2011 Hertford College Magazine (Issue 91)

Management
Steve New writes - ‘I have continued my
research on two main strands: healthcare
operations and provenance issues in supply
chains. For the former, I have been continuing
my work with colleagues from the
Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences,
focusing on the application of standardised
perioperative processes within orthopaedic
surgery. I have published a paper in the
British Medical Journal and given presentations
on this work at the International
Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare
in Nice, and the International Surgical
Congress of the Associations of Surgeons
of Great Britain and Ireland in Liverpool.
‘Work on traceability and provenance
in supply chains continued with “The
Transparent Supply Chain” in the Harvard
Business Review, and presentations
based on this research were also made to
the Sustainable Luxury Forum in Lausanne
and to the MIT Geospatial Data Center
- University of Wales Geospatial Cyber-
Physical Supply Chain Summit in Cardiff.
‘My teaching work has included the
successful new elective course with Professor
Alastair Nicholson on Corporate
Turnaround and Business Transformation
for the MBA and EMBA programmes
in the Saïd Business School’.
Mathematics
Alan Lauder writes - ‘It was a pleasure
to be joined by a new colleague in Applied
Mathematics, Dr Fernando Alday, at
the start of this academic year. As I had
anticipated Dr Alday quickly proved to be
an enormously popular and effective tutor.
Sadly Dr Rahul Satija is leaving us after two
years as the lecturer in Statistics to take up
a position at MIT. He has been a tremen-
HERTFORD COLLEGE MAGAZINE
Hertford year: Subjects and research
dous hit with our students and we are very
grateful for the excellent work he has done.
“ Dr Satija’s band ‘Stornoway’ is
apparently now something of a
fixture at Glastonbury and will
appear on stage after U2 ”
‘Dr Satija is a good example of the extraordinary
talent beyond mathematics
which I continually discover amongst the
mathematicians at Hertford. After we had
all said farewell to him at the schools dinner
he went directly off to the Glastonbury
festival: his band Stornoway is apparently
now something of a fixture there and this
year will appear on stage after U2. On
this theme I should also congratulate my
DPhil student and college member Sebastian
Pancratz for winning the Meadowbank
Grand Prix. His name is now etched
on the trophy alongside that of Chris Hoy
and five other world champion cyclists.
“ This will help to illuminate
some dark corners of number
theory ”
‘Turning to my own research, number
theory in Oxford is stepping up a gear in
October with the arrival of Andrew Wiles.
Mathematical readers might recall that
Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem in
the early nineties by showing that all “elliptic
curves” come from “modular forms”.
Over the last year I have shifted my research
interests towards these topics. This
worked out better than I could have hoped:
I was delighted to discover a completely
new method for doing certain fundamental
computations with modular forms. This
new approach will help to illuminate some
dark corners of number theory, and should
give me something to talk about over tea
with Wiles before our weekly seminars’.
63.