastic group of panellists scheduled for the series. We therefore hope that you are eager to join them in conversation, and learn more about the diverse research conducted at Lincoln.

Tickets are free, but must be booked in advance. Spaces are limited and going fast, so make sure you sign up by clicking here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lincoln-leads-2020-tickets-87627477143

Do join us at the seminar to find out what Lincoln Leads is all about, and celebrate the diverse research connected with the College.
Bring all your friends, enjoy all the free wine and ask all the questions.

For more information on the seminar series, please visit our pages on social media: Facebook @lincolnleads

Join us as we hear from Prof Martin Bureau (University of Oxford) about his research on Supermassive black holes.

‘Supermassive black holes are now known to lurk at the centre of most
galaxies. They are also believed to play a key role in the evolution
of galaxies, by regulating the supply of the gas necessary to form
stars. Here, I will present key results from the mm-Wave
Interferometric Survey of Dark Object Masses (WISDOM), a high
resolution survey of molecular gas in galaxy nuclei. I will first show
that carbon monoxide (CO) can be used to easily and accurately measure
the mass of these supermassive black holes. I will then discuss
substantial ongoing efforts to do this, and present many new
spectacular measurements from the Atacama Large
Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA), the largest ground-based
telescope project. This effort opens the way to literally hundreds of
measurements across galaxies of all morphological types, both active
and non-active, with a unique method. It thus promises to
revolutionise our understanding of the co-evolution of galaxies and
black holes.’

FREE entry

Drinks and snacks provided. (Non-alcoholic and vegetarian/vegan dietary requirements provided for. For other diets please get in touch in advance)

For more information email emil.ostergaard@stcatz.ox.ac.uk. There is wheelchair access. There is padded seating, and an accessible toilet. There is blue badge parking by request at the event.

There is increasing attention being paid to the ability of data to help us deliver better patient and population outcomes while optimising resource utilisation. How much of this is hope, how much is real and how much is hype?

Come to this panel session organised by the Value Based Healthcare Programme, Dept of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford and hear experts from health and care systems in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and England give a balanced perspective on the role data has played in improving the health of citizens in their countries.

Panelists
Prof Milena Vainieri: Sant’Anna Institute of Advanced Studies, Pisa
Dr Kathrin Fischer: Charite Hospital, Berlin
Mr Onno van der Galien: Zilveren Kruis, Achmea, Utrecht
Dr Abraham George: Kent County Council, Kent

Chair
Dr Anant Jani: Value Based Healthcare Programme, University of Oxford

Image: “Big Data” by TRIADA STUDIO, Hasmik Mkhchyan, artashes stamboltsyan is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

This talk will share information about Al-Anon Family Groups and how the Al-Anon process works with the problem drinker and their family. We are privileged to have the opportunity to hear personal experience of living with a problem drinker in the family, and how attending Al-Anon meetings has helped.

This talk will be given by Nicky T., a former service user and volunteer for Al-Anon.

Nicky T. is a grateful member of Al-Anon Family Groups for over twenty years. Nicky is a volunteer for Al-Anon in various admin roles, and on the national helpline, including assisting with public information about the fellowship.

Dr Cairns discusses the successes of, and challenges for contemporary cohort studies, and some of the ways in which the challenges can be met.

Cohort studies follow people over time to investigate causes and risk factors of disease and other health-related outcomes. They have played key roles in the history of epidemiology and public health, and contemporary cohorts such as the UK Biobank are vital sources of observational data for many different fields of medical research. Large cohort studies assemble many different types of data on participant health, behaviour, environment and genetics, enabled by efficient methods of recruitment, measurement, and follow-up through administrative datasets. However, these methodological features of cohort studies also present challenges for data analysis, particularly selection biases, measurement error, and questions of causality. This lecture will discuss the successes of and challenges for contemporary cohort studies, and some of the ways in which the challenges can be met.

Dr Benjamin Cairns is a Nuffield Department of Population Health Senior Research Fellow, working in the MRC Population Health Research Unit. His research trajectory started outside of health sciences, studying mathematical models in ecology and conservation. He then joined the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford, and has since worked on epidemiological studies in cohorts such as the Million Women Study and the UK Biobank. His current research interests are in aortic valve disease and other cardiovascular diseases, multimorbidity, and research methods in epidemiology.

This talk is given as part of the graduate programmes in Evidence-Based Healthcare, Oxford University Department for Continuing Education.

