2006 - 2007 - Wolfson College

Transcription

2006 - 2007 - Wolfson College
Wolfson College
CA M B R I D G E
Magazine 2 0 0 6 – 2 0 07
No . 31
Wolfson College CAMBRIDGE Magazine 2 0 0 6 ‒ 2 0 07 No . 31
Published in 2007 by Wolfson College Cambridge
Barton Road, Cambridge cb3 9bb
© Wolfson College 2007
Compiled and edited by Conrad Guettler
Front and back cover images of Wolfson College by Edward Hill
www.glartists.com
Designed and printed by
Cambridge University Press
www.cambridge.org/printing
As in previous years this magazine is printed on
environmentally friendly paper
These photosphere pictures of Wolfson College by Edward Hill now hang in the Combination Room. www.glartists.com
Wolfson College
CA M B R I D G E
Magazine 2006–2007
No . 31
Contents
page
1.
From the President
4.
From the Senior Tutor
7.
Becoming Bursar
11.
Jon Crowcroft: Research Profile
12.
Andrew Herbert: Research Profile
14.
Peter Jones: Research Profile
17.
Kevin Greenbank: Profile
19.
Richard Taylor: Profile
22.
The Registrary
23.
The Andean Bear
25.
The Orang-utans and the Black Water Swamps of Central
Kalimantan, Borneo
29.
Thoughts on Green Design
34.
Archaeology links Cambridge and the Red Sea: the Suakin Project
Workshop 2007
36.
A Pakistani Woman at Wolfson
39.
Film Makers Sabiha Sumar and Sachithanandam Sathananthan
41.
Prizes 2006–2007
43.
Examination Results 2006–2007
53.
The Wolfson Course and Programme: Keeping in Touch
56.
Teacher Leadership: a New Journal created by Wolfson Members
58.
Journalism in a Networked Society
66.
Postgraduate Course returns to Wolfson
68.
Wolfson College Research Colloquium
70.
The Lee Pineapple Story
72.
Wolfson Science Day
74.
Music at Wolfson 2006–2007
77.
Wolfson Art Exhibition
78.
Wolfson Sport: Blues and other Outstanding Achievements
80.
Wolfson College Boat Club 2006–2007
89.
Wolfson College Sports 2006–2007
Basketball
Badminton
Cricket
95.
June Event: Treasure Island
98.
The Wolfson Gardens: Garden Design Trends since Foundation
101.
Remembering the Early Days of the College
102.
Jack King’s Chronicle of Wolfson College
103.
Book Review
105.
Recent University Appointments
106.
John and Elizabeth Morrison Memorial
107.
Members’ News
133.
Wolfson College Alumni Day
134.
Wolfson College Lawyers
135.
Marriages, Civil Partnership, Engagement
137.
Births
138.
College Officers and Administration in the College
140.
Vice-Presidents’ Dinner
141.
Fellowship in Order of Seniority
146.
Honorary Fellowship in Order of Seniority
147.
Emeritus Fellowship in Order of Seniority
148.
Senior Members
151.
Visitors 2006–2007
155.
Obituaries
164.
The Lee Library 2006–2007
166.
Donations to the College 2006–2007
From the President
Gordon Johnson
Each academic year makes an orderly progress
from October through the following July:
matriculation, the start of teaching, an intensive
period of learning followed by examination and
graduation. The College has a cycle of Governing
Body meetings – admission of Fellows, the audit of
the accounts of the year past, the report on
educational matters, touching both College and
University, the election of those to serve on the
College Council; then a period of quiet while the
passing year is tidied up and preparations are put
in hand for the new year ahead. The College is full
of residents from mid-September until those
completing their course begin to move out in July;
then the maintenance crews swing into action and
major refurbishments are undertaken. Students
may experience only one academic year; for
others, their course takes them through two, three, four, or even more turns of the wheel.
But it is a comforting structure, and as regular in its overall movement as the changes
from spring to summer to autumn to winter.
Occasionally, however, during the course of one particular year, more seems to
happen than usual, or a perceptible turning point is reached. The year under report is
one such moment. We have been without a major new building operation – the first time
for over fifteen years – and full use is being made of what has suddenly become familiar
architecture set in mature gardens. We have celebrated this by the publication of a
pamphlet guide to the College – the brainchild of Dr Neville Silverston and Ms Penny
Davison. A version of this guide is on the website, and printed copies are available in
College and given to all new members to help them find their way around. It shows just
how the College has grown over forty years, and enables us to recognise the
achievements of those who, particularly in the very early life of the College, could not
possibly have imagined how much would be done within a generation.
The year marked the retirement of Dr John Seagrave, the second great building Bursar of
the College. He had served in that office for seventeen years and had begun his tenure with
the addition of floors to the old Court, then the building of Toda House and the Lee Library,
followed by the purchase first of Sir Vivian Fuchs’s house and then the garden, which made
possible the whole of the Western Field development culminating in the opening of the
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Chancellor’s Centre and the block of family flats in the far south-western corner of the
College. We owe him a great debt of gratitude for his stewardship and enterprise.
Dr Seagrave’s retirement coincided with the death of Mr Jack King, who was the College’s
first great builder, taking a small but promising site, expanding it by active purchase of
neighbouring houses, then building the first residential block and transforming it into a
pair of Courts and, after negotiating the benefaction from the Wolfson Foundation,
supervising the construction of the main central buildings – the Hall and Clubroom,
kitchens and offices. He wrote about all this in his ‘Wolfson College Cambridge 1965–2005:
A Personal Chronicle of Events, People and Bricks and Mortar over 40 Years’, which we
celebrated with a grand reception in the Combination Room in February 2007.
The recent rapid growth of the College in terms of students, Fellows and Senior
Members is now also levelling off – at about 800 actual students here at any one time,
about 150 Fellows, and around 200 active Senior Members. We have grown, comfortably,
into our place within the neighbourhood and within the University. A small College on
the edge of things has become large and central.
The challenge now is for us to grow in other ways: to continue to be innovative and
open to ideas, to seize opportunities offered by the changing nature of higher education,
now driven not just by developments in Cambridge and the UK, but truly influenced by
global challenges, to ensure that we remain competitive in attracting the best students,
The President and two Bursars, Mr Lawrence and Dr Seagrave
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and to foster here a respect for learning and research, and to promote their importance
for the well-being of societies everywhere.
However much we may change, or respond to change, it is important to hold fast to
the unchanging purpose of our being. Universities are about discovery and
understanding, teaching, learning and being guardians of much that is good in our
culture. They do well in proportion to their ability to be close to the interests and needs
of the contemporary world by asking hard questions, challenging established ways of
thinking, and incorporating new understanding in what is taught and learned.
