07/2026: Interventional Cardiology for Congenital Heart Disease: Bomb Disposal for Cowards – Dr Neil Wilson
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06/2026: Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases – Professor Christl Donnelly
Tuesday 16th June 2026 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)
How do diseases spread and how can the analysis of data help us stop them? In this talk, Professor Donnelly will explain the quantitative modelling and statistical tools that are essential for understanding transmission dynamics and informing evidence-based policies for both human and animal health. Drawing on lessons from past epidemics and endemic diseases, across livestock, wildlife, and human populations, she will show how mathematical frameworks and statistical inference help unravel complex transmission systems. She will also highlight how novel data sources are underpinning new approaches to understanding transmission and protecting vulnerable populations.
Speaker: Professor Christl Donnelly
Christl Donnelly CBE has been Professor of Applied Statistics at the University of Oxford since 2018. Previously, she was Professor of Statistical Epidemiology at Imperial College London. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the newly formed Academy for the Mathematical Sciences. Her research spans infectious diseases in humans and in animals, with extensive experience in real-time analysis of data during major epidemics. These include the 2001 UK foot-and-mouth disease epidemic, the 2003 SARS epidemic, the 2009 influenza pandemic, the 2014-2016 West African Ebola epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic.
05/2026: Harnessing the Stars – the Pursuit of Fusion Power – James Edmiston
Tuesday 19th May 2026 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)
Energy consumption per capita is closely linked to quality of life. As such, the demand for power has shaped much of the innovation, politics and conflict of the previous century. With consumption expected to triple by 2050 and concerns mounting about continued carbon dioxide emissions, scalable and sustainable power is more needed than ever.
Nuclear fusion has long been hailed as the ‘holy grail’ of clean energy. In principle, it could power the world for billions of years without any of the drawbacks associated with nuclear fission (such as long-lived radioactive waste, reactor meltdowns and weapons proliferation). However, the physics and engineering challenges involved are formidable. In this talk we will discuss the history of fusion research, the myriad of proposed solutions and the technical challenges that remain.
Speaker: James Edmiston
James is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, cosponsored by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. Previously he completed an MSci and BA in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and has conducted research in plasma physics at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Imperial College London. Current research interests include transport in ‘burning’ magnetically confined plasmas, magnetohydrodynamic turbulence and magnetic reconnection thrusters.04/2026: Learning from Accidents – Dr Robin Wilson
Tuesday 21st April 2026 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)
Trains are one of the safest ways to travel, but it hasn’t always been like that. In this talk Dr Wilson will introduce the basics of railway signalling, and look at how it has evolved over time – often in response to accidents and near-misses. You will find out how a single stray wire caused an accident that killed 35 people, why leaves on the line cause such a problem for the railways, and how signalling systems are designed to deal with the inevitable human error. Working from the early days of the railway to the present (and future), the talk will take you through a number of accidents, their causes and the improvements that were made after the accidents.
Speaker: Dr Robin Wilson
Robin is an expert in satellite imaging, having won the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society’s PhD Prize for his thesis in 2014. Afterwards he worked in academia but is now a freelance geospatial software engineer, working for clients ranging from small community groups to multi-national corporations to store, process and visualise geographic data such as satellite images and maps. He has had an interest in railways, particularly signalling, for many years and has recently been building replica signalling circuits which he hopes to demo after the talk.
Website: https://rtwilson.com
Twitter: @sciremotesense
Bluesky: @robintw.bsky.social
03/2026: Predators: How Nature’s Killers Have Shaped Life on Earth – Professor Tim Coulson
Tuesday 17th March 2026 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)
This talk is part of the 2026 ATOM Festival of Science & Technology.
Three quarters of a billion years ago the first simple animal evolved. It probably looked like a small sponge, but no fossils of it have been found. A couple of hundred million years later, ocean chemistry changed, and this allowed simple animals to make hard parts: teeth, skeletons and shells. Once these had evolved, animals had the means to eat one another and so began arms races between predators and their prey that have played out ever since. These arms races have shaped life on earth, even making us human. Tim Coulson takes us on this gripping journey through half a billion years of life-and-death struggles between hunter and hunted. From ancient shark leviathans to lions on the African plains, from the rise of Homo erectus to our own role as the planet’s most dangerous killer, this talk explains how predation shaped the very fabric of life and could yet save humanity’s future.
Speaker: Professor Tim Coulson
Professor Tim Coulson is a British zoologist and evolutionary ecologist. He holds the title of Professor of Zoology at University of Oxford and is a Professorial Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. His research explores how changes in predator populations influence ecology and evolutionary dynamics across systems. His field sites include Yellowstone National Park, the freshwater streams in Trinidad and oceanic islands off Australia. He earned his BSc in Biology from University of York and his PhD from Imperial College London. Tim is also a science communicator, podcast co-host and author of a popular science book.