University College Oxford Record 2020

PROFESSOR TAMSIN MATHER,
Supernumerary Fellow in Earth Sciences, has
given numerous invited lectures this academic
year including at the Sorbonne University, Paris,
as part of the 2020 Darwin College Cambridge
Lecture Series “Enigmas”, and during lockdown
virtually a joint department seminar organised by
Monash University and the Australian National
University to an audience across seven Australian
universities. In February 2020 to celebrate the
International Day of Women and Girls in Science,
she launched the project “Your Science Out
There” in collaboration with Oxford Sparks, and
three DPhil students, a volcanologist, a planetary
geochemist and a palaeo-climatologist, to create
video and teaching/learning resources for
scientific learners of all ages. She also participated
in the Nailing Science YouTube series where
science meets nail art. She has been awarded two
international collaboration grants this year, one to
research the sulphur cycle through subduction
zones with Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory,
New York, USA and the other to research the
environmental impacts of continental flood
basalts deep in Earth’s geological past with
Nanjing University, China.
PROFESSOR PETER J MCHUGH,
Supernumerary Fellow in Biochemistry, and
colleagues are working to tackle the purification,
structure-activity and inhibition of the two
nucleases encoded in COVID-19.
PROFESSOR BARRY V L POTTER FMedSci,
Supernumerary Fellow in Pharmacology,
lectured on his anticancer drug discovery work
as a Keynote Speaker at the 2019 Research
Meeting of the Lister Institute for Preventive
Medicine in Oxford and was an Invited Speaker
at the 63rd German Congress of Endocrinology
of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Endokr, in
Giessen, Germany. He was also chosen as one
of the honorary graduands of the University of
Bath for the academic year 2019-2020 to be
awarded the degree of Doctor of Science honoris
causa. The citation read “in recognition of his
distinguished career and extensive experience in
Education and Science and world-class academic
contributions to Biology, Medicinal Chemistry
and Chemical Biology.”
*PROFESSOR NAJIB M RAHMAN
(1994, Medicine), Supernumerary Fellow in
Medicine, is running a respiratory HDU and
contributing to, leading and designing COVID-19
treatment studies at a national and local level.
PROFESSOR NICOLA SIBSON,
Supernumerary Fellow and Professor of Imaging
Neuroscience, in the Department of Oncology,
was awarded a Developmental Pathway Funding
Scheme grant of £3.5m by the Medical Research
Council to take her work on “Permeabilisation
of brain metastases for early and more effective
treatment” towards clinical trial.
PROFESSOR PHILIP STIER,
Supernumerary Fellow in Physics, hosted a
workshop at Univ with some of the world’s
leading climate scientists in November 2019. The
workshop was organised under the GEWEX
Aerosol Precipitation (GAP) initiative that
Professor Stier co-chairs with Sue van den Heever
(CSU). The aim of the workshop was to critically
review the existence and strength of satellitebased
constraints for aerosol (air pollution
particles) effects on precipitation. This meeting
brought together some of the world’s leading
22 University College Record | October 2020