We have had cause to reflect on all this with the deaths in the past year of two of our
most distinguished Honorary Fellows: Professor Kurt Lipstein, who died in December
2006 aged 97, was one of the greatest academic lawyers of our time. A cultured and
civilising man, he showed brilliance from childhood and it did not diminish to the very
end. Successively a Lecturer, Reader and Professor in Law, and a Fellow of Clare College,
we were fortunate to have him, and his wife Gwyneth, as our neighbours in Barton Close
– always friends of University/Wolfson College. And we were privileged by his acceptance
of an Honorary Fellowship here, and the charm and intellectual vigour he brought to our
social occasions: he was exceptionally good at talking to students, not least when
enlivening our New Year’s Day party in the President’s Lodge. Beneath his broad learning,
and the gay wit of his conversations, lay a deep seriousness about his subject and a
devotion to it that was unshakeable.
Professor Karen Spärck Jones was another of our stars. She knew of the College from
its earliest times because her husband, Roger Needham, was a Fellow from its very first
Michaelmas term; but she did not herself become a Fellow until February 2000 and then,
with Roger, we were thrilled to elect them both to Honorary Fellowships in 2002. She,
too, had remarkably wide intellectual interests. Sometimes, when talking to her, you felt
there was no subject on which she was not well-informed, and no book she had not
read. In her professional life she turned to the challenge of how information might be
sorted more efficiently and accessed more rationally than was possible, for example,
when it was stored away in discrete units in a library. This problem, the solving of which
is of great interest and importance, particularly now when so much information is
available, raises philosophical and linguistic issues of great complexity, and a great deal
of careful and disciplined thought has to be applied before much of a dent can be made
in them. Google-world rests on a bed of pure research. Although to some a little daunting
(I was certainly terrified of her bearing down and saying “Well, Gordon, and what’s new
in Indian history these days” and knowing she would have some inkling of the answer,
would have read some of the stuff, and would not be fobbed off with flannel), Karen
contributed enormously to our intellectual life and, like Roger, was both kind and
generous to the young and to the College.
This year’s Magazine shows once more that the College is in good heart: a community
of mature students dedicated to research and learning; a society with a distinctively
international flavour about it; a College that holds to the essentials, but is open to the
new and is innovative itself – a College still on the move, but on the move now with
renewed confidence and buoyed up by the achievements of its early years.
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From the Senior Tutor
David Jarvis
Last year I reported in this magazine on a period
of considerable change, both within the College
and the wider University. Many of the
developments in graduate education I discussed
then, such as the growth in postgraduate student
numbers and the normalisation of four-year
doctorates, continue to impact upon Wolfson and
the College’s strategic planning. Against this
backdrop, it seems ever more important to
consider our institutional identity and core
purposes, and it is these subjects I would like to
expand upon here.
Wolfson has long benefited from its willingness
to embrace educational innovation within
Cambridge. It is now difficult to imagine a time
when computer studies and business
administration, for example, were regarded with
suspicion by many sections of the University, but long before the Computer
Laboratory and the Judge Business School established their current positions, Wolfson
welcomed their students and lecturers, and our association with those faculties
continues to be mutually beneficial. Much more recently, Wolfson was one of the three
colleges to admit students to the new Graduate Course in Medicine (GCM), an
accelerated version of the standard undergraduate medical course open to graduates
of all disciplines. This year saw the first cohort of students complete the course, and
the intervening four years have seen the GCM establish an excellent reputation and
become one of the most competitive Cambridge courses for admission. The foresight
of my predecessors in embracing this initiative is borne out by the enthusiasm that
many other colleges are now belatedly showing in accepting GCM students
themselves.
It is vital that the College continues to engage with University and intercollegiate
bodies with a view to adapting to changes in the admission and education of students.
Specific areas in which we need continually to review our policy and practice include the
growth of part-time graduate education, the changing demographic profile of the
University student body and possible changes in the funding and admission of full-time
graduate students.
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Part-time graduate education has been consistently expanding within Cambridge
over the last ten years, and the current proposal to establish a part-time route to the
MPhil is likely to exacerbate this trend: data from other British universities confirms
that this is a key growth area for student numbers. Wolfson has long-established links
with a variety of part-time and vocational courses, such as the Manufacturing Leaders
Programme (MSt in Manufacturing), the Masters programme in Interdisciplinary
Design for the Built Environment and the Hertfordshire MEd. We are also for the first
time this year hosting the MSt for Social Enterprise course, which is run by the
Institute for Continuing Education. As yet, in common with other colleges, we have
only a small number of part-time PhD students, but this group is also likely to increase
in coming years. The label ‘part-time student’ proves in fact at least as broad as that of
‘full-time student’, encompassing a very wide range of courses, institutional
affiliations, qualification levels and teaching provision. One of the few ways in which
their separate status denotes a common experience is the simple fact that such
students are not required to be permanently resident in Cambridge, and this has an
obvious impact of the meaning of college membership for such students. We have
been trying to address this in recent years, and to that end appointed a tutor
specifically for part-time students, Dr David Frost. David has considerable experience
of part-time students because of his involvement with the Hertfordshire MEd
programme, and his expertise is proving invaluable in our efforts to maintain effective
links with our part-timers.
The demographic profile of the university student body is of course primarily
determined by factors outside the control of a single college. Changes in central
government policy in relation to undergraduate funding will inevitably impact upon
undergraduate admissions, for example, although mature students have access to
generous provision from the Cambridge bursary scheme. National and international
trends are also evident in our graduate applications, notably in the increased volume
of applications from China in recent years, and the expansion of MPhil courses. The
net effect of these changes on Wolfson is, put simply, to reinforce the strengths but also
exacerbate the weaknesses of our situation. One of Wolfson’s great strengths has always
been its internationalism, and our well-established reputation as the most
cosmopolitan College in Cambridge ensures that large numbers of overseas students
continue to apply to Wolfson, which in turn feeds the diversity and energy of our
student body. Less positively, the proliferation of nine-month MPhil courses means
that the College has an extremely high turnover of students, with an inevitable knockon effect on the sense of community. To give some idea of the scale of this, the College
is now regularly admitting nearly 250 new full-time students each year: in other words
about half our total number of registered students. Many of these students know on
arrival that they will only be in the College (and often, by extension, the country) for
less than a year, and many of those intending to carry on for doctoral studies will only
know very late in the academic year whether or not they will be continuing at
Cambridge. All communities thrive on continuity, and this constant turnover of junior
members inevitably impacts negatively on a sense of institutional identity. In the
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circumstances, the College’s student organisations and its cultural and sporting
activities remain remarkably vibrant, but a more settled student population is clearly a
desirable goal.
