Neocortical networks must generate and maintain stable activity patterns despite perturbations due to learning and experience, and this stability must be maintained across distinct behavioral states with different sensory drive and modulatory tone. There is abundant theoretical and experimental evidence that network stability is achieved through homeostatic plasticity mechanisms that adjust synaptic and neuronal properties to stabilize some measure of average activity. This process has been extensively studied in primary visual cortex (V1), where chronic visual deprivation induces an initial drop in activity and ensemble average firing rates (FRs), but over time activity is restored to baseline. I will discuss recent work in which we follow bidirectional FR homeostasis in individual V1 neurons in freely behaving animals, as they cycle between natural periods of sleep and wake. We find that, when FRs are perturbed by visual deprivation or eye re-opening, over time they return precisely to a cell-autonomous set-point. Intriguingly, this FR homeostasis is gated by sleep/wake states in a manner that depends on the direction of homeostatic regulation: upward FR homeostasis occurs selectively during active wake, while downward FR homeostasis occurs selectively during sleep. These data indicate that neocortical plasticity is regulated in a complex manner by vigilance state and raise the possibility that temporal segregation of distinct plasticity mechanisms is important for proper circuit refinement.

Butterflies and moths are suffering impacts from changes in climate, habitats and plant communities, alongside wider challenges to nature. The talk will describe these challenges, some of the actions being taken to tackle them, locally and internationally, and where we are able to demonstrate success.
Dr Asher is butterfly recorder for Berks, Bucks and Oxon, author/co-author of several books on butterflies and national chair of Butterfly Conservation, the world’s largest insect conservation charity.

Neurons use two fundamental coding schemes to convey information: rate coding (frequency of firing) and temporal coding (timing of firing). Although temporal coding has long been postulated to be important for encoding responses to stimuli or internal states, this hypothesis has been challenging to test. I will describe how the circadian clock acts via a novel clock output molecule, Wide Awake (WAKE), to tune biophysical properties of spikes to induce regular firing of specific clock neurons at night. Optogenetic experiments demonstrate that these changes in the pattern of firing, in the absence of changes in firing rate, directly alter sleep quality. Computational modeling shows that the rhythmic changes in ionic flux driven by WAKE are sufficient to account for both the dynamic modulation of spike morphology and the regularity of the spike train. Finally, I will show how temporal coding in these clock neurons is transformed to rate coding changes in downstream arousal neurons and demonstrate that temporal coding alone can induce synaptic plasticity that encodes persistent changes in clock-regulated sleep quality.

Adult stem cells are a rare population of undifferentiated cells found throughout our bodies which are able to divide infinitely and give rise to the different types of cells that maintain the body’s tissues and organs. Salvador Aznar’s laboratory is interested in studying how these adult stem cells maintain tissue homeostasis and why they fail to function properly during ageing and tumorigenesis.

Prof Aznar will present their latest data regarding the impact our diet has on the timing of stem cell function and its profound effects on stem cells ageing. He will also discuss their recent findings on the influence that the fatty acid content of our diet has on metastatic-initiating cells, as well as recent work indicating that our diet exerts striking epigenetic effects on metastatic stem cells which can be therapeutically targeted.

What if I like research but not teaching? What if I do not like any of them? What alternatives to academia do I have?

We would like to introduce the “SIU Career Sessions”, a termly round of talks focusing on alternative careers for PhD students and postdocs, which will definitely help you with these questions. Get ready to hear from experts and explore new career paths! If you are not sure what is next after your PhD or would just like to be aware of your options, these events are for you!

Our first session will focus on a promising field for PhD-level scientists: industry. In this event, attendees will have the opportunity to hear from high profile speakers from two pharmaceutical companies with different focuses: Novo Nordisk and Immunocore. The speakers will bring not only information about the attributes they seek in potential employees, but also the daily life in industry and opportunities for a successful and stable career in big pharmaceutical companies. We will also learn from their first-hand experience how they took the career transition path to industry.

