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In 2021, Canada passed legislation to change its medical assistance in dying (MAID) program from one in which eligibility was restricted to individuals nearing end-of-life to one in which individuals with serious but non-fatal illnesses, diseases, or disabilities could be eligible. Proponents of this change often frame it as a victory for patient autonomy, arguing that it had been a paternalistic moral imposition for the state to restrict the so-called ‘right to die’ to individuals who were already near death. However, this expanded MAID program still relies on state-defined eligibility criteria as to what kind of suffering renders intentional death acceptable. The 2021 MAID eligibility expansion was, therefore, not a removal of moral values from MAID law but rather a change in which moral values are deemed most legitimate. My dissertation research aims to shed light on this significant socio-moral change by examining the relationship between moral and political values in the context of the legitimisation of MAID in Canada. This talk focuses in on a specific theme that emerged during fieldwork interviews: ambiguity. Both pro- and anti-MAID interviewees – all of whom were legal, medical, or political experts on assisted dying – would often raise concerns that the Canadian MAID legislation was too ambiguous. I argue that this legal ambiguity has the effect of diffusing moral responsibility for MAID eligibility decisions, and that this diffusion has the double-edged potential to reduce both moral injury and oversight efficacy.

• Speaker: Janna Bryson, PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology
• Tuesday 28 January 2025, 13:10-14:00
• Venue: 1 Newnham Terrace seminar room, Darwin College.
• Series: Darwin College Humanities and Social Sciences Seminars; organiser: Dr Amelia Hassoun.

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Lubrication theory is adapted to incorporate the large normal stresses that occur for order-one Deborah numbers, $De$, the ratio of the relaxation time to the residence time.

Comparing with the pressure drop for a Newtonian viscous fluid with a viscosity equal to that of an Oldroyd-B fluid in steady simple shear, we find numerically a reduced pressure drop through a contraction and an increased pressure drop through an expansion, both changing linearly with $De$ at high $De$. For a constriction there is a smaller pressure drop that plateaus at high $De$. Much of the change in pressure drop occurs in the stress relaxation in a long exit channel.

An asymptotic analysis for high $De$, based on the idea that normal stresses are stretched by an accelerating flow in proportion to the square of the velocity, reveals that the large linear changes in pressure drop are due to higher normal stresses pulling the fluid through the narrowest gap. A secondary cause of the reduction is that the elastic shear stresses do not have time to build up to their steady state equilibrium value while they accelerate through a contraction.

And experiments find differently!

• Speaker: Professor John Hinch, DAMTP
• Friday 28 February 2025, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: MR2.
• Series: Fluid Mechanics (DAMTP); organiser: Professor Grae Worster.

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In the mid-20th century, the United States and the Soviet Union came to believe that the future of each country hinged on capable technoscientific workforce. To cultivate such workforce, researchers in both countries suggested using special pedagogical computers, which were seen as more effective instructors than human teachers. At the same time, in the 1960s and the 1970s, both American and Soviet societies saw the rising urgency of the concept of creativity, defined as the capacity for technoscientific ingenuity. This talk begins by examining how researchers in the US and the Soviet Union approached the task of turning the computer, a rule-bound machine, into the instrument of cultivating creative thinking. In doing so, scholars employed formal approaches to modelling human reasoning developed by artificial intelligence (AI) practitioners and cognitive scientists in the US and the USSR . Pedagogical computing, therefore, became the site where many approaches to AI were tested and perfected. Eventually, some researchers involved in pedagogical computing turned to artificial intelligence research, where they sought to replicate computationally what they had come to define as the core of human intelligence. This talk treats US and Soviet pedagogical computing as converging efforts in optimizing and managing human cognitive resources under late capitalism and late socialism. Tracing the lineage between pedagogical computing and artificial intelligence in the US and the USSR , I demonstrate how in both countries, artificial intelligence was a managerial science of cognitive resources predicated on state and industry efforts to mold societies with science and technology.

• Speaker: Ekaterina Babintseva (Purdue University)
• Thursday 13 March 2025, 15:30-17:00
• Venue: Large Lecture Theatre, Department of Plant Sciences, Downing Site.
• Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science; organiser: Dr. Rosanna Dent.