In short, the College remains in a very healthy position. We are successfully
recruiting large numbers of able students and sustaining a welcoming and lively
environment in which to live and work. There is little room for complacency, however,
and Wolfson will need to continue adapting to a period of rapid educational change
both within Cambridge and beyond. So long as we maintain a clear sense of the values
we stand for and prioritise the welfare of our students, we will certainly succeed in
doing so.
Internal view of the roof in the Chancellor’s Centre, the winning entry by Olga Goulko in the 2007 Photography
Competition
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Becoming Bursar
Christopher Lawrence
The photo above shows me on my last day in my previous role before becoming Bursar
of Wolfson College in July 2007. The scene depicts me rehearsing Leopold Mozart’s littleknown alphorn concerto at London’s Wigmore Hall with members of the Academy of
Ancient Music (AAM), the ensemble I managed for ten years. Within a fortnight of this
photo I was sitting at my new desk in Bredon House at the heart of Wolfson College,
getting to know new colleagues and a new environment.
I was already familiar with the ethos of a Cambridge college, having been an
undergraduate myself at Queens’. But, as everyone says, Wolfson is different. Its
egalitarian nature really is evident, and there are many fewer barriers between Fellows,
students and staff than one might find in many other colleges. This leads to a sense of
anything being possible, and I look forward to making my own contribution to the
College’s development.
The welcome I have received has also been extended to my wife and two children who
are frequent visitors to the College now and particularly enjoy discovering new corners of
the College’s gardens, which are beautifully kept by Head Gardener Philip Stigwood and
his team. Favourites of my children are the topiary penguin – complete with egg between
its feet – in front of the Antarctic explorer Sir Vivian Fuchs’s house (78 Barton Road or
even ‘Penguin Palace’ to some readers); and the oriental statuary in various parts of the
site. In fact, Wolfson is a very family-friendly college, with a set of five family flats one of
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the more recent developments; and my children are already looking forward to the
Christmas party for the children and grandchildren of staff, Fellows and members (while
the Fellowship is wondering who will be called upon next to play the part of Father
Christmas this year).
I am only the fourth Bursar of Wolfson, and follow in the footsteps of Jack King, Peter
Turner and, latterly, John Seagrave. I arrived for my interview in College earlier this year
to find the flag at half-mast, in honour of Jack King, and I am acutely aware of his
particular contribution to the Wolfson College we find today. All three of my
predecessors oversaw significant growth in the College from a single building, Bredon
House, back in 1965 to the 12-acre site full of buildings in 2007.
Although there is now little room for further building on the site, the financial
demands for maintenance and refurbishment of what is now a large college are
substantial. Indeed it is one of the two main financial challenges for the College; the
other being raising funds for student support and bursaries to ensure that Wolfson
continues to attract the very best students, irrespective of financial background. Wolfson
is one of the least well endowed of the Cambridge colleges and its endowment, at
£8 million, is about £30 million short of where it should be to ensure stable progress.
Although Wolfson has a tremendous record of support to date from foundations and
individuals, this has been largely geared towards new bricks and mortar. The College is a
very careful custodian of its resources, which goes some way to addressing its relatively
underfunded position within Cambridge, but the challenge remains.
John Seagrave described the role of Bursar as encompassing the three Ps: People,
Property and Purse. I think I will settle for a single P: Prosperity. My aim is for the College
to prosper on all fronts, and this will involve not only stringent stewardship of its existing
resources – both financial and otherwise – but also building up its financial capacity to
enable it to prosper. We do not have the same staffing levels as other colleges, but we do
have the ability to compensate for this by wearing multiple hats. Most Cambridge
colleges have a development director to lead the fundraising efforts for a college; at
Wolfson I will be taking on this role in conjunction with the President. My chairman in
my previous role at the AAM emphasised that fundraising should be fun; i.e. that the
donor should enjoy the act of donating, and should feel closer to the organisation as a
result. This is certainly the approach I shall be adopting, although I will be resisting the
temptation to use the jargon so beloved of development directors such as ‘fun-raising’
and ‘friend-raising’.
Wolfson will be reaching out to you, its Members, more than ever before, to keep you
informed of the College’s progress, and we hope to be able to invite you back to your
College for more events in the future. In particular there will be a new Alumni Reunion
Dinner on the Saturday of the University’s own Alumni Weekend each year. In 2008 this
will take place on Saturday 27 September and the invitees will be those of you who
matriculated in 1968, 1978, 1988 and 1998. (If you matriculated in a year ending with a ‘9’,
then put 26 September 2009 in your diary; and 25 September 2010 for the ‘noughts’
amongst you. This pattern will continue into the future.) In turn, please do keep the
College informed of your current news and contact details either through the contact
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form on the website at www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni or by email to
[email protected]. And don’t forget that you can start helping Wolfson
immediately by routing any purchases you might make through Amazon via the Wolfson
website (again at www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni).
There is a simple inter-generational equation that comes into play when talking about
financing an institution such as Wolfson College. The current generation of members
(both students and Fellows) is benefiting from the support of the previous generation;
and in turn the current generation has the opportunity to repay its debt of gratitude by
supporting the next generation. The challenge, then, for a bursar is to get the balance
right between looking after the needs of the current generation and those of future
generations.
I thought I would end this item with a picture of the headline figures for the College’s
financial position. The two pie-charts show the income and expenditure for the financial
year 2006–2007. Under
Income and Expenditure 2006–2007
Income, note how reliant
the College is on fee income
Income (£3,709,000)
and accommodation rental
income, and don’t be
Fees
misled by the size of the
Accommodation
30%
52%
kitchen income: this is
gross income and should be
compared to the related
figure for the kitchen under
expenditure. In most years
income is drawn down from
Kitchen
Sales
the endowment to help
13%
balance income and
Interest and
Endowment
Charges
expenditure. Such income
1%
4%
from the endowment is less
than the total growth in the
endowment, ensuring
Expenditure (£3,709,000)
Domestic Costs
overall growth in the
11%
Salaries and Allowances
endowment; but at the
50%
Finance Costs
moment the endowment is
9%
unable to contribute
Administration
Costs
significantly to the
7%
prosperity of the College,
Kitchen
hence the ambition to
Purchases
7%
grow the endowment. One
of the major contributors
Repairs and
Refurbishment
to our endowment each
10%
Fellowship and
Hospitality
Academic Costs
year is the Cambridge
2%
4%
Colleges’ Fund. This is
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
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Cambridge University’s own internal taxation system whereby the richer colleges, such
as Trinity, pay a contribution to help the poorer colleges, such as Wolfson. Wolfson has
always been a net beneficiary of this system.