Is industry for you? Come find out with us!
As always, this event is completely free and everyone is welcome.

This presentation covers the highlights of almost half a century of observing local wildlife. It includes dormice, reptiles, rare orchids, rare butterflies, moths and other insects, great-crested newts and other amphibians, moths and wildlife observed in Mr Brownsword’s garden.
Mr Brownsword is a retired chemist whose interests include horticulture, natural history and photography.

Book Launch with Author & Translator: Yan Ge (顏歌)’s The Chilli Bean Paste Clan, translated by Nicky Harman

https://www.facebook.com/events/605485149803274/

2018/May/07 Monday 5-7PM Ho Tim Seminar Room, China Centre, St Hugh’s College, Oxford

Open and free of charge for all

Supported by: Oxford Chinese Studies Society

To welcome everyone back to Oxford in this Trinity Term, we have invited one of the most important writers of China’s post-1980 generation, Yan Ge, to share with us her experiences as a young writer in China and abroad. She will bring her seminal work, The Chilli Bean Paste Clan (《我們家》in Chinese, published in 2013), and discuss issues of family, language, morality, capitalism and more, with the novel’s English translator Nicky Harman. The Chilli Bean Paste Clan the English translation will be published by Balestier Press and available on the market from the 1st of May, 2018, adding a fresh voice in the growing field of literature in translation.

Synopsis of The Chilli Bean Paste Clan:

Set in a fictional town in West China, this is the story of the Duan-Xue family, owners of the lucrative chilli bean paste factory, and their formidable matriarch. As Gran’s eightieth birthday approaches, her middle-aged children get together to make preparations. Family secrets are revealed and long-time sibling rivalries flare up with renewed vigour. As Shengqiang struggles unsuccessfully to juggle the demands of his mistress and his wife, the biggest surprises of all come from Gran herself……

Professor David Der-wei Wang 王德威 of Harvard University has commented on Yan Ge and her work and hinted that she might signal a generational shift in the Chinese literary scene:
“She writes about her hometown. The stories in a small Sichuanese town are greatly done. She has her own worldviews, and frankly speaking, she is of a very fortunate generation. What she may have encountered as she grew up is not as tumultuous or adventurous as the writers that came before her, and therefore the factor of imagination has gradually come to matter more than experiences in reality.
她写她的故乡，四川一个小城的故事，写得很好。她有她的世界观，但坦白地讲，他们都是有幸的一代，在她成长的过程里面，她所遭遇的不如过去那辈作家有那么多的坎坷或者冒险性，所以，想象的成分已经逐渐地凌驾了现实经验的体会。”

This event will be of interest to those of you who work on contemporary China, Chinese literature, translation studies, and publishing. The conversation between Yan Ge and Nicky Harman will last around 30 minutes and we will leave plenty of time for critical dialogues, Q & A and discussions.

Books available for purchase at a discounted rate.

Speaker biography:

Yan Ge was born in Sichuan Province, China in 1984. She is a writer as well as a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature. Publishing since 1994, she is the author of eleven books in Chinese. Her works have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Hungarian. She was a visiting scholar at Duke University from 2011 to 2012 and a residency writer at the Cross Border Festival in Netherlands in November 2012. Named by People’s Literature magazine as one of twenty future literature masters in China, she is now the chairperson of China Young Writers’ Association and a contract writer of Sichuan Writers’ Association. She recently started writing in English. Her English stories could be seen on Irish Times and Stand Magazine. She lives in Dublin with her husband and son.

Nicky Harman is a British translator of Chinese literature, and one of the most influential figures in the field. She is co-Chair of the Translators Association (Society of Authors) and co-founded Paper Republic 纸托邦, one of the most important online forums for Chinese literatures in translation. She taught on the MSc in Translation at Imperial College until 2011 and now translates full-time from Chinese. The authors she has translated include Jia Pingwa贾平凹，Yan Geling 严歌苓，Chan Koon-chung 陈冠中，Annibaobei 安妮宝贝，Chen Xiwo陈希我，Yan Ge颜歌，and Han Dong韩东, to name just a few. She has won several awards with her translations.