Blake Gopnik’s definitive biography digs deep into the radical genius of Andy Warhol. Based on years of archival research and on interviews with hundreds of Warhol’s surviving friends, lovers and enemies, Warhol traces the artist’s path from his modest origins in Pittsburgh and first success as an illustrator, to his ground-breaking pivot into Pop Art in the 1960s, to the society portraiture and popular celebrity that became his hallmarks in the ’70s and ’80s. He overcame the vicious homophobia of his youth to become a symbol of gay achievement, while always seeking the pleasures of traditional romance and coupledom. (Warhol explodes the myth of his asexuality.) Despite being burdened with an almost crippling shyness, Warhol sought out all the most notable figures of his times – Susan Sontag, Mick Jagger, the Rothschilds. Filled with new insights into the artist’s work and personality, Warhol asks: Was he a joke or a genius, a radical or a social climber? As Warhol himself would have answered: Yes.

Please note that this event has been cancelled.

Join novelist Sarah Moss and historian Sarah Knott in conversation with critic Merve Emre.

A conversation about life-writing and the Lives of Houses. With Hermione Lee, Roy Foster, Alexandra Harris, and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.

Adults make choices regarding the technology they use to self-manage their health and wellbeing, and these technologies are often adopted, used and abused in ways that researchers, manufacturers, and clinicians have not accounted for. This talk will give an overview of human-computer interaction qualitative research on the real world use of mobile technologies in people’s everyday lives. Accounting for individual health and wellbeing choices adults make with technology, supporting choices through end user customisation, and the emerging trend towards Do-It-Yourself open-source health and wellbeing technology will be discussed. Examples of pragmatic qualitative studies will be given from research on wearables, apps, and standalone devices used for Type 1 diabetes, hearing loss, baby monitoring, and physical fitness.

Dr Aisling O’Kane is a Senior Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction for Health and Deputy Director of the EPSRC CDT in Digital Health and Care at the University of Bristol. As a member of the Bristol Interaction Group and the Digital Health Engineering Group, she uses a pragmatic approach to qualitative research of health, wellbeing and care technologies. Dr O’Kane is currently PI of Innovate UK Machine Learning for Diabetes, co-designing AI to support diabetes self-management and Co-I of EPSRC SPHERE Next Steps, co-designing smart home technology to support health at home.

This talk is being held as part of the Advanced Qualitative Research Methods course which is part of the Evidence-Based Health Care Programme. This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend.

An exploration of the work of prolific writer Jenny Diski, with a keynote lecture from Blake Morrison.

The world faces many challenges, climate change, systemic racism, a crisis of leadership and the pandemic. As governments, business and organisations pivot to survive can the social impact sector do the same? What’s changed and what hasn’t in this vitally important space?

We have brought together experts in the field to share their experience and shine a light on the way forward. To reflect on any changes to their approach to social impact work, to share what they are seeing around the world, what’s worked and what the future holds for those who work in this area or are about to embark on a career in it.

Join Marya Besharov and our panel of experts for an interesting discussion.

Marya Besharov – Professor of Organisations and Impact, Saïd Business School

The panel:

• Shivani Garg Patel, Chief Strategy Officer, Skoll Foundation
• Meng Zhao, Associate Professor, NTU Singapore
• Francois Bonnici, Director and Head, Schwab Foundation
• Marc Ventresca – Associate Professor of Strategic Management, Saïd Business School

In this talk Natasha Randall explores the task of biographical research into the figure of the literary translator Constance Garnett. Translators notionally produce non-original text but are there aspects of their work, their semantic tendencies perhaps, that can expose something of their personal nature, or their lived experience? Garnett brought seventy volumes of Russian literature to English readers over the course of her lifetime, often first translations, and yet her existing letters and diaries betray relatively little of her interior life. Can her translations provide additional insight into her life and character? What are the detectable choices in Garnett’s work that can contribute to a portrait of her?

Natasha Randall is a literary translator of the works of Dostoyevsky, Zamyatin, Gogol, and others, for publishers such as Penguin Classics, Canongate’s Canon, and the Modern Library. Her writing and critical work has appeared in theTimes Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Moscow Times, BookForum, The New York Times, Strad magazine, The Yale Review, Jubilat, and on National Public Radio. She is a contributing editor to the New York-based literary magazine A Public Space. Her novel, Love Orange, about modern anxieties and opioid addiction, was published in September by riverrun (Quercus).

