News from the James Martin 21st Century School

Professors Gero Miesenböck and Stephen MacMahon are among the 46 new Fellows who have been elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences. The honour recognises outstanding contributions to the advancement of medical science, innovative application of scientific knowledge, or conspicuous service to healthcare. Professor Stephen MacMahon is director of the new George Centre for Healthcare Innovation, a member of the Oxford Martin School. He is also James Martin Professor of Cardio...

PEGGIE is a sleek and shapely prototype battery electric vehicle which will, for the first time, be competing in the 2012 Shell Eco-Marathon, an international competition that challenges student teams from around the world to design, build and test-drive energy efficient vehicles. Developed by a team of engineers from the Oxford Martin School’s Institute for Carbon and Energy Reduction in Transport and the University of Oxford’s Engineering Department, PEGGIE brings hi...

The Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food is getting underway with a call for research proposals, issued this week. The Programme aims to stimulate research on the food system, including all aspects of the production, processing and consumption of food, as well as their social, economic, environmental and health consequences. Professor Charles Godfray, Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, outlined some of the challenges facing food production and...

Oxford is to lead a £1.3m research project on Climate Geoengineering Governance funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).  The two-year international project, which begins in July 2012, seeks to identify and addresses governance challenges raised by a broad range of geoengineering options. Geoengineering is the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract clima...

Professor Gero Miesenböck has been awarded the prestigious InBev-Baillet Latour 2012 Health Prize for his pioneering research in the field of neurosciences. This most important scientific prize in Belgium, the InBev-Baillet Latour Prize is awarded to promote fundamental research and its implications for human health. It  was awarded to Professor Miesenböck this year for his work on optogenetic approaches to manipulate neuronal activity and to control animal beh...

The Oxford Geoengineering Programme has issued a call for applications to its Oxford Summer School on Geoengineering research, which has been organised in collaboration with partners from Harvard University and Heidelberg University. Research into proposed geoengineering techniques and the governance issues associated with them is gaining attention in academia and beyond. The summer school aims to provide information on the current state of developments in the field and with a foc...

New research has highlighted techniques that can work successfully in the prevention of mass atrocity crimes.  Recent conflicts in Syria, Libya and other states have focused fresh attention on the need to protect civilian populations from the most serious crimes imaginable - mass atrocities such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Researchers at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC), who have been studying the challenges of the ...

A new research centre opens today at Oxford University to investigate how intelligence arises in the brain from the physical interaction of nerve cells that are wired into circuits. The Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour is funded by a Strategic Award from the Wellcome Trust and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, who have each awarded £5 million towards funding for staff, state-of-the-art equipment, and research positions for postdoctoral scientists. The Oxford Martin School...

The prestigious Neyman Medal has been awarded to Professor Sir Tony Atkinson for his contribution to statistics. Under the Patronage of the President of the Republic of Poland, Bronislaw Komorowski, Professor Atkinson was awarded the medal by the Polish Statistical Association at its centenary conference in Poznan on Wednesday. Professor Atkinson, who is Deputy Director, Economic Modelling, at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School commented, “It ...

The Oxford Martin School today announced its receipt of a prestigious funding award to bring new understandings of strength and vulnerability in our highly interconnected world. The Rockefeller Foundation awarded the $300,000 grant to enable a new project to investigate the key structures and mechanisms that generate resilience for systems characterised by high interconnectivity as well as risks of internal failure or external shocks. Dr Felix Reed-Tsochas, Director of the Oxford Marti...

Oxford computer scientists are perfecting a system to profile the energy consumption of your computer software, allowing you to use less energy, thus reducing your carbon footprint. Developing a framework that will be of particular interest to computer intensive businesses and university researchers, the developers believe that they will be able to significantly improve energy consumption without affecting performance. James Martin Fellow Jeyan Thiyagalingam, at the Oxfor...

Expert findings from Professor Sarah Harper have contributed to a new Royal Society Report highlighting population challenges. Challenges to human health and our natural environment resulting from rapid and widespread changes in the world's human population, coupled with unprecedented levels of consumption are the focus of the Report, People and the Planet, Professor Sarah Harper, Director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, and a member of the Royal Society's Int...

A new interdisciplinary research centre to explore and challenge conventional economic thinking has been created by the Oxford Martin School in collaboration with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). The creation of this exciting new centre comes in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the on-going euro crisis, after which leading economists, policymakers and business leaders have called for a fundamental re-think in economics.  The Institute for New Economic T...

Professor Anne Trefethen, Co-Director of the Oxford Martin School’s Institute for the Future of Computing, has been appointed to the new post of Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the University of Oxford. The appointment, which was the result of an internal University competition, has been made in conjunction with the forthcoming bringing together of the three central ICT units: Business Services and Projects (BSP), the ICT Support Team (ICTST), and Oxford University Computing ...

New research involving members of the Oxford Martin School’s 21st Century Ocean Institute is shedding light on ice sheet response to climate change and its relationship to sea-level rise. The findings come from studies of ancient coral off the island of Tahiti, which link the collapse of massive ice sheets 14,650 years ago and a dramatic and rapid rise in global sea-levels of ~14m,  to a period known as the Bølling warming. Dr Alex Thomas and Prof Gideon Henderson wer...

Increasing use of drug therapies to counteract the effects of obesity was just one of the social influences on demographic trends that captured the public’s attention following Professor Sarah Harper’s Oxford London Lecture last week (13 March). Harper, Director of the Oxford Institute for Population Ageing and a member of the Oxford Martin School, was addressing an audience of several hundred members of the public, government, business and academia who were eager to find out i...

A ‘Declaration of Global Rights and Responsibilities’ is required before global governance can succeed said Director General of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy, at an Oxford Martin School event on Thursday. Calling for a platform of common values, which would be shared “not only by the ‘West’, but with the ‘rest’”, Lamy empahsised the need for basic agreement between nation states on a strong set of core principles to underpin a...

Student engineers from the Oxford Martin School’s Institute for Carbon and Energy Reduction in Transport (ICERT) have been selected to participate in a global competition for energy efficient vehicles. They will be entering ‘PEGGIE’, a prototype battery electric vehicle (pictured), into the 2012 Shell Eco-marathon in Rotterdam this May. But only if they can achieve the sponsorship they need to cover the costs of participation. Working in conjunction with The Energy an...

Globalization has provided immense benefits, but the systemic risks and rising inequality it causes require urgent action. The failure to arrest these developments is likely to lead to growing protectionism, nationalist policies and xenophobia, which will slow the global recovery and be particularly negative for poor people. These are key conclusions of Professor Ian Goldin’s latest book, “Globalization for development,” published this month by Oxford University Press.&nb...

Oxford Martin School founder, Dr James Martin, is visiting Oxford this month. He will participate in an active programme of exciting public events and meetings with academics from the School. At the invitation of Dr Paul Fairchild, Director of our Stem Cell Institute, Dr Martin will be giving the opening address at the Oxford Stem Cell Institute Annual Symposium on 15 March where Dr Paul Colville-Nash from the Medical Research Council will provide an update on the government's stra...