Join St Cross alumna Kristina Lunz (MSc Global Governance and Diplomacy, 2014), co-founder of the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy, for a panel discussion on diplomacy, feminist foreign policy and social entrepreneurship. Joining her will be CFFP co-founder Marissa Conway, head of CFFP in the UK, and Dr Jennifer Cassidy, Editor of “Gender and Diplomacy” (Routledge, 2017) and Lecturer in International Relations, University of Oxford (St Peter’s College).

This talk is free to attend, all welcome.

About CFFP

The Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy (CFFP) is a research and advocacy organisation promoting a feminist approach to foreign policy. With its vision to challenge the status quo of foreign policy, the CFFP puts people instead of special interest at the core of policy initiatives.

CFFP was founded in 2016 by Marissa in London, where she is heading the UK section of CFFP. Kristina, a St Cross alumna (2014-2015), joined Marissa as a co-founder and also brought the organisation to Germany, where she is heading the German team. Dr Jennifer Cassidy joined CFFP’s Advisory Council recently.

How do we define a sound or a taste for which our language does not have a dedicated word?

Typically, we borrow words from another sensory modality. Wines, for example, are often described by words that belong to other sensory perceptions: a “soft flavour” borrows the adjective soft from the domain of touch, and a “round taste” borrows the adjective round from the domain of sight.

It remains an interesting open issue to what extent these cross-sensory metaphors are universal across languages, and to what extent they are language-specific.

Dr Francesca Strik Lievers will address these questions and provide an overview of the latest scientific discoveries in the field, using examples taken from different languages. Her talk will be followed by an opportunity for questions.

The event is organised and hosted by Creative Multilingualism in collaboration with TORCH. Creative Multilingualism is a research programme led by the University of Oxford and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the Open World Research Initiative.

Participation is free and open to the public. We provide FREE LUNCH to all participants.

12.30-13.00 – lunch and mingling

13.00-14.00 – talk and discussion

In today’s fast changing, highly interconnected, culturally diverse world our current approaches to policy need to become more responsive to change. Currently the dominant mode of policy making is still based on what we might term ‘intelligent choice’. This retains the premise that problems can be resolved through ‘best practice’ evidence-based approaches using empirical methods. We need to move however to ‘next practice’ a method which seeks to create entirely new propositions and then testing them in context so that we may learn, adapt and actively shape our understanding of the problem-solution space itself.

New methods are at the heart of some of that Lab’s latest projects, including a unique collaboration with the Government’s Office for Science, applying Speculative Design and advanced visualisation in the run up to the Industrial Strategy Ageing Grand Challenge.

As part of Think Human Festival, this one-off pop-up event is a unique opportunity for visitors of all ages to interact with leading academics from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Oxford Brookes University. The academics will act as ‘human books’ from a range of perspectives; historic, literary, political, legal and educational for 15 minutes per ‘book loan’ against the back drop of revolution. ‘RESIST! REMAIN!’ will provide the chance to engage with and access humanities and social science disciplines in a fun, original and inspiring way, and aims to create a lasting impression of how these subjects can help to understand what it is to be human.

Please note that this event is free, open to all ages and there is no need to book ahead. Please come to Bonn Square and start a interesting conversation around revolution!

Lunchtime talk and discussion led by Pete Wallis of Oxfordshire’s Youth Justice Service at the Mint House, Oxford Centre for Restorative Practice. Refreshments from 12.45.

Since 2015 a group of research-active academics from Oxford Brookes School of Law have been investigating how the criminal law can, and should, tackle speech and images on the internet which are dangerous or offensive.

For Think Human Festival Chara Bakalis, Chris Lloyd, and Mark O’Brien will run a workshop with short talks on ‘cyberhate,’ ‘sexting,’ and the ‘dark web’ respectively. These talks aim to engage audiences in intellectual questions about the issues society faces in the internet age and how the law can engage with these pressing topics. This workshop is for anyone interested in issues of criminal law, internet regulation, the affects of social media, and the wider digital world of the 21st century.