Lt. Major Cecilia Diaconeasa was a Cold War secret police informant who in March 1983, several weeks after the birth of her baby daughter, was assigned to extract confessions from a woman suspected of collaborating in a public political protest, and to prevent her from committing ‘unthinkable acts’. Her ‘target,’ my mother, was under arrest in the infectious ward of the district’s children’s hospital with her own new born son, who was struggling for his life. The talk will discuss working with Cold War surveillance family archives and the process of getting inside the Lt.’s mind, in order to understand the narrative of oppression. In the course of locating the appropriate form which could transform the historical documents and the life experiences into literature, I found myself asking deeper questions about what constitutes literary language.

Carmen Bugan, a George Orwell Prize Fellow, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Lilies from America, a Poetry Society Special Commendation. Her memoir, Burying the Typewriter, called by the Sunday Times ‘a modern classic,’ won the Bread Loaf Nonfiction Prize and was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Her poems have been anthologized in the Penguin’s Poems for Life and Joining Music with Reason among others, and her work has been translated into several languages. She wrote a monograph on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile and reviews regularly for Harvard Review Online. Bugan was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan and teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in Manhattan. She appears on current affairs and history programmes on the BBC, NPR, Monocle, and ABC. Bugan has a DPhil in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford University. Her book of essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, will be published by Oxford University Press in March 2021.

We are please to announce this s really important symposium on athlete welfare and the Duty to Care in sport with @oxford_brookes @OBUSportCourses in partnership with
@_UKCoaching

Speakers to include Tanni) Carys Davina Grey-Thompson, Baroness Grey-Thompson
Cath Bishop, rower and Olympic silver medallist and Andy Burns (commonwealth athlete and English Institute of Sport.

This is a free virtual event but booking is essential http://bit.ly/athlete-z

This is the Weinrebe Lecture in Life-Writing for Michaelmas Term 2020.

Hermione Lee, whose biography of Tom Stoppard is published by Faber on 1 October, talks about his life and work, and the challenges for a biographer in writing the life of a living subject.

With unprecedented access to private papers, diaries, letters, and countless interviews with figures ranging from Felicity Kendal to John Boorman and Trevor Nunn to Steven Spielberg, Hermione Lee has built a meticulously researched portrait of one of our greatest playwrights. Drawing on several years of long, exploratory conversations with Stoppard himself, it tracks his Czech origins and childhood in India to every school and home he’s ever lived in, every piece of writing he’s ever done, and every play and film he’s ever worked on. This is the revealing story of a very public and very private man.

Hermione Lee was the President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017, and is the founder and advisory director of OCLW. She held the Goldsmiths’ Chair of English Literature at Oxford from 1998 to 2008, and before that taught at the Universities of Liverpool and York. Her work includes acclaimed biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2007) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography). She has also published books on Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather and Philip Roth, and she has written about life-writing, in Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing (2005), Biography: A Very Short Introduction (2009), and, co-edited with Kate Kennedy, in a collection based on an OCLW conference, called Lives of Houses (2020). Her biography of Tom Stoppard is published by Faber in October 2020. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature (where she serves on the Council) and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literature.

The video of this Weinrebe Lecture in Life-Writing will be available for 24 hours only.

Join Professor Chas Bountra, Professor of Translational Medicine and Professor Sir Charles Godfray as they discuss how the healthcare system has had to adapt due to the Covid-19 pandemic and what this means in the future.

Come along to the long-awaited Night Sky Show at the fantastic Great Hall in Cholsey. It will certainly be a night to remember!

Facts, fiction, laughter and more in a fantastic place, for one night only. A night of great entertainment as well as an event for everyone!

SHOW DESCRIPTION

The Cholsey Night Sky Show will take you on an epic journey. Certainly a very unique and different journey! From our celestial back yard and across the cosmos.

Comedy, astronomy and so much more. Above all, an evening for anyone with a slight interest in the night sky or more. A night for anyone who indeed wants to laugh, learn, be inspired and enjoy.

The Night Sky Show will be a truly fun, entertaining and memorable evening. Helping you understand and enjoy the heavens above and the universe beyond. Helpful for the next time you’re looking up at the night sky stargazing, or when you just look up and wonder.

For one thing, we’ll skip the heavy going science and hard to follow explanations. The Universe and everything within will be presented in an entertaining and easily absorbed way.

AN AMAZING SHOW FOR EVERYONE

This won’t be a boring astronomy talk. The Night Sky Show is a theatrical performance anyone can enjoy! Learn about constellations, stars, planets and the deeper cosmos. The sheer scale of the universe. The mythology and stories of the night sky.

