From Darwin to DNA, Studying Evolution in the 21st Century

Tuesday 21st February 2023 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)

Please note our move to the third Tuesday of the month for 2023.

When we think of evolution, the first person that springs to mind is Charles Darwin. In The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin presented evidence supporting evolution, proposed the metaphor of an evolutionary ‘tree’, and suggested a mechanism: natural selection acting on variation. But there were still some very big questions, such as the shape of the tree (who is more closely related to whom?) and the nature of the inherited variation (what are variants or mutations?). In this talk, I will explore how animal evolution is studied in the 21st century, with a focus on remarkable new insights we are gaining from molecular biology and genome sequencing. The talk will be accessible to a general audience.

Speaker: Professor Peter Holland

Peter Holland is the Linacre Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford. After an undergraduate degree in Oxford and PhD in London, he held academic posts in Oxford and Reading before taking up his current post 20 years ago. He has published over 200 scientific papers on genetics and evolution, and an introductory book ‘The Animal Kingdom: A Very Short Introduction’. Peter Holland was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society in 2003 and has received several awards for his research contributions. These include medals from the Zoological Society, the Genetics Society and the Linnean Society, and most recently the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society.

The Ever-Changing Brain

Tuesday 17th January 2023 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)

Please note our move to the third Tuesday of the month for 2023.

Our brains adapt whenever we practice a new skill, such as playing a musical instrument or learning to juggle. Our brains also adapt as we get older, or following damage such as stroke. Changes in our lifestyle, like taking up exercise or altering our sleep patterns, can also affect our brains and can influence risk of cognitive decline or dementia. Understanding how the brain adapts to change can help us to design new rehabilitation treatments, to promote healthy ageing, or to enhance learning.

This talk will discuss how brain scanning technology is used to investigate how the brain changes with experience, learning and recovery from damage. Such investigations shed light on the possibilities and limits for changing the brain and help inform design of novel clinical treatments and diagnostics for brain disorders.

Speaker: Professor Heidi Johansen-Berg

Professor Heidi Johansen-Berg is a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Director of the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN), based at the University of Oxford. WIN is a multi-disciplinary research facility that uses brain imaging to bridge the gap between laboratory neuroscience and human health, by performing multi-scale studies spanning from animal models through to human populations. Heidi originally studied Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Oxford, before specialising in Neuroscience. She has been primarily based in Oxford throughout her career but has spent time as a visiting researcher at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and the University of Oslo in Norway.

ATOM Christmas Social

Thursday 8th December 2022 from 19:00
King Charles Room, The Kings Head & Bell (E St Helen St, Abingdon OX14 5EA)

Back by popular demand – it’s the Society’s Christmas Get-Together!

This will be an excellent opportunity to chat to other members and some of our recent speakers. To stretch your mind, there will be some science-based quiz questions and games.

All the quizzes from the night can be downloaded below.

How Fast is the Fastest Questions
How Fast is the Fastest Answers

ATOM Christmas Crossword

Inventions and Inventors Questions
Inventions and Inventors Answers

Science and Arithmetic Questions
Science and Arithmetic Answers

How the Circadian Clock Knows What Time It Is

Thursday 17th November 2022 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)

All organisms show 24-hour rhythms in their physiology and behaviour, orchestrated by a circadian clock that coordinates internal time with the external world. Dr Jagannath’s research aims to understand the molecular mechanisms by which the circadian clock picks up cues from the external environment and is set to the right time.

Note: This talk will be preceded by a short AGM.

Speaker: Dr Aarti Jagannath

Dr Jagannath read for a DPhil on the mechanisms of RNA interference at Brasenose College, Oxford. She subsequently joined the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute, within the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neuroscience, as a Roche Post-Doctoral Fellow to work on the circadian clock. After staying in the unit, she became a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) David Phillips Fellow and group leader. Her group researches the molecular mechanisms that regulate circadian clock entrainment.

She was awarded the L’Oreal Women in Science Fellowship in 2015 and is the founder of a spin-out company, Circadian Therapeutics, that translates research into the clinical arena. She is also a mother of two and a passionate advocate for women in STEM careers.

The First Data From JWST: Providing Answers or Raising Questions?

Thursday 20th October 2022 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)

The James Webb Space Telescope, billed as the successor to Hubble, has been long anticipated. The largest telescope ever launched into space, it is designed to give us an unprecedented new view of galaxies in the early Universe.

After successfully launching on Christmas day 2021, six months of deployment and calibration culminated in the first set of stunning images released on the 12th of July.

This first release was only the beginning of Webb’s mission. Since then, more data has continued to flood in. But while JWST is performing brilliantly in delivering raw data back to Earth, the process of turning these raw data into answers to our questions about these distant galaxies is far from easy.

The real questions to answer are; What were the first galaxies in the Universe like? How did they form, and how did they evolve into the galaxies we see today?

Three months since JWST’s first images is sadly not long enough to provide answers to these questions.

Instead, in this talk Alex will discuss the challenges associated with working with a new telescope. He’ll also give a preview of what scientific results have been released so far, and what we can expect over the next year or so. In doing so, he’ll ponder the question of when we might expect to start to get some real answers.

Speaker: Dr Alex Cameron

Dr. Alex Cameron is an astronomer in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford.

He hails from the small town of Wangaratta in rural south-eastern Australia, where the night sky looks stunning, especially in early spring. He did his undergraduate and PhD studies at the University of Melbourne, before moving to Oxford as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant in 2021. He is a member of the JWST/NIRSpec instrument team and had some involvement in the commissioning process after the launch of JWST. He is part of the “JADES” survey team who will analyse some of the deepest exposures that JWST will get within its first year of operation. His research interests involve trying to understand the evolutionary processes that have shaped galaxies over the last 13 billion years since they first formed in the early Universe until the present day.