Lunch will be provided at this event.

Our DNA holds clues to the demographic history of our ancestors. Dr Clare Bycroft presents recent work looking at the genetic history of the Iberian Peninsula.

The adoption of big data, machine learning, and simulation software in biology and drug discovery have allowed for rapid progress in these fields. So far these technologies have aided discoveries, but can they eventually replace human effort and experiments? We are inviting a panel of experts at the forefront of these technologies to answer this titular question, and evaluate the role of computers in the future of biology and medicine.

Time: 5:30 pm on 23rd May
Venue: Lecture Theatre B, Department of Computer Science 15 Parks Road

Limited spots available.
There will be a networking & drinks reception after the event.
As always, this event is free and everyone is welcome!

About the speakers:

Professor Blanca Rodriguez

Professor of Computational Medicine

Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in Basic Biomedical Sciences

Blanca was born in Valencia, Spain, where she attended the Lycee Francais de Valencia, and graduated as an Electronics Engineer from the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain, in 1997. She then started a PhD in the Integrated Laboratory of Bioengineering supervised by Prof. Chema Ferrero and at the same time became an Assistant Professor in Electronics and Biomedical Instrumentation at the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia. During her PhD studies, she investigated the causes of extracellular potassium accumulation during acute ischaemia using a mathematical model of single cell action potential. After graduating in 2001, she joined Prof. Natalia Trayanova’s group at Tulane University in New Orleans (now at Johns Hopkins University), as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Her research focused on the mechanisms of cardiac vulnerability to electric shocks in normal and globally ischemic hearts. In 2004, she won the First Prize in the Young Investigator Award Competition in Basic Science of the Heart Rhythm Society. After spending two years in New Orleans, she joined Oxford University in August 2004, as a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. David Gavaghan, funded by the Integrative Biology Project. From 2007 to 2013, Blanca Rodriguez held a Medical Research Council Career Development fellowship and she has also been awarded funding by European Comission, Royal Society, EPSRC, Wellcome Trust, BHF and Leverhulme Trust. She is currently a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in Basic biomedical Science and Professor of Computational Medicine.

Dr. Romain Talon

XChem Senior Support Scientist

Romain joined the Structural Genomics Consortium Oxford in 2014, where his initial role was to contribute to the Diamond Light Source X-ray fragment screening facility XChem: “X-ray structure-accelerated, synthesis-aligned fragment medicinal chemistry”. He test-drove the new experiment with real-life SGC projects, stress-tested the XChem throughput and established what was required for XChem team to be open to external users. He then made sure that XChem was used as a routine experiment to carry out X-ray fragment screening at the SGC. Romain thus became an “XChem Liaison Scientist” for the SGC. Over the past two years, he has coordinated and provided his expertise in crystallography for a total 27 fragment screening campaigns at the SGC. This number includes three fragment screening projects he carried out himself. Romain moved to the Diamond Light Source synchrotron to be a Senior Support Scientist for XChem. On top of his user support role, Romain is now improving his knowledge in computational chemistry and expertise that to provide for XChem users at Diamond.

ENTRANCE VIA LONGWALL STREET ONLY.

Many illnesses have been thought—controversially—to have a psychosomatic component. How should we understand this? Sometimes a contrast is made between organic illness and mental illness: psychosomatic illnesses are the latter masquerading as the former. But if the mental is physical, and hence organic, this will not help. An alternative approach distinguishes between symptoms that are influenced by the patient’s attitudes, and those that are not; psychosomatic illnesses are marked by the former. Does this make the class too wide? Suppose I aggravate a bad back by refusing to exercise, falsely expecting the exercise to be dangerous. My symptoms are influenced by my attitude: are they therefore psychosomatic? I suggest that there is no sharp cut-off. I examine the role of attitudes in various illnesses, including addiction, focussing on the ways that social factors affect the relevant attitudes. I ask whether recognition of a continuum might help lessen the stigma that psychosomatic illness has tended to attract, and suggest other ways that treatment might be more attuned to these issues.