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As global opium markets expanded in the 19th century, the drug presented a deep therapeutic dilemma. Valued for vanquishing pain and inducing sleep, opium also heightened fears about its habit-forming capacity. Prized amid recurring cholera epidemics, opium products also provoked worry over their capacity to poison and kill. This talk – previewing my next book – examines a single murder trial of an enslaved girl in 1850 Tennessee, accused of using opium to kill the infant child of her master. At issue in the case was her knowledge of the uses and misuses of laudanum, an opium concoction. The case sheds light on an unexplored aspect of the nineteenth-century opium dilemma – the interplay of vital need and fear of poisoning as manifest in the context of US slavery. The case also illuminates how the courts waded into this therapeutic dilemma – how law and medicine interacted in adjudicating questions of knowledge, intent, culpability, and the maintenance of social order as opium found its way onto the North American slave plantation.

Cambridge Lecture in the History of Medicine

• Speaker: Keith Wailoo (Princeton University)
• Thursday 06 March 2025, 15:30-17:00
• Venue: Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site.
• Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science; organiser: Dr. Rosanna Dent.

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Over the past several decades, significant changes have taken place in the way that the Amazon River region has come to be understood across a range of disciplines. In the field of anthropology, interventions by anthropologists Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, as well as Indigenous knowledge-keepers including Davi Kopenawa Yanomami and Ailton Krenak, have transformed the academic (and public) understanding of how Amerindian communities perceive and describe their own histories in equatorial South America, and beyond. Amazonian archaeology, in the work of Anna Roosevelt, Eduardo Neves, and Denise Schaan, among many others, has likewise revealed new ways of understanding the relationship between physical remnants of communities past and the longer histories of habitation and engagement within the vast and diverse Amazonian ecosystem. Even more recently, Amazonian artists from Peru to Venezuela and Brazil have engaged in a creative and politically ambitious rethinking of colonialism within the broader Amazon basin, presenting their work at venues from Braunschweig to Vienna and from Princeton to Venice. And mega-exhibitions like that of Sebastião Salgado’s ‘Amazonia’ or the even more recent ‘Amazonias: El Futuro Ancestral’ (CCCB, Barcelona) have helped bring the visual lexicon of Amazonian rivers, forests, and communities to even more global audiences.

Today, Amazonia is being presented and displayed like never before in its history: in the news media, in scholarly books and publications, in museums, in political discourse, and in visual art. How are we to understand this visibility historically, especially through the presence of Amazonian objects and collections in museums and art exhibitions, and given the multidisciplinary and transgeographical nature of the region? What historically have been considered the confines of ‘Amazonia’ as a concept and what kinds of discourses exist that place different kinds of objects, works of arts, and histories together under a single category of ‘Amazonia’ today? This presentation aims to present the broad outlines of an interdisciplinary research project that will examine Amazonia historically, materially, and ideologically in museum collections around the globe. As digital repatriation comes to be better understood, what role/place/function does it have for the Amazon River region in particular? How do these politics change across the range of media, across geographical frontiers, and distinct legal and ethical regimes of this megaregion? As we contemplate these questions, are there particularly good scholarly models we can use to understand the historical processes of collecting Amazonia in the present day?

• Speaker: Neil Safier (Brown University)
• Thursday 27 February 2025, 15:30-17:00
• Venue: Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site.
• Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science; organiser: Dr. Rosanna Dent.

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The concept of psychiatric (mental) disorder became widespread in the late 20th century, as a sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical, extension of the more general category of physical disease. It has facilitated medicalization of some psychological conditions, such as those listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM). At the same time, it has generated controversy about the scope and consequences of its applicability. ‘Psychiatric disorder’ has become a ‘hembig’ concept: one with normative (hegemonic) content, ambiguous meanings, and wide (big) scope. This has led to ongoing uncertainty and disagreement about what falls under the scope of psychiatric disorder. Many proposed definitions are circular. Practical consequences of these ‘hembig’ characteristics include inappropriate stigmatization, patient refusals of diagnoses, uncertain eligibility for healthcare and disability accommodations, concerns about overdiagnosis, and worries about elite capture of resources. I will argue that understanding the evolving meaning of ‘psychiatric disorder’ is helpful as a preliminary to recommendations about how to go forward with (or without) this concept.

