Time and Place: Thu, 28 May 2015, 19:30, Crown and Thistle (Barn Room), 18 Bridge St., Abingdon (note change of venue)
Presenter: Professor Boris Vojnovic, Cancer Research UK and MRC, Oxford Institute for Radiation Oncology
Title: Fluorescence image-guided surgery: prospects and challenges
A surgeon’s view of ovarian cancer cells with and without the tumor-targeted fluorescent imaging agent. (Image courtesy of Philip Low)
Time and Place: Thu, 23 Apr 2015, 19:30, Kings Head and Bell (King Charles Room)
Presenter: Alfons Weber (University of Oxford & STFC/RAL)
Professor Alfons Weber is a physicist working at the Physics Department of the University of Oxford and at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Harwell. He started off as a theoretician, but has now worked for more than 20 years in experimental particle physics all over the world, from CERN in Switzerland, Fermilab in the USA and J-PARC in Japan. He develops detectors for neutrino experiments and analysis the data to reveal their secrets. He is also a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford where he is teaching physics for undergraduate and graduate students.
Title: Neutrinos – The Ghostly Shape-shifters
Neutrinos are some of the most abundant particles in the universe, but very little is known about them. This talk will tell you why neutrinos were originally “invented”, why they are important to understand and give you a glimpse of their strange properties: They can travel through light years of lead without being stopped; they can change from one particle to being another; they may be the very reason, why we are here.
Time and Place: Thu, 26 Feb 2015, 19:30, Kings Head and Bell (King Charles Room)
Presenter: William Trigg (GE Healthcare)
William Trigg is currently a Project Leader in the Life Sciences Business within GE Healthcare leading projects in the development of novel PET tracers for brain imaging. He has worked in the pharma/diagnostic industry for 17 years after gaining a degree in Pharmacology and Chemistry from Sheffield University and a PhD in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Bath. He has published 19 papers on Chemistry, Radiochemistry and imaging and has made more than 10 patent applications in the pharmaceutical and diagnostic area.
Title: Looking inside the brain
The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe and for many years the only way to study the brain was to take it out of the person which has severe consequences for its owner! Given the increasingly ageing population, the prevalence of brain disease and particularly neurodegenerative disease is an increasing problem for society and has fed the need for non-invasive techniques to study the brain’s structure and function. Here I will introduce the techniques used to study the brain in the clinic and in the research setting with a focus on molecular imaging.
Time and Place: Thu, 22 Jan 2015, 19:30, Kings Head and Bell (King Charles Room)
Title: Snapshot Serengeti: Carnivores, Camera Traps and Citizen Science
Presenter: Dr. Alexandra Swanson, Oxford
At this very moment in the Serengeti National Park,225 cameras are flashing day and night, capturing the secret lives of Africa’s most elusive animals. This is Snapshot Serengeti, the largest remote camera survey in the world. Established in 2010 to study how large carnivores divided up the landscape, the Snapshot Serengeti cameras have captured more than 1.5 million images of more than 48 wildlife species. volunteers from around the world help classify animals from this survey through the Zooniverse’s citizen science website www.SnapshotSerengeti.org. In this talk Alexandra Swanson will dive into the story of Snapshot Serengeti: the scientific questions that inspired it, the adventures of the field work behind it, and the lessons learned.