The year is 1964 and ten defendants are on trial for their lives in South Africa in what is widely perceived as a politically motivated proceeding. The defendants include many prominent campaigners against apartheid, notably Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki. Across the world there is widespread condemnation, and criticism of the apartheid regime is frequently aired by states in the United Nations. Multiple resolutions are passed by the General Assembly and Security Council calling for South Africa to end the trial and to release all political prisoners.

On Friday 25 May 2018, members of the Oxford Brookes Model United Nations Society will be staging a re-enactment of a Security Council debate about the Rivonia trial in South Africa.  The Security Council delegates have agreed to meet with interested bystanders, over tea, coffee and cake, between 12 noon and 1pm in Headington Hill Hall and will be available to discuss about what their countries hope to achieve in a resolution about the Rivonia trial.

Please join us for what will be a fun event set in a fascinating time in history with the Cold War, anti-colonial movements and the rise of ideas of racial equality and human rights all playing a role in how apartheid was discussed within the United Nations.

Please register for this event on the Think Human Festival website.

Federica Infantino is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Group for Research on Ethnic Relations, Migration and Equality at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her project ‘Practicing Immigration Detention and Deportation in the EU. Actors, Organizations and Transnational Policymaking from Below’ is funded by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS-FRS). In 2015, she was Wiener-Anspach postdoctoral fellow and visiting academic at COMPAS, University of Oxford. Federica holds a PhD in political and social sciences from Université Libre de Bruxelles and a PhD in political science, comparative political sociology, from Sciences Po Paris. Her main research interests focus on the practices of migration and border control in comparative perspective, transnational actors and dynamics of policy change, the involvement of non-state actors in governments’ functions. She is the author of the book Outsourcing Border Control. Politics and Practice of Contracted Visa Policy in Morocco (Palgrave MacMillan), the co-editor of the 2014 Security Dialogue’s special issue ‘Border Security as Practice’ and the author of several articles about the day-to-day filtering work of borders that is achieved via visa issuing.

This lecture explores the global preoccupation with criminality in the early twenty-first century, a preoccupation strikingly disproportionate, in most places and for most people, to the risks posed by lawlessness to the conduct of everyday life. Ours in an epoch in which law-making, law-breaking, and law-enforcement are ever more critical registers in which societies construct, contest, and confront truths about themselves. It argues that, as the result of a tectonic shift in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance, the meanings attached to crime and, with it, the nature of policing, have undergone significant change; also, that there has been a palpable muddying of the lines between legality and illegality, between corruption and conventional business – even between crime-and-policing, which exist, nowadays, in ever greater, hyphenated complicity.

Founder and co-head of Doughty Street Chambers, Europe’s largest human rights practice. He has argued leading cases in constitutional law, criminal law and media law. Author.

It is generally thought that China and the West have developed historically along different lines, each with its own understanding of society and the ideas and concepts on which society is founded.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the legal and jurisprudential context, where it is conventionally assumed that the two major civilizations proceeded according to wholly different understandings of society, relations among its members, and between the people and government.

The writings of Confucius seem to confirm this sense of separation. While we have all heard of Confucius; have probably at some time quoted from him, nevertheless he epitomizes the Chinese way of thought, which is taken to be a matter of curiosity but of no special interest.

In this lecture, Dr Ying Yu, Research Fellow of Wolfson College Oxford, will challenge these assumptions and offer the basis for a wholly new approach.

Through a close analysis of Confucius’ ideas, based on the original script, Dr Yu will show how similar they are to the jurisprudential foundations of western societies. In doing so, Dr Yu will pay particular attention to understandings of justice, both substantive and procedural.

Dr Ying Yu is a Research Fellow in Law Justice and Society at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a member of the Faculty of Law in the University of Oxford.