Under Expenditure, exactly half is spent on the salaries and stipends of the 80 staff
and 8-strong tutorial team – both full-time and part-time – who keep Wolfson College
running. From the three executive officers (President, Senior Tutor and Bursar) to the 35strong team of housekeeping staff, everyone plays a vital role in ensuring that the
community of students and Fellows is catered for (in both senses of the word when it
comes to our excellent Executive Chef Ray Palmer and his team in the kitchen). Two
areas of expenditure which I would like to see taking an increasing share of an increasing
pie are: (i) grants to students, to increase access and to ensure that the best students are
able to come to Wolfson; and (ii) upkeep and maintenance, to ensure that the best
facilities are provided to the Wolfson community. For example, the first photo shows the
newly refurbished tennis court, ready for the next generation of Wolfson students. We are
also increasingly playing our role as good citizen in terms of environmental
responsibility – the second photo shows the solar panels installed this summer to
generate hot water for use by the College kitchen, as part of the overall boiler
replacement programme which cost £250k. This is typical of the type of maintenance
and refurbishment work which the College undertakes annually and is expertly managed
by our Clerk of Works Paul Chapman and his colleagues in the maintenance team.
I hope this has given you a sense of the current state of Wolfson College and the
financial challenges it faces. If you would like to join me in addressing those challenges
and helping Wolfson to prosper, I am ready to hear from you.
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Jon Crowcroft: Research Profile
Fellow and Marconi Professor in the Computer Laboratory
I do communications systems research. Systems people consider all relevant aspects of a
technology, whether engineering, modelling, human, or software. In the 1980s, my work
was concerned with getting parts of the Internet working such as improving performance
and routing, and use of satellites. In the 1990s, I worked on group communication and
real-time multimedia (video, audio, music, shared work-spaces). In this millennium, my
research concentrates on wireless communication and Internet security.
Extending communications over wireless networks presents several challenges to the
systems researcher: we do not know the fundamental capacity limits of wireless
communications systems – the theory of a channel provided a long time ago by Claude
Shannon does not trivially extend to our current multiple hop, multiple radio systems.
Many techniques appear to defy simple explanations, and require novel models.
Cooperative diversity in antennas, coding and modulation, and in higher level
communication, such as generalised information swarms, promise far higher effective
capacity than the traditional approaches used in cellular telephony, 3G or WiFi.
As we extend the Internet into more and more devices in the world, we expose society
to more and more risks. The use of sensors to monitor the environment invades our
privacy. The use of remote control of actuators such as automatic braking risks our safety
for what if the car behind does not have such a fast system? The overall complexity of the
system undermines our ability to model and comprehend its normal operations as well
as its failure modes. New techniques and methods for system design and modelling are
required to provide safe and secure ubiquitous computing systems that are not an even
bigger playground for miscreants and terrorists, or even just shoddy engineering with
unexpected catastrophic (cascading) faults and collapses.
In both of these areas, research has common goals with many other disciplines than
just computer science. Models of large complex systems are now commonly found in
systems biology and physics. Epidemiological models of disease work well to describe
some of the problems, but also can be used to construct efficient means of dissemination
of information (and to immunise computers against attacks). Small world graphs describe
social networks, but also extend to cover the fixed and wireless topologies that we find in
artificial networks for communications, whether of email, web, file sharing, or for
transportation. Complex decentralised control systems that are uncovered in nature can
be used to automate the management of resources in a computer network with higher
resilience than traditional centralised approaches. Human cognitive models of perception
inform more efficient and secure designs for information systems.
My research may appear narrow, but is widely interconnected with other disciplines.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
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Andrew Herbert: Research Profile
Fellow and Managing Director, Microsoft Research Cambridge
The Microsoft Research laboratory in Cambridge
recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. Founded
by Roger Needham (Fellow 1966–2003) the
laboratory is now run by myself, also a Fellow of
the College. In fact I began my Cambridge career
as a PhD student working with Needham on
computer operating systems, which remain my
research interest. Leaving the Cambridge
University Computer Laboratory in 1985 to pursue
a career in industry, in 2001 Needham persuaded
me to join him again at Microsoft.
Operating systems remain a vibrant area of
research: with silicon chip technology reaching
the limits of what a single microprocessor can do,
future operating systems will have to make greater
use of parallel processing, and with colleagues at
Microsoft Research, I am investigating how
changes to programming languages, operating systems and networks can help address
this challenge. For example recent work on ‘software transactional memory’ shows a
promising approach to building shared memory data structures for multi-core
processors.
Having become Managing Director much of my time is taken with leading Microsoft
Cambridge. With five laboratories on three continents, Microsoft Research has grown
steadily since its creation in 1991 to become one of the largest and most highly respected
computer science research organizations in the world. Cambridge was the first
laboratory created outside the USA and today, located on the West Cambridge site, it
numbers over 100 research staff.
The mission of Microsoft Research is threefold: to advance the state of the art in
computer science, to contribute to innovation in Microsoft products and to ensure
Microsoft has a vision for – and a role in – the future of software technology. The
organization balances an open and largely unconstrained research environment with an
effective process for transferring the results to product development. Virtually every
Microsoft product contains features originated in Microsoft Research and Cambridge
has played its part with the creation of the first Tablet PC amongst other successes.
Through a variety of programmes, including the Roger Needham PhD studentship at
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Wolfson, Microsoft Research Cambridge collaborates with universities, industry and
governments to support research in computer science and related fields more broadly.
There are five main areas of research at the Cambridge laboratory: operating systems
and networks, machine learning and perception, programming principles and tools,
computer mediated living and computational science. The last two of these are new
ventures created by myself since becoming Managing Director anticipating how the
world of computing might change over the next decade.
The computer mediated living group investigates new kinds of software and hardware
to enhance everyday lives. Bringing together psychology, sociology, design and computer
science the group observes what people do in their everyday lives and considers how
technology can enhance the experience without taking it over. In contrast to much
technology research, the Cambridge work is not anchored in metaphors (e.g., the
computer screen as ‘desktop’) but focuses on the physical and social world to create new
twists on ordinary objects like answering machines, photograph albums, mirrors and
kitchen calendars making it unique in the field. One innovation developed by this group
is SenseCam, a wearable digital camera which takes photos automatically. Originally
conceived as personal ‘black box recorder’, it has most recently been used as a powerful
recall stimulant for people with severe memory loss through clinical trials in conjunction
with Addenbrooke’s hospital.