• Speaker: Miriam Soloman (Temple University)
• Thursday 20 February 2025, 15:30-17:00
• Venue: Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site.
• Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science; organiser: Dr. Rosanna Dent.

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Science is a form of communication, but its analysis from this standpoint has often been fragmented between diverse approaches and specialties, from textual criticism and media sociology to book history, citation analysis and translation studies. As a result, work not devoted to these subjects often implicitly treats the communicative dimension of science as an afterthought, managed after the main work is done. This talk aims to bring communication to the centre of our understanding of science. My goal is not to offer a unified overview of the vast literatures on pragmatics, translation, visual culture, the philosophy of linguistics and other areas, but to point to practical perspectives that might help in interpreting science at every stage as communicative action.

• Speaker: Jim Secord (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
• Thursday 13 February 2025, 15:30-17:00
• Venue: Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site.
• Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science; organiser: Dr. Rosanna Dent.

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This paper examines the relationship between data and disease in the mid-19th-century British colony of Sierra Leone through the eyes of the black physician James Africanus Beale Horton (1835–1883). A native of Sierra Leone and a distinguished graduate of two British medical schools, Horton sought to arrest the alarming ascent of racialised medical information gathering systems that framed the delivery of public health and wellness for both African and European inhabitants who lived across the 3,000 miles of West African coastline controlled by Britain. Concentrating on the historical context that enabled Horton to use his robust knowledge of medicine, environmental science and statistics to promote health equity within British West Africa and within the Global South more generally, I suggest that he was especially keen to challenge the proliferation of incomplete, inaccurate or irrelevant medical information by collecting and disseminating climatology and mortality ‘counter data’ that revealed the true causes of health and illness.

• Speaker: Matthew Eddy (Durham University)
• Thursday 06 February 2025, 15:30-17:00
• Venue: Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site.
• Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science; organiser: Dr. Rosanna Dent.

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When relations between science and society are going well, members of the public can straightforwardly use scientific information in their decision-making. When things go awry and trust breaks down, people seek out substitutions to fulfil the epistemic functions that trust in science previously satisfied. One way to do this is to adopt a DIY approach and ‘do your own research’.

Plenty has been written philosophically on the phenomenon of ‘doing your own research’, mostly from and about north American and western European contexts. The implied epistemic agent is typically someone who values autonomy in the extreme, is deluded about their own capacities, has a contrarian character, and may enjoy the novelty of figuring things out for themself. However, if we change the cases, ‘doing your own research’ may look different.

In this talk, I provide a detailed case study of Thabo Mbeki and his AIDS denialism. Thabo Mbeki was South Africa’s president from 1999 to 2008, and when he began his political career, he completely accepted the mainstream scientific position on HIV /AIDS. However, Mbeki began to distrust this science as he came to suspect that it was premised on racist values. He engaged in substantial independent evidence-gathering and developed AIDS policies on that basis, with tragic consequences. Mbeki’s story is undoubtedly a cautionary tale against ‘doing your own research’, but he is far-removed from the parody of an autonomy-obsessed agent, dabbling in science for the fun of it. He is deeply invested in the success of his country and its people, and he takes this role extremely seriously. In fact, it seems that it is the seriousness of his commitments that lead him astray.

Overall, this talk hopes to provide a slightly different story about ‘doing your own research’’ It also aims to highlight how the selection of cases for philosophical analysis can substantially alter how we understand the phenomenon under study, and so choosing cases should be approached with care.

• Speaker: Katherine Furman (University of Liverpool)
• Thursday 30 January 2025, 15:30-17:00
• Venue: Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site.
• Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science; organiser: Dr. Rosanna Dent.

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Our current understanding of the elementary building blocks of Nature, encapsulated by the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, is one of the most successful theory constructions of the past century, yet it is necessarily incomplete. Several experimental observations, such as the presence of Dark Matter and the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe, are currently unexplained by the model. In my talk I will discuss how the uncharted territory beyond the Standard Model can be explored and how Maths can be a precious compass to guide us in the fascinating quest for the unknown.

Talks are priced at £4 for non-Scientific Society members. Scientific Society members will have free access to all our talks. Lifetime membership costs £15 and gives free access to all talks, members-only events and priority access to oversubscribed SciSoc events.