Ying’s main research interest is the rights of consumers and their legal protection, building on her former work on international trade, maritime law and private international law.

Welcome to the first event in our two-part China-UK Science Innovation Series!

In 2016 alone, China invested USD236 billion in Research and Development, making it the second largest investor in innovation globally. Given this, as well as China’s rapid economic growth, Science Innovation Union (SIU) and the Oxford Chinese Life Sciences Society (OCLSS) have decided to team up to hold an outstanding two-session event on this exciting area of development. Attendees will hear from a distinguished group of high profile speakers coming from the government, academic and private sectors. Our audience will have the chance to learn about how China and the UK have been working together to boost innovation, opportunities available for funding and to get an update on the latest leading-edge research.

Speakers:
Sunan Jiang (Minister Counsellor for Science and Technology, the Chinese Embassy in the UK)

Dr Wenming Ji (Managing Director at Oxford Cardiomox Ltd.; Former Senior Consultant at Isis Innovation Ltd; Former Project Manager at Innovation China UK)

Dr Shisong Jiang (CTO of Oxford Vacmedix)

Schedule:
17:30-17:40 Registration

17:40-18:00 Speaker 1

18:05-18:25 Speaker 2

18:30-18:50 Speaker 3

18:50-19:10 Q&A

19:10-20:00 Networking

As always, this event is free and open to the public!

The second part of this series is entitled:
“Building bridges between UK and China: From investment to ongoing global research advances” and will take place on the evening of June 26th.
Please keep an eye out for further details in the coming weeks!

A History of Food Fraud and Its Detection
Dr Duncan Campbell (DPhil Soil Solution Chemistry, 1986)

Duncan’s talk will cover the long history of food adulteration from medieval Germany to 19th century America, the pioneers who applied scientific methods to its detection in the 19th century and some modern examples from Britain and further afield.

Duncan was a student member of St Cross College from 1982 to 1985. After his time at St Cross and a period of post-doctoral research, he broadened his horizons to apply chemical analysis to public protection and gained the qualification required to act as a Public Analyst in 1994.

Although small in number, Public Analysts play a key role in enforcing many aspects of food legislation in the UK, directing the analysis of food and providing expert opinion on the results. A leading member of the profession, Duncan has contributed to the wider debate on protecting the public’s interests in relation to food, as well as TV programmes including the second episode of Netflix’s documentary series ‘Rotten’ which sets out to expose fraud and corruption in today’s global food industry.

Drinks reception to follow.

Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Five Openings, and Caspar Henderson, author of A New Map of Wonders talk about honeybees and nature. All are welcome. 7.30pm on 16 July in the library in the Oxford Hub. More details here https://www.facebook.com/events/222901301824557/

A presentation on natural history covering kingfishers, butterflies, insects, and many mammals.

The Preeces have been photographing wildlife for about 18 years after taking early retirement and have had their work published in many magazines.

Introducing a pioneering approach to ‘global legal epidemiology’, Prof Steven Hoffman will discuss legal mechanisms available for coordinating international responses to transnational problems, their prospects, and their challenges. Global legal epidemiology is the scientific study of international law as a factor in the cause, distribution, and promotion of outcomes around the world. It involves evaluating the effectiveness of international legal mechanisms on the basis of their quantifiable effects and drawing implications for the development of future treaties.

Prof Hoffman will draw on examples from public health, including tobacco control and antimicrobial resistance, identifying wider lessons for potential international treaties in other domains such as the environment, human rights and trade.

To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Inclosure Act, a brief illustrated history will be given of a 4 acre allotment of land north of Oxford from Anglo-Saxon times to the present, together with a description, examples and demonstrations of its flora, fauna and significance today.

Bernard Tucker Memorial Lecture – Joint with OOS
Prof. Richard Gregory is Head of Species Monitoring and Research at the RSPB Centre for Conservation Science. His talk will explain how the RSPB’s science is delivering evidence-based solutions to address the biodiversity crisis.