Presented by Adrian West – A passionate and experienced astronomer. Better known as VirtualAstro on Twitter and Facebook. One of the largest independent astronomy and space accounts on social media. He’s passionate about the night sky and inspiring people to look up. His success is due to being interesting, down-to-earth and fun! The writer of numerous astronomy and space-related articles for various popular online science magazines. He has also written guides and articles for the BBC, Met Office and National Trust to name a few. You can regularly find him pointing out things to people in the night sky.

If you look up and wonder, The Night Sky Show is for you. www.nightskyshow.co.uk

SO LET’S EXPLORE!
Suitable for ages 8+ Fully licenced bar.

In her mid-20s, Heidi Williamson was part of a Scottish community that suffered an inconceivable tragedy, the Dunblane Primary School shooting.

Through poems about landscape and loss, the poems in her third collection, Return by Minor Road (Bloodaxe), explore the lasting impact of being an ‘incoherent bystander’ at such a tragedy.

Through rivers, rain, wildlife and landscape, Williamson revisits where ‘the occasional endures’ and discovers the healing properties of a beloved place:

‘These small movements
towards the bracken
are to be reckoned with.’

—

Heidi Williamson is a poet, writing tutor and mentor, and an Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund. She studied poetry and prose at the UEA and regularly teaches for arts and literature organisations in the UK.

Her work has appeared in literary journals in the UK, America and Australia and been translated into Polish, German, and Turkish. It has inspired poetry and science discussions in schools and adult creative writing groups, and has featured in NHS waiting rooms, cafés, and at science and literary festivals in the UK and abroad.

Her first collection, Electric Shadow, was supported by a grant from Arts Council England and was published by Bloodaxe in 2011. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry.

Her second collection was inspired by being a printer’s daughter. The Print Museum received the EAW Book by the Cover’ Award and the 2016 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry.

With a rootless lily held in front of him, a poem from her latest collection, won the 2019 Plough Prize.

Following her Research Forum talk in Trinity 2020, ‘The Elusive Subject: Biographies of Exiles’ Soledad Fox Maura returns to the OCLW programme for the launch of her first novel, Madrid Again (Simon & Schuster), in conversation with Hannie Lawlor. Told with humor, candor, and grit, Madrid Again is a highly original novel, and an homage to the haunting power of history, and how it shapes the identity of two generations of women.

Soledad Fox Maura is the V-Nee Yeh ‘81 Professor at Williams College. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. She has written two biographies that have been published in English, Spanish, and French. The first one is about Constancia de la Mora, aka one of the Spanish “Mitford Sisters” who rebelled against her wealthy and conservative upbringing to become a one-woman anti-Fascist force during the Spanish Civil War; and the second about Jorge Semprún, who fought in the French Resistance, survived Buchenwald, and went on to become a serial autobiographer, auto-fiction writer, and Oscar nominee for two screenplays. At the moment she is preparing editions of memoirs written by two Spanish women in exile, and working on a collection of biographical essays about American collectors, soldiers, writers, artists, and impresarios, and politicians in 20th century Spain.

The current covid-19 pandemic has focussed attention on the variability in personal risk of serious illness. After age and ethnicity, one of the most important factors associated with developing serious covid complications, requiring admission to hospital or ICU, is being overweight.

Professor Susan Jebb is a nutrition scientist with a special interest in designing and testing public health interventions to prevent and treat obesity. In this conversation, we shall explore the policy options available to governments and other bodies to tackle obesity and ask whether, as we emerge from the pandemic, there will be a new focus on the benefits of a healthy body weight.

Lecture by Hanna Zembrzycka-Kisiel, Principal Major Applications Officer at
South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse Councils. Hanna uses the research
insights of her recent MA Thesis to explore the reality of poor urban design
and the benefits of green spaces in our living environments, drawing on local
and international urban design projects for inspiration. Book online or pay at the door.

The COVID-19 pandemic has become a defining event of the 21st century.

New technologies such as ubiquitous smartphones and virus genome sequencing offer powerful new ways to understand virus transmission and to tackle the problem of epidemic spread. But can those new tools be deployed fast enough to make a real difference to public health? And can we balance the need for privacy with the life-saving benefits of understanding how transmission occurs?

Join Prof Christophe Fraser of Oxford’s Big Data Institute, who advises the UK’s NHS COVID-19 Tracing app, and Prof Oliver Pybus, Lead Researcher of the Oxford Martin School Programme on Pandemic Genomics, as they discuss the opportunities and challenges of successfully applying new technologies to pandemics past, present, and future.