The second new area is ‘computational science’ – using computer science ideas to
enable, create and accelerate scientific advances in other disciplines. For example, the
computational biology group is exploring new ways to study, model and understand
living systems using similar techniques to those used to develop complex software
systems. It is already creating exciting insights into the function of the human immune
system, metabolic pathways and the cell cycle in collaboration with leading research
laboratories worldwide. While it is premature to predict the outcomes of the research,
the hope is that it could perhaps lead to software systems that enable delivery of
‘personalized healthcare’ and of course, should this be the case, it would be something
Microsoft would likely want to develop into a business.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
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Peter Jones: Research Profile
Fellow and Professor of Psychiatry
As a psychiatrist and epidemiologist my research is focused on the causes and treatments
of major mental illnesses, particularly the psychoses (such as schizophrenia) and
affective disorders (such as depression). I take the standpoint that, although they affect
many aspects of a person and require many levels of understanding, a fundamental and
necessary aspect to their tractability lies in brain function and disorder. Stepping back
from single projects, I enjoy the creative tension of working at the interface between
neuroscience and population-based approaches. The brain is, after all, a very, very large
population of interacting units organising themselves into different families and
neighbourhoods to create an economy that generally ticks along, punctuated by
occasional ups and downs. All kinds of disciplines will be required to understand it fully,
psychiatry and epidemiology are two that fit into the Cambridge jigsaw described by the
Cambridge Neuroscience Initiative (www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk). Here comes a brief
account of my research in these areas.
My early studies concerned the role of early neurodevelopment in establishing risk for
schizophrenia in adulthood. The idea that abnormal brain development might account
for a proportion of the disorder became very popular in the 1980s but there was only
indirect evidence. Colleagues and I used a long-standing British cohort study involving
everyone in Britain born in one week in March 1946 in order to try and find more direct
evidence.
The MRC National Survey of Health and Development involves five and a half
thousand people studied frequently in childhood from the developmental and
educational point of view. They continue to be studied every few years as they march
through life, now into their 60s. We identified those who, as adults, had developed
schizophrenia and examined their developmental trajectories. Children who,
unbeknown to anyone, would develop schizophrenia as adults showed subtle differences
in neurodevelopment in several domains including language, motor and cognitive
development, suggesting that there is, indeed, a developmental aspect to the disorder,
and that some aspects of causes must be operating very early.
Studies to elucidate this further moved on to Finland, where I collaborate with
scientists at the University of Oulu who work with a cohort of 12,000 people born in
Northern Finland in 1966 and in whom we can take similar approaches. We showed that
the abnormalities in motor development can be both subtle and manifest very early,
even during the first year of life. In terms of cause, factors leading to chronic fetal
hypoxia before birth and central nervous system infections like encephalitis and
Coxsackie B, can lead to substantially increased risk of later schizophrenia. This fits in to
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Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
emerging evidence that any factor that may impinge upon the normal development of
the brain can probably increase the risk of neuropsychiatric disorder such that many of
these have a developmental dimension.
This work has been taken further through collaboration with another Wolfson Fellow,
my colleague Ed Bullmore, and others in the Department of Psychiatry. Brain imaging
data from this Finnish sample show that normal motor development was linked with the
structural integrity of a distributed brain circuit involving frontal areas, basal ganglia and
the cerebellum and that, furthermore, an overlapping network was linked with cognitive
functions in healthy individuals that are impaired in schizophrenia. This suggests that
early developmental and adult cognitive problems in schizophrenia may arise from
problems in a single brain circuit that, in childhood, is responsible for motor
development and, in adult life, for higher cognitive functions; perhaps an example of the
links between phylogeny and ontogeny.
This idea that cognition deficits are important in schizophrenia has gained
importance over the past decade, with evidence showing that people with psychotic
states also have problems with attention, memory, planning and other executive tasks
akin to the effects of a head injury, and that it is these that limit function and hold people
back in life as much as the conventional symptoms of psychiatric illness. Again with Ed
Bullmore, colleagues and I have set up a new research-led specialised NHS service for
young adults in Cambridgeshire with a first episode of a psychotic disorder, the CAMEO
team (www.cameo.nhs.uk). We are delighted to be on the shortlist for the ‘Psychiatry
Team of the Year 2007’ and will know the result in November.
Research in our patients has shown that marked cognitive problems are present at the
very earliest stages of the illness, probably continuous with those shown in the
childhood studies above. This revolutionises our understanding of the difficulties
experienced by young people with psychosis, and suggests new therapeutic targets; with
Barbara Sahakian, Professor of Neuropsychology, we are doing a trial of the cognitive
enhancing drug, Modafinil as well as using non-pharmacological treatments to help.
A last strand of cognition research concerns the general population again, where
Jenny Barnett, post-doctoral scientist, and I have asked whether putative genes for
neuropsychiatric disorder that are, in fact, very common in healthy people may have
some effect on cognition even where someone has good mental health. The answer
seems to be, for one gene, COMT, that they do, but the effects are very small and, not
unexpectedly, need to be seen in the context of other genes.
The CAMEO team also takes part in other studies, particularly those facilitated by the
new NHS infrastructure of research networks; I lead the East Anglia hub of the Mental
Health Research Network (www.mhrn.info). With James Kirkbride, postdoctoral
scientist, I have been involved in ‘classical’ epidemiological studies of the determinants
of raised rates of psychotic disorders in urban populations and in migrant groups,
particularly through a large MRC study called ÆSOP (www.psychiatry.cam.ac.uk/aesop).
A programme grant from the new National Institute of Health Research will allow us to
exploit the remarkable social geography of Cambridgeshire, with rich and poor, urban
and rural components repeating in fractal-like, North to South gradients within the
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
15
county and within its constituent towns, to tease apart the contributions from poverty
and migration using the natural experiment of the recent migrations from Eastern
Europe.
Two other strands of research involve treatment of psychotic disorders and causes of
affective illness such as depression. Regarding treatment, I was part of a multi-centre
collaborative UK study of the cost effectiveness of new, expensive so-called atypical
antipsychotic drugs compared with the older and cheaper compounds; the CUtLASS
study. I drew the short straw for writing-up the part of the results indicating that there
was no advantage for the newer drugs, something that continues to have ramifications
over the year since publication, not least in terms of my relationships with the
pharmaceutical industry, something that the University urges us to foster. In fact, I
believe that the trial really shows how well clinicians and their patients can do with older,
cheaper drugs if they set themselves the high standards that the newer drugs have
brought with them.
My research interests in depression have been mainly concerned with developmental
or life course approaches, particularly in terms of trying to define long-term categories of
health and illness rather than looking only at single episodes. This area has expanded
from my point of view through a collaboration with another Wolfson Fellow, Ian Goodyer
who has, with Joe Herbert and Tim Croudace, been interested for many years in the
interactions between adverse life events, genetic risk and neuroendocrine reactions in
setting the level of risk for depression in young adults. Through a programme grant from
the Wellcome Trust we have undertaken a school-based study of 1,200 local teenagers in
order to study these factors. The study is two thirds of the way through and, as the largest
such study in the UK to date, is a very exciting prospect that will keep us busy for some
time to come.