• Speaker: Prof Maria Ubiali
• Tuesday 18 March 2025, 18:00-19:30
• Venue: Pfizer Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry, Lensfield Road.
• Series: SciSoc – Cambridge University Scientific Society; organiser: Zhang Xianghao Jeffrey.

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The development of new chemical methods for the next generation of nanoparticles with very high magnetic moment, fine tuning Au nanorods and novel hybrid and multifunctional nanostructure is presented. Detailed mechanistic studies of their formation by sophisticated and advanced analysis of the nanostructure allows tuning of the physical properties at the nanoscale; these can subsequently be exploited for diagnosis and treatment of various diseases. The studies are conducted to provide insight for future material design approaches. It will also help to identify the critical process parameters that can be manipulated in order to obtain the suitable physical properties for the intended applications.

Talks are priced at £4 for non-Scientific Society members. Scientific Society members will have free access to all our talks. Lifetime membership costs £15 and gives free access to all talks, members-only events and priority access to oversubscribed SciSoc events.

• Speaker: Prof Thanh Nguyen
• Tuesday 04 March 2025, 18:00-19:30
• Venue: Pfizer Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry, Lensfield Road.
• Series: SciSoc – Cambridge University Scientific Society; organiser: Zhang Xianghao Jeffrey.

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Josh Smalley, postdoctoral research associate at the University of Leicester and finalist of The Great British Bake Off, explores how chemistry plays an all-important role in the success or failure of bakes. Beyond the heat of the oven, Josh shares his personal journey as a chemist, how he combines a successful research career with his passion for food, along with how he navigated the competitive landscape of the Bake-Off.

Talks are priced at £4 for non-Scientific Society members. Scientific Society members will have free access to all our talks. Lifetime membership costs £15 and gives free access to all talks, members-only events and priority access to oversubscribed SciSoc events.

• Speaker: Dr Josh Smalley
• Tuesday 25 February 2025, 18:00-19:30
• Venue: Pfizer Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry, Lensfield Road.
• Series: SciSoc – Cambridge University Scientific Society; organiser: Zhang Xianghao Jeffrey.

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Bodily reactions to acute stressors are by design adaptive enabling individuals to operate within defined homeostatic limits. However, more protracted forms of stress, including uncontrollable stress encountered during early stages of life, result in a myriad of adverse outcomes, not least stress-related disorders such as depression and anxiety. When faced with such stress, humans and other animals elicit a variety of coping strategies to offset stress intensity and harm, but for some, stress ‘gets under the skin’ and leaves lasting impacts. This talk considers the brain science and psychology of stress and focuses on so-called top-down cognitive control processes that collectively suppress stress circuits centred on the amygdala, striatum and periaqueductal grey (PAG). A new theory will be introduced that links mitochondrial function in the prefrontal cortex with top-down cognitive control, which it will be argued may account for both the beneficial (i.e., stress resilience) and maladaptive consequences of repeated exposure to uncontrollable stressors. Empirical support for this theory will be introduced and discussed using data derived from in-vivo respirometry, high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging, and computer-automated touchscreen-based tasks in rodents. Finally, the implications of this research for developing new interventions for depression and anxiety-related conditions will be considered, including a novel scientific justification for psilocybin and other hallucinogenic drugs in treatment-refractory depression.

Talks are priced at £4 for non-Scientific Society members. Scientific Society members will have free access to all our talks. Lifetime membership costs £15 and gives free access to all talks, members-only events and priority access to oversubscribed SciSoc events.

• Speaker: Prof Jeffrey W. Dalley
• Tuesday 18 February 2025, 18:00-19:30
• Venue: Pfizer Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry, Lensfield Road.
• Series: SciSoc – Cambridge University Scientific Society; organiser: Zhang Xianghao Jeffrey.

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Evolution on islands has fascinated generations of biologists. While weird and wonderful organisms are known from islands, repeated evolution is also a feature of island biota. The island syndrome refers to the phenomenon where suites of characteristics evolve in predictable ways after an organism colonises an island. How evolution produces these repeated patterns when islands themselves vary in numerous ways is not yet well understood. Furthermore, repeated evolution on islands stems from repeated dispersal and colonisation opportunities, yet speciation usually requires some phase of isolation. How then can species that are excellent overwater dispersers diverge and speciate? My research examines how birds evolve on islands using the silvereye (Zosterops lateralis) of Australia and the southwest Pacific. This species is a prolific island coloniser, providing the opportunity to examine repeated evolution over multiple timescales and understand how dispersal shapes the evolutionary trajectory of island birds.