Join the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences for their annual research lecture, delivered by Dame Professor Louise Robinson. The biggest risk factor for developing dementia is age, with dementia now the most common cause of death in women over 65 years of age in the United Kingdom (UK). Our ageing populations mean that the number of people with dementia globally is predicted to rapidly increase, although research from the UK and Europe has shown that modification of key lifestyle factors may positively influence this. Over the last decade, the UK has had a strong policy focus on dementia, initially via a National Dementia Strategy and followed by Prime Minister’s National Dementia Challenge. This led to the creation of the unique £200 million UK National Dementia Research Institute, with a main focus on finding the ‘cure’ and/or novel dementia drug therapies. Professor Robinson will discuss why future research should be as equally focused on improving the quality of dementia care and targeting future prevention as exploring the elusive cure.

This event is for: Everyone

With COVID-19 vaccines on the horizon, attention again returns to the contentious topic of whether vaccination should be made mandatory.

Recent polling has resulted in worrying headlines about a lack of willingness to have a COVID-19 vaccine if it were available.

Are mandates the answer to ensure vaccine high uptake to end the pandemic? While still a hypothetical scenario, without yet having a safe and effective vaccine approved for use, this could change in the coming months. The question of introducing mandatory vaccination spans considerations of personal liberty, health decision-making, public health and policy, as well as the relationship between the state and its citizens. Join Professor Julian Savulescu and Dr Samantha Vanderslott to debate the ethical and public policy arguments for and against mandatory COVID-19 vaccination.

Join Peter Drobac as he interviews Paul Farmer, in an exploration of the lessons we can learn from Paul Farmer’s phenomenal new book, Fevers, feuds and diamonds: Ebola and the ravages of history.

We will reflect on how these lessons can help us tackle the current Covid-19 pandemic and discuss how inequality and exploitation fuelled the spread of a deadly virus and how we might finally learn from history, in order to build a healthier, more equitable world.

For more details, visit https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/events/fevers-feuds-and-diamonds-dr-paul-farmer-future-global-health

Join us live or watch the recording on: https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/oxford-answers

This event and open to all Registration not required.

Covid-19 killed around two million people in 2020. At the same time, the social and economic impact of the pandemic led to an 8% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the biggest one-year decline on record.

As the pandemic is brought under control from 2021 onwards, by supplementing current control methods with vaccination, there are big opportunities to sustain the benefits of lower emissions for health and well-being. The direct benefits are fewer droughts, floods, heatwaves, storms and wildfires, and cleaner air. Indirect health benefits are expected from better nutrition, safe sanitation, energy-efficient health services, and jobs in the green economy, among others.

In this conversation, Sir Andy Haines (Professor of Environmental Change and Public Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) and Chris Dye (Professor of Epidemiology, University of Oxford) consider how better health and well-being are an both argument for, and a consequence of, making progress towards “net zero” carbon emissions.

To register and watch this talk live: www.crowdcast.io/e/building-back-healthier

The talk will also be streamed via YouTube here: https://youtu.be/xy3xkB9q8Ds, but please note you will not be able to take part in the interactive Q&A session unless you join the talk on CrowdCast.

Amanda Oates (Executive Director of Workforce, Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust) and Dr Kristina Brown (Senior Lecturer, Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University) will be speaking on the story of the Just and Learning Culture at Mersey Care NHS Trust.

In recent years, Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust has undergone a radical shift in workplace culture and organisational procedures. They have gone from a blame culture to a culture where staff feel empowered and supported to learn from incidents. Numbers of disciplinary and suspension cases went down, staff reporting of adverse incidents went up, and there were positive effects on staff retention and levels of sickness absence.

Restorative justice was integral to these changes, termed the ‘Just and Learning Culture’. Amanda Oates and Kristina Brown will reflect on the impact of the restorative just culture at Mersey Care and help us to understand how other organisations can adopt a similar approach.

This event will be held online via Zoom (link TBA). Please contact joy@minthouseoxford.co.uk for more information.

You can register for this this event on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/restorative-just-culture-the-story-of-mersey-care-nhs-trust-tickets-146564629753

Dr Rachel Clarke, NHS palliative care doctor and bestselling author will be in conversation with the audience, discussing life on the NHS frontlines and asking what the response to the pandemic can tell us about government, the media and ourselves.