Katharine Wright is Assistant Director at the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. There she organises and runs Working Parties and other activities, and is involved in representing the Council to the public and professional bodies.
Before joining the Secretariat in May 2007, she worked on health law and ethics in the NHS, the Department of Health and the House of Commons.
My background is in the molecular biology of human viral pathogens, specifically HIV (tat/TAR interactions, at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge), poliovirus (secondary structure of 5' non-coding RNA in neurovirulence and vaccine attenuation, with Prof Jeff Almond) and coronaviruses, in the pre-SARS era (with Prof Stuart Siddell, then in Wuerzburg, Germany).
Danielle Schreve is a Reader in Physical Geography and Deputy Director of the Centre for Quaternary Research.at Royal Holloway. Danielle graduated with a B.Sc. in Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Quaternary mammalian palaeontology from the Department of Biology, also at UCL, in 1997.
Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. Formerly a Fellow of All Souls College, and Wadham College, he is now a Fellow of New College. He is currently an EPSRC Senior Media Fellow and was previously a Royal Society University Research Fellow. His academic work concerns mainly group theory and number theory.
Denis Noble received his PhD from University College London in 1961, where his project to produce the first computer model of the heart had already resulted in two articles published in Nature in 1960.
Bill McGuire is the Director of the Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre. He is author or editor of over 400 books, papers and articles focusing on volcano instability and monitoring, volcanic hazards, natural hazards and environmental change, climate change and global geophysical events.
My research covers several areas in evolutionary biology and population genetics, combining both theoretical work and empirical analyses. Of particular interest is the analysis of recombination from population genetic data, the relationship between linkage disequilibrium and properties of the underlying genealogy, and methods for inferring genealogical history from DNA sequence data.
Chris Jarvis is one of the Education Officers at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Having spent his formative years in Nigeria, where he grew up surrounded by wildlife and kept snakes, owls, bushbabies, bushpig and other animals as pets, he has been a keen amateur naturalist all his life.
Robin Dunbar is currently Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology in the School of Anthropology, and a Fellow of Magdalen College. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998.
Alan J Barr is a lecturer of the Particle Physics group in the University of Oxford’s department of physics, a Tutorial Fellow in physics at Merton College, the Physics coordinator of the ATLAS UK collaboration and currently works with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Swiss-French boarder near Geneva.
In 2000 I started my PhD in Primate Biology and Conservation at Cambridge University and graduated in 2004. During this time I worked at the Kalaweit Gibbon Rehabilitation Project, with which I am still associated as a scientific advisor and coordinator for Kalaweit UK. Responsibilities include coordinating the volunteer programme and raising awareness of the plight of gibbons.
Could the Yeti really exist, or is it just a popular legend? Anthropologist and primate expert, Dr Anna Nekaris, will be explaining how you find unknown animals, looking at examples of new species of primate still being discovered today, and exploring the likelihood of the Yeti's existence. She will also bring us up-to-date with recent research into unidentified hairs reportedly taken from a Yeti-like creature in India.
“The charismatic orang-utan and the singing, swinging gibbon are threatened by logging, oil palm, the illegal pet trade and forest fires. But more people are learning how they can help our primate cousins, so the situation is not all bleak. Dr Susan Cheyne will discuss what we know about these wonderful creatures, and how they can be protected”
My research interests focus on resource-consumer interactions examining how species coexist through space and time. This research involves developing appropriate mathematical models and experiments to test hypotheses on species coexistence. Primarily, we use parasitism as the life-history mode to explore the coexistence of multiple species in resource-consumer interactions.
What impacts do domestic cats have on wild bird populations? Despite being fed regularly by their owners, a proportion of domestic cats will still hunt wild prey. Join Becky Dulieu as she investigates whether this predatory behaviour is contributing to the decline of wild bird populations
Dr Mike Bonsall provides an insight into the lifestyles of the minibeast. By focussing on the diversity of insects we find in our own gardens, he will look in particular at ‘pest insects’ and how we can use bugs to control bugs.
Over the last half million years, Britain has experienced extreme variations in climate, switching from “Ice Ages” to warmer times when hippos wallowed in the Thames.
‘Continental flood basalt’ eruptions are examples of volcanic ‘super-eruptions’. They can smother hundreds of thousands of square miles in red-hot molten rock, create stacks of lava over a mile thick and spew out mind-boggling quantities of toxic gas. Dr Mike Widdowson investigates the geological record for past eruptions, and speculates upon what might happen if such super-eruptions were to occur today – after all, it’s only a matter of time before the next one blows!
The future of the Earth's climate looks bleak - new research points to higher temperatures, bigger storms, more floods and the drowning of coastal towns and cities across the planet. Prof Bill McGuire, head of Europe's leading academic hazard research centre, explains that if we are to stop it from happening we may have less than 10 years to do something about it.
Pandemic flu and the end of the human race? When bird flu finds a human host, the death rate is higher than in the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic (which killed nearly 40 million people).
Humans are very closely related to the other apes, and share many aspects of their anatomy, behaviour and ecology. So why do we appear to be so different? What are humans not simply “just another great ape”?
Living things are much more than just packages of DNA. In fact, organisms interact with their genes and environment in a complex way, forcing biologists to question their assumptions about the nature of humanity.
An insight into the ethical issues surrounding the forensic use of DNA.
The use of DNA is becoming an increasingly valuable tool in criminal investigations. The UK's forensic database holds around 4 million DNA profiles, but does this affect people's liberty and privacy, or is the collection of 'bioinformation' justified by the need to fight crime?
From terrifying T-Rex to super-sized sauropods - discover the story of the evolution of the dinosaurs How did the dinosaurs evolve, what did they evolve from, and could their descendants still be alive today?Chris Jarvis, from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, will explain how rocks and fossil
Our genes can tell us a lot about human history.
Professor Gil McVean will explain how they can be used to tell us about how humans evolved, how they colonised different parts of the globe, and how they were shaped by local pressures from diet, disease and the environment.
The world population has doubled to ca. 6.8 billion over the last 50 years and until recently the relative abundance of food has kept pace, with the poorest benefiting the most, although more than 900 million are malnourished and live below the poverty line. This dramatic increase in crop yields was due to a number of innovations: mechanisation, irrigation, genetics and plant breeding, nitrogen fertilisers, pesticides, and the developed world became complacent.
Chris Leaver has recently retired as Sibthorpian Professor and Head of the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford.
Science Oxford welcomes top physicists Dr. Alan J. Barr, Brian Cox and Dr. John March-Russell as they bring us the first news from the Large Hadron Collider: an 17 mile long atom-smasher deep below the Alps which will recreate the conditions that existed in the first moments after the Big Bang.
From the sphere to the swastika, from the pyramid to the pentagon, our eyes and minds are drawn to symmetrical objects. symmetry is central to the key ideas in subjects ranging from architecture to zoology.
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