Talks are priced at £4 for non-Scientific Society members. Scientific Society members will have free access to all our talks. Lifetime membership costs £15 and gives free access to all talks, members-only events and priority access to oversubscribed SciSoc events.

• Speaker: Prof Sonya Clegg
• Tuesday 11 February 2025, 18:00-19:30
• Venue: Pfizer Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry, Lensfield Road.
• Series: SciSoc – Cambridge University Scientific Society; organiser: Zhang Xianghao Jeffrey.

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Advanced nucleic-acid based therapeutics (NATs) e.g. antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs), siRNAs and modified in vitro transcribed mRNAs, can provide promising treatments ranging from mRNAs vaccines against COVID19 and cancers, to therapeutic ASOs to treat life-limiting genetic disorders. However, each therapy presents its own unique safety assessment challenges and preclinical studies have identified a range of toxicities for ASOs and siRNAs that are now observed in clinical trials. Understanding how NATs interact with and impact on the cellular machinery is key to preventing off-target effects and to improve the safety profiles of these new medicine platforms and this research is particularly important as we progress from using these new agents to treat rare to common diseases.

Talks are priced at £4 for non-Scientific Society members. Scientific Society members will have free access to all our talks. Lifetime membership costs £15 and gives free access to all talks, members-only events and priority access to oversubscribed SciSoc events.

• Speaker: Prof Anne Willis
• Tuesday 04 February 2025, 18:00-19:30
• Venue: Pfizer Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry, Lensfield Road.
• Series: SciSoc – Cambridge University Scientific Society; organiser: Zhang Xianghao Jeffrey.

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All human advances have depended on making new materials, and all materials are alloys, i.e. mixtures of several different starting materials or components. So the history of the human race has been the continued invention of new materials by discovering new alloys. Recently a new way of doing this, by manufacturing multicomponent high-entropy alloys, has shown that the total number of possible materials is enormous, even more than the number of atoms in the galaxy. The vast majority of these new materials have never been thought of, let alone made, so we have lots of wonderful new materials yet to find. The first group of these new materials that was discovered are called Cantor alloys, an enormous range of millions of materials all with an incredibly simple face-centred cubic structure, based loosely on the original equiatomic five-component Cantor alloy CrMnFeCoNi. This talk will discuss briefly the previous history of alloying, the discovery of multicomponent alloys, the structure of multicomponent phase space, the complexity of local atomic and nanoscale configurations in such materials, the effect of this on some fundamental properties such as electronic and atomic motion (conductivity and diffusivity), and the resulting outstanding properties and potential applications, including at low and high temperatures, for corrosion and radiation resistance, and to enhance recycling and re-use.

Brian Cantor is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford, a Research Professor in the Brunel Centre for Advanced Solidification Technology at Brunel University, a Trustee of the UK’s National Science Museum Group, Co-Director of the UKRI Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Circular Metals, and a Chief Editor of the Springer-Nature research journal High Entropy Alloys and Materials. He was previously Vice-Chancellor of the University of York and Bradford University, Head of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Oxford, and a research scientist and engineer at General Electric Research Labs in the USA ; he also worked briefly at Banaras Hindu University, Washington State, Northeastern, IISc Bangalore and the Kobe Institute. He founded and built up the World Technology Universities Network, the UK National Science Learning Centre, the Hull-York Medical School, Oxford’s Begbroke Science Park, and the York Heslington East campus. He was a long-standing consultant for Alcan, NASA and Rolls-Royce, and editor of Progress in Materials Science. He invented the new field of multicomponent high-entropy alloys and discovered the so-called Cantor alloys. Among many honours and prizes from different countries around the world, he is a Commander of the British Empire (CBE), a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng).

Talks are priced at £4 for non-Scientific Society members. Scientific Society members will have free access to all our talks. Lifetime membership costs £15 and gives free access to all talks, members-only events and priority access to oversubscribed SciSoc events.

