Place and Time:

Online, Thursday 16 April 2020, 19:00 for 19:30
A minimally edited version of the livestream can be watched on YouTube.

TITLE: From Pig Insulin to Gene Therapy: 100 Years of Biopharma

It’s almost 100 years since Canadian researchers administered the first dose of animal derived insulin to 14 year old Leonard Thompson in an attempt to treat his diabetes, and since then the production of medication using animals and isolated cell lines has not only become commonplace, but continues to provide ground-breaking and life saving treatments. Together we will explore how current biologics can treat a range of diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, breast cancer and Crohn’s disease, before turning our attention to emerging cell and gene therapies that offer the opportunity to cure Leukaemia, Parkinson’s Disease and many other lifelong conditions, with just a single dose.

Speaker

After reading Biochemistry BSc at the University of Sheffield, Danielle Fairbrass went on to post-graduate study, gaining her doctorate in Sheffield where she was studying Monoclonal Antibody production in CHO cell lines and its impact on cell metabolism. Danielle went on to conduct post-doctoral research at the Universite de Rennes 1, before moving back to the UK where she took up her current position as a scientist in the Cell Engineering Group at leading cell and gene therapy company, Oxford Biomedica, engineering producer cell lines generating LentiViral vectors for gene therapy applications.

There will be no talk by the ATOM Society in March, but members are invited to attend the Atom Festival of Science and Technology 2020. See http://www.atomfestival.org.UK/ for more information.

Place and Time:
Abingdon, Thursday 20 Feburary 2020 from 19:00 for 19:30
King Charles Room, King’s Head and Bell, (10 E St Helen St, Abingdon OX14 5EA)

TITLE: Ultra-low temperatures – pushing the boundaries of engineering

The coldest natural place in our universe is in the centre of the Boomerang nebula, at 1 Kelvin (-272.15 °C). It is relatively unknown that here on earth, scientific research is routinely done at temperatures 2 orders of magnitude colder than this! At Oxford Instruments we create a low temperature environment for industries and universities to push the boundaries of science and enable quantum technologies, nano technology research and materials characterisation at 10 mK and below, at the push of a button.

In this talk I will discuss how ultra-low temperatures can be achieved, how we conduct research in these extreme environments, the applications and reasons behind going so cold and most importantly (to someone who spent 4 years of their PhD measuring temperature), how we measure the temperature of such an environment

Speaker

Harriet van der Vliet is a quantum engineer at Oxford Instruments Nanoscience and worked in Tubney Woods for the last two and a half years. She work in the NPI (new product introduction) team  to develop the next generation of low temperature systems predominantly for use by researchers and industries working in quantum technologies and fundamental science. Currently, she is developing a cryogenic link to connect two cryostats as part of the European Quantum Flagship project, QMiCS – Quantum Microwave Communication and Sensing. This will be used at the Walter Meissner Institute for research towards quantum microwave communications.

During her first year at Oxford Instruments, she was chosen to go on secondment to the United States to work at another Oxford Instruments business, Asylum Research in Santa Barbara, to develop my management and commercial skills and experience working in a different culture.

Prior to working at Oxford instruments, she completed a PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London in the London Low Temperature Laboratory, working with the coldest electrons in the world and measuring their temperature directly! She not only had the coldest electrons in the world, but also (unofficially) one of the longest PhD thesis titles – Platforms for new quantum technologies – Addressing the challenges in cooling and exploring the properties of strongly correlated electron systems, using current sensing noise thermometry. Seh also held some post graduate research positions at Royal Holloway as part of the European Microkelvin Platform and InK – Implementing the New Kelvin.

Place and Time:
Abingdon, Thursday 16 January 2020 from 19:00 for 19:30
King Charles Room, King’s Head and Bell, (10 E St Helen St, Abingdon OX14 5EA)

TITLE: CERN and the Profoundly Unknown

In 2012 two of the major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN discovered the Higgs boson. The two experiments are called “CMS” and “ATLAS” and I work with the ATLAS experiment. This was the last major prediction of the “Standard Model” of particle physics.

The accelerator though, has not stopped running since then. And in fact the energy of the beams has almost doubled. So what is it that we are doing? And why are we doing it?

In this presentation I hope to explain why we are continuing to look at this data through the window of my own research efforts which do still centre around the Higgs boson. I will explain about the Higgs and how we search for it. I will then explain why it is important to now search for cases where we produce two or more Higgs bosons at the same time. I will show the results we have obtained so far and then also talk about the immediate future of the Large Hadron Collider and where this kind of fundamental physics goes from here.

Speaker

Todd Huffman is a professor of physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. His research is in particle physics and focusses on discovering new particles and forces at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Prof. Huffman’s current research is focused on the search for events that occurred within the LHC which produced two Higgs bosons…so-called “diHiggs” events.

Prof. Huffman received an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Nebraska in the United States, the University that is in the state where he spent his childhood. He worked as an apprentice engineer for General Motors corporation as a co-operative student in order to obtain sufficient funds to top-up his scholarships for his undergraduate degree. He obtained a Fellowship moved to studying Physics in graduate school at Purdue University in Indiana where he received his Masters degree and then, in 1992, his Ph.D. in Physics.

From there his post-doctoral career was as a researcher in Particle Physics based at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory just outside of Chicago Illinois but working for the University of Pittsburgh. In 1997 he accepted a “Research Officer” position at Oxford and came to the UK, but one year later a full lectureship opened up to which he applied and won in 1998 in association with Lady Margaret Hall, where he has stayed first bringing Oxford into a collaboration at Fermilab and then joining the ATLAS experiment at CERN.

Members and their guests will meet for our yearly Christmas Social on 5th December at the King’s Head and Bell at 19:30. There will be a buffets and tickets (which are sponsored by the society) are £5 per person and are on sale at October and November meetings or by emailing the secretary. Drinks will have to be bought from the bar.