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Kevin Greenbank: Profile
Fellow and Archivist & Administrator, Centre of South Asian Studies
After a year off in South Africa which ended up
lasting a decade, I came to Wolfson and completed
a PhD in history, writing a thesis on the
introduction of apartheid in Cape Town. Since
finishing this degree I have worked as the
Administrator and Archivist at the Centre of South
Asian Studies.
The Centre is a resource for scholars from
across the University who study South and
Southeast Asia. It has a library of approximately
40,000 volumes and a large and diverse archive
comprising papers, photographs, films and oral
history. The latter is heavily used by scholars. We
are in the throes of a reorganisation of the
collections in order to make them more accessible,
especially for those searching for papers on the
internet. As part of this overhaul I have, over the
course of the past eight years, been working on the digitisation of the film and oral
history collections.
The oral history collection held in the archive is a real treasure. There are some 400
interviews, ranging in length from half an hour to eight hours, conducted with leading
freedom fighters, Indian Civil Service officials, missionaries, teachers, musicians, tea
planters – the variety of the list is quite astonishing. We have, for example, an interview
with a would-be assassin, who describes his mindset in the run-up to his attack in great
detail, and then goes on to give the reaction of his victim. There are Sanskrit prayers,
Nepali musical performances, demonstrations of different languages and many
descriptions of all facets of life and work in India both before and after independence.
The tapes on which all of these are held are in varying states – surprisingly the
younger cassettes present almost as many challenges as the older reels of tape, although
the machines for playing them are in better condition – and the digitisation is a way of
preserving the content of the interviews as well as making them accessible to researchers
without fear of damaging the original.
The reasons for the transfer of the Centre’s holdings of ciné film are the same – the 90
hours of material could not be used for fear of causing damage to it. It has now all been
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
17
transferred to digibeta (a broadcast-quality digital tape format) and onto DVD for
viewing copies. The range of subjects is similar to that of the interviews, although there is
a stronger focus on the domestic and ceremonial aspects of life in India which is to be
expected in what were essentially home movies. There are real treats in the collection,
though – colour film of repairs to railways in the 1930s, footage of the awful suffering of
refugees during Partition, durbars, weddings and many others.
Both collections are being made available for viewing and listening over the internet,
with a pilot from the audio collection already available on the Centre’s website
www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk.
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Richard Taylor: Profile
Fellow and Director of Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning at the University
I arrived in Cambridge three years ago to take up
the post of Director of Continuing Education and
Lifelong Learning at the University – and it is a
mark of the University’s commitment to this area
of work that, for the first time, the Director was
also appointed to a professorship. I am a
Londoner by birth, and an Oxford graduate –
Exeter, PPE in the 1960s, at the same college and
time as Tariq Ali and other then luminaries on the
Left. But, since then, I have spent almost all my life
in the North of England, mainly in Leeds and
Bradford, working in University continuing
education and lifelong learning.
So, it was quite a change to come to Cambridge
– not least to experience living in the flatlands
after the hills and moors of the North. Why did I
come? Well, at a simple level, who would not come
if offered a senior post at one of the world’s great universities? More specifically though,
this was a very good time for an advocate of lifelong learning to come to Cambridge. The
University was the very first in the field in 1873 and began the University Extension
Movement – Oxford followed our lead a little later. Extramural work, as it used to be
known, flourished over the years; but in the decentralised culture of the University,
although the work had grown and prospered, over recent decades it had become rather
separate and distanced from the University’s ‘mainstream’ activities.
The climate of the times – the knowledge society, globalisation and so on – and an
educationally progressive leadership in the University, all meant that continuing
education and lifelong learning have become central, strategic concerns.
Of course, this presents challenges as well as opportunities, as the cliché has it: once
the wide range of our work gains a high profile, people begin to ask whether these are
the sorts of things Cambridge should be doing. After all, our activities are on quite a large
scale: the Institute of Continuing Education has around 12,000 part-time students,
studying across a whole range of subjects and levels, the large majority not in Cambridge
itself, but in the region, and nationally and internationally. Our learners vary from those
engaged with or members of ‘disadvantaged’ communities, through a range of
certificated day and evening classes, to a large international summer school, and an
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19
expanding number of programmes for professionals in both the private and public
sectors. In addition, the Institute has a developing, multi-disciplinary, series of research
activities: for the first time several colleagues in a number of disciplines (including
continuing education and lifelong learning itself) will be returned in the forthcoming
Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).
There is, therefore, plenty going on: never a dull moment – and always the persisting
irritant of the seemingly random shifts in Government agendas and funding structures
which cause turbulence in the system. Indeed, one of the (many) ironies in the present
Government’s policy profile is on the one hand the prominence and priority given to
lifelong learning, and, on the other, the funding changes which result in practice in the
reduction of the numbers of adult learners in the system. In the whole post-compulsory
sector, for example, the last eighteen months or so have seen a fall in enrolment of over a
million adult learners, most of them from the lower socio-economic groups. Still, those
of us who have been in the game for a long time have become battle-hardened to such
volatilities: and we have become reasonably adept at fast footwork to mitigate at least
the worst consequences.
The 2007–2008 academic year should see significant advances in the University’s
lifelong learning agenda: the General Board is reviewing the overarching Report on the
University’s lifelong learning activities, following consultation across the faculties and
colleges last year, which yielded generally positive comments. The Institute will review
and develop its medium term strategy in the light of the University’s decision on the
Report and its recommendations.
What then are my reflections at Cambridge, from the perspective of my rather unusual
role – though, in passing, I have found one of the delights of the University is how many
‘unusual roles’ it has? Inevitably, there are good and bad things. I will begin with a pretty
random list of some of the ‘bad’. There is, first, a whiff at times of arrogance and elitism –
maybe this is understandable, but it can be tiresome. Linked to this, I have experienced
at times an internalised, self-referential culture, a detachment from the ‘real world’ and
on occasion an extraordinary unreality in people’s ‘world view’. I recall in contrast my
work in Leeds with unemployed people and community educators; with anti-racist
movements; with both miners and police in the years of conflict in the 1980s. At times
one yearns for a bit more grit and radical politics in the culture. In my no doubt
specialised, if not narrow, world of continuing education and lifelong learning I
encounter in the University not so often hostility, but rather a mixture of apathy and
ignorance. This applies to the higher education context, but even more to the wider
world of the Learning and Skills Councils, the Regional Development Agencies, and their
myriad initiatives. These are complex, and often tedious, areas of policy and practice –
and it is fair enough for ‘the University’ to argue that these issues are not their immediate
concern. We cannot, after all, try to engage with the whole national agenda for lifelong
learning. Well, that is true, up to a point: but increasingly, sectors interconnect, and
governmental pressures for changes are felt – even in Cambridge – in areas like employer
engagement (and thus inter alia our provision in continuing professional development),
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and social inclusion and widening participation (hence the growing importance of
outreach and community education).
And finally, in my list of grumbles – on a personal note – I miss the hills and open
spaces of the North: but I can hardly criticise the University for its location!
However, the ‘good things’ far outweigh the bad. As this is a piece in the Wolfson
Magazine, I should begin with enthusiastic thanks to the College. The informal,
cosmopolitan ethos, and the generally collegial style have suited me perfectly: and, after
a sometimes trying day, a relaxing, stimulating conversation over dinner on totally
different topics is the ideal tonic. I return home rejuvenated, rather than just tired. This
leads me to the main plus point for me about Cambridge: it is an extraordinary pool of
intellectual creativity and originality. To have the privilege of collegiality with some of the
most interesting intellectuals in Britain, indeed in the world, is an inestimable benefit.
And if I needed a dose of academic humility, which I probably do, this is the most
pleasurable and beneficial way of providing it. I think sometimes – often, in fact, – that I
know nothing of any worth at all, even after forty years in academia, and I am sure that is
very good for me!
There is too a genuine intellectual and academic freedom in Cambridge. It is by no
means total, of course: even here there is evidence of the insidious culture of the RAE,
and the bureaucratic intrusion of the Quality Assurance Agency and so on. But,
compared with most universities, the freedom to research, write, and think as one
wishes, is a huge benefit (and partly explains, of course, why Cambridge is shown so
consistently to be ‘excellent’).
In its own quirky way, Cambridge is fairly democratic. This somewhat surprised me –
the degree of decentralisation, the collegiate structure, and, above all, the strong
academic control of the University, are a very welcome contrast to the creeping
managerialism of most of the system, accompanied as it so often is by a philistinism of
approach.
Overall, then, a good place to be – and a busy and stimulating one. There is much to
do, and, as they say, ‘interesting times’ ahead.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
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The Registrary
Timothy Mead, Fellow
Registrary n (obs) (OED) “The Registrar of Cambridge University”
THE REGISTRARY (University of Cambridge Statute D, VIII, 1) “shall act as the
principal administrative officer of the University … as the head of the University’s
administrative staff [and] as Secretary to the Council”.
Two definitions, the first begging some important questions; the second indicating a job
description for an Office that it was my privilege to hold for ten years from 1 October
1997, an Office that daily demonstrated that neither it nor its title was obs(olete)!
Administration (management by another name) cannot on its own make a university
great. But the process of management is on the critical path to success in education,
research and scholarship. A concern that the quality of our administration should match
the quality of the academic endeavour has been one of my two major preoccupations.
The other, which I shall not discuss in this article but on which I can become very boring,
has been a subject that ten years ago was thought of as at best as arcane and more often
as sad, namely university governance. Now of course it is the subject of vigorous, if often
uninformed, debate both in Parliament and over Cambridge dinner tables.
A university is defined by its academic purposes and achievements. It should seek, as
Cambridge does, to find and transmit new knowledge for its own sake and for the benefit
of society; it should look to the transmission of civilised values; and above all it should
encourage individuals to develop themselves. To do these things nowadays is a complex
exercise. Universities have thus become major businesses. Cambridge, for example,
employs about 9,000 people and, excluding the colleges, the Press and Cambridge
Assessment, turns over close on £600m a year. It needs a professional administration,
not to circumscribe it but to help it navigate the murky waters of the political, legal,
constitutional and regulatory context in which it operates, and to ensure that its
resources are used to maximum effect.
That is what administration should do in a committed, professional way. A way that
bestows no favours, is up to date and well informed, that focuses on the outputs and the
services to be delivered not on the process for its own sake. Administration based on a
clear understanding of and respect for the academic priorities, especially Cambridge’s
decentralised structures, and that is itself respected for what it needs to do and for the
way that it does it.
That is what my colleagues and I have been working towards. We have had some
considerable success. More is to be done. I hand the baton to my successor, conscious of
the privilege I have enjoyed for ten years of working with some fine people in one of the
world’s great universities and a great British institution, and of being a Fellow of Wolfson,
perhaps the most open and certainly the most cosmopolitan and friendly College in
Cambridge.
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The Andean Bear
Shaenandhoa García Rangel, Junior Member
My research is focused on evaluating the
distribution, habitat and landscape use of one of
the most threatened Andean bear populations
within the Venezuelan Andes. The Andean bear is
the only bear species in South America. It is
distributed along the Andes mountain range from
Venezuela to Argentina, across dry forests, humid
rain forests, páramos (high-elevation shrub-lands)
and puna prairies. In Venezuela, it is considered
an ‘endangered’ species due to poaching, habitat
destruction and habitat fragmentation. My
research is based in Sierra de Portuguesa, in the
north-east of the Venezuelan Andes, where one of
the smallest Andean bear populations within the
country is restricted to remnant forests at
mountain tops, and possibly isolated from the rest
of the range. Three National Parks (NPs) have been
established in the area, but they are partially isolated from each other, and surrounded
by human activity. Management is urgently required to reduce the risk of local
extinction, but useful information is scarce. Thus in 2002, I set up this project to identify
factors modulating the species habitat and landscape use and to generate guidelines for
the establishment of an appropriate management strategy.
In 2003, I started visiting villages across Sierra de Portuguesa in search for information
about the Andean bear. With the help of local people, especially hunters, I started my
training on bear tracking, looking for claw-marks, feeding sites, daily beds, scats,
footprints, and hair across the dense cloud forest. During my free time, I interviewed
several villagers and collected data on the historical distribution of the species, and on
local attitudes and beliefs related to it. In Sierra de Portuguesa, the Andean bear is known
as ‘El Salvaje’ (The Wildman), it is thought to kidnap women and have great strength, so
until the early 1990s its bones and blood were used for medicinal purposes.
In 2004, I conducted a pilot study to test different field methods, train two field
assistants and evaluate bear habitat use across the only remnant forest linking two of the
established NPs. After this, I started quantifying Andean bear habitat using satellite
imagery, and planning a large-scale data collection period. By July 2005, I joined a group
of local researchers, students and NGOs working on up-dating the national strategy for
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Andean bear conservation. After two very successful workshops, the final document was
published in July 2007.
During August 2005, two undergraduate students joined my field team to carry out a
project that allowed us to determine the age of the signs found on consecutive surveys.
Starting in February 2006, my team and I embarked on large-scale data collection,
searching for bear signs across Sierra de Portuguesa, and measuring several habitat
variables along the way. Finally in March 2007, I returned to Cambridge to analyse the
data and to write my dissertation. Since then, I have been sitting in my office talking to
the computer, missing the peaceful feeling of a walk in the cloud forest, the thrill of bear
tracking, and the adventures with my 4-wheel drive, but very happily relieved to be
temporarily away from the heavy monsoon rain!
An Andean bear claw mark
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The Orang-utans and the Black Water Swamps
of Central Kalimantan, Borneo
Helen Morrogh-Bernard, Junior Member
In 2003 after I had completed one year at Cambridge, I headed out to the black water
swamps of the Sebangau, otherwise known as peat swamp forest, an area of 5,000 km2 in
Central Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. Tropical peat lands are a unique ecosystem,
being both peat forming and supporting tropical forest cover; they are formed by the
accumulation of organic matter over hundreds and thousands of years. Although these
areas are well known by the local people they have been relatively little studied by
scientists.
In 1995 I had first entered this
forgotten habitat. It was previously
thought that these swamps were
low in biodiversity and
unimportant for conservation; as a
result only three per cent were
protected in Indonesia, with the
majority designated as either
production forest for selective
logging or conversion forest for
agriculture. Due to the harsh
conditions of these black water
swamps, which are permanently
Railway into the forest in the wet season
waterlogged in their natural state,
most scientists confined their research to the pristine dry forests in National Parks.
However, these conditions and tales of swamp monsters did not put me off. Simon
Husson and I, then both undergraduates at the University of Nottingham, jumped at the
chance to go to Borneo when one of our supervisors was looking for volunteers to join
him. We welcomed the challenge to work in this unique habitat where one was
permanently wet from dawn to dusk and was accompanied by ones own mosquito fan
club! However, it was well worth it. We were able to glimpse the majestic red ape as it sat
camouflaged in the canopy above. We undertook a density study, and unearthed the
largest contiguous population of orang-utans left today. This area is now one of the most
important areas left for orang-utan conservation. Continuing research revealed large
shifts in orang-utan distribution in response to illegal logging, and by 2002 a decline of
36% in population numbers was noted. The reason for the decline was not fully
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understood, but was most likely a result of a decreased carrying capacity of the forest,
and of food availability, due to forest destruction and fires.
Therefore I embarked in 2003 on a study of the behavioural ecology of a population of
wild orang-utans to find out what was affecting their numbers. Information on
population composition and breeding conditions were pre-requisites to determine the
population’s viability over the longer term. Any reduction in habitat quality affects
foraging patterns and alters diet composition. The objectives of the research were to
document the demography and behavioural ecology in response to logging, in order to
identify ecological requirements for maintaining a viable population, and to facilitate the
design of appropriate conservation strategies. Orang-utans are one of the least studied
great apes as they are the most solitary, and their behaviour is still not fully understood.
This study was the first of orang-utans in a disturbed peat swamp forest. I say disturbed
because the area had been selectively logged for the past 30 years and was now being
illegally logged. Illegal loggers were digging canals in the peat to float the wood out and
at the same time they were also draining the area. Thousands of small canals were dug
between 1997–2003. This drying of the peat combined with El Nino events in 1997–1998
and 2001–2002 resulted in huge areas of forest going up in flames whereas peat swamp
forests in their natural state do not burn.
I employed a team of five assistants from the local village who were all loggers,
hunters or fishermen. They knew the forest like the back of their hand, and working for
me stopped them logging and hunting. They were also go-betweens between our
research and the village, as they would take tales home to their families and friends
about how important both the forest and the orang-utans were. Over a two-year period I
hired twelve assistants, followed 28 different orang-utans and collected over 6,000 hours
of behavioural data. Out of all the individuals followed, fifteen were habituated which
means you could follow them without them running away, which happened a lot at the
beginning. With persistence they would eventually accept you as just another forest
animal; it is a privilege to be in the territory of such a great creature, and feeling at home
there yourself is really indescribable.
Orang-utans are the most sexually dimorphic apes: males are twice the size of
females, and they exhibit two male morphs (bimaturism), adult males with cheek pads
and adult males without cheek pads, which is why they were once considered to be
two different species. One can hear the booming long call of the adult flanged male
which alerts females to his presence and alerts other males to get out of the way. The
study of the social structure and behaviour of orang-utans is still in its infancy, and
only recently have we discovered that there are many differences between the Bornean
and Sumatran orang-utan which are now classified as two distinct species. Like
humans, they also possess cultural traits that differ between populations. In some
forests orang-utans use tools and make bunk beds, whereas in others they make
sleeping bags and pillows. Every day we were learning something new.
Following orang-utans is hard and trying: the days start at 3.30am as you need to be at
their nest for 5am when they wake up and leave. Data is then taken every 5 minutes on
what they do until they make their night nest and go to bed, usually around 5pm as dusk
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is drawing in. We then return to
camp, have a wash, sort data, eat
and go to bed ready for the next
day. This hard work is all worth it
when one is able to sit
uncontested and uncovers their
secrets. On one occasion when my
assistants were sitting patiently
taking data on a flanged male
called Hengky, they lit a mosquito
coil which was glowing away
beside them in order to keep the
pesky mosquitoes away. When
Hengky approached them, they
quickly retreated but left their
bags and the mosquito coil
smoking away. Once Hengky
Hengky, a flanged male
reached the stump where they
had been sitting, he lifted the mosquito coil to his nose, sniffed it, then put the coil out
on the dead log and climbed back into the canopy. Our undercover fireman! A number of
females have been observed using a plant to rub on their arms and legs like soap. The
same plant is used by the locals for treating swellings, and we believe ours is the first
account of what we can view as self medication in orang-utans. Such behaviour gives us
an insight into our own evolution and culture, and shows us just how intelligent these
apes are. When conditions are harsh and no water remains in the forest (which is not
natural in a swamp forest but happens these days due to the drainage), individuals have
been seen breaking off breathing roots (pneumataphores) and sucking the water out.
Orang-utans have discovered a
way to find water even when all
the surface water down to
1–1.5m below ground has
drained away. They are
intelligent and adaptable, and
will only give up when there is
no chance of survival left.
I am very hopeful for the
survival of the Sabangau
population, as efforts by our
local counterparts CIMTROP
(the Centre for International
Management and Co-operation
of Tropical Peatland based at
the University of Palangkaraya) Railway into the forest in the dry season (unnaturally dry due to drainage)
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27
have stopped the illegal logging and have started to dam up the canals; and on the basis
of our research the area has since been made into a National Park. As orang-utan
numbers seem to be recovering from their 2002 crash, and females are breeding, the
future may look more promising. However, this cannot be said for all populations as
across the river, oil palm planting is devastating the forest and as a consequence our
neighbouring orang-utans are disappearing.