• Speaker: Prof Brian Cantor
• Tuesday 28 January 2025, 18:00-19:30
• Venue: Pfizer Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry, Lensfield Road.
• Series: SciSoc – Cambridge University Scientific Society; organiser: Zhang Xianghao Jeffrey.

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I’ll be giving a broad overview of the decision procedures we have been building for bitvector reasoning in Lean, with both fixed and infinite width. Time permitting, I shall sketch the design and mechanization strategy of the infinite width decision procedure, since the core involves verifying a cute model checking algorithm (k-induction), with games to be played to hook in a SAT solver into the tactic loop.

Note: work done in collaboration with the wider Lean community, and effort led by the Lean FRO : Henrik Boving, Kim Morrison, and Leo de Moura.

=== Hybrid talk ===

Join Zoom Meeting https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/87143365195?pwd=SELTNkOcfVrIE1IppYCsbooOVqenzI.1

Meeting ID: 871 4336 5195

Passcode: 541180

• Speaker: Siddharth Bhat (University of Cambridge)
• Thursday 23 January 2025, 17:00-18:00
• Venue: MR14 Centre for Mathematical Sciences.
• Series: Formalisation of mathematics with interactive theorem provers ; organiser: Anand Rao Tadipatri.

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Predicting the response of nonlinear dynamical systems subject to random, broadband excitation is important across a range of engineering disciplines, such as structural dynamics. Building data-driven models requires experimental measurements of the system input and output, but it can be difficult to determine whether inaccuracies in the model stem from modelling errors or noise. Therefore, there is a need to determine the maximum component of the output that could theoretically be predicted using the input if an improved model was to be developed through the investment of resources. This talk presents a novel method to identify the component of the output that could potentially be modelled, and quantify the level of noise in the output, as a function of frequency. The method uses input-output measurements and an available, but approximate, model of the system. A trainable, frequency dependent parameter balances an output prediction generated by the model with noisy measurements of the output to predict the input to the system. This parameter is utilised to estimate the noise level and then calculate a nonlinear coherence metric as a measure of causality or predictability from the input. There are currently no solutions to this problem in the absence of an accurate benchmark model.

• Speaker: Joe Massingham, PhD student, CUED
• Friday 24 January 2025, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: JDB Seminar Room, CUED.
• Series: Engineering - Dynamics and Vibration Tea Time Talks; organiser: div-c.

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I’ll be giving a broad overview of the decision procedures we have been building for bitvector reasoning in Lean, with both fixed and infinite width. Time permitting, I shall sketch the design and mechanization strategy of the infinite width decision procedure, since the core involves verifying a cute model checking algorithm (k-induction), with games to be played to hook in a SAT solver into the tactic loop.

Note: work done in collaboration with the wider Lean community, and effort led by the Lean FRO : Henrik Boving, Kim Morisson, and Leo de Moura.

=== Hybrid talk ===

Join Zoom Meeting https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/87143365195?pwd=SELTNkOcfVrIE1IppYCsbooOVqenzI.1

Meeting ID: 871 4336 5195

Passcode: 541180

• Speaker: Siddharth Bhat (University of Cambridge)
• Thursday 23 January 2025, 17:00-18:00
• Venue: MR14 Centre for Mathematical Sciences.
• Series: Formalisation of mathematics with interactive theorem provers ; organiser: Anand Rao Tadipatri.

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Biography

Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith is the Executive Chair of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). Before this appointment she served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research and International Partnerships) at the University of Cambridge. A renowned mammalian developmental geneticist, genome biologist and epigeneticist, Professor Ferguson-Smith is the Balfour Professor of Genetics in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Genetics where she served as Head of Department from 2013-2020. She is also a Fellow of Darwin College.

At the University of Cambridge, Professor Ferguson-Smith leads a research group comprised of experimental and computational scientists. They focus on the epigenetic control of genome function, particularly on models of epigenetic inheritance with implications for health and disease. Committed to the training and professional development of new talent, her team’s current work includes investigating how genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors influence cellular and developmental processes.

In 2017, Anne was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 2021 received their Buchanan Medal for her pioneering work on epigenetics. In 2023, she was named Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for her research contributions.

Photo – Dasha Tenditna

• Speaker: Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith, University of Cambridge
• Friday 14 February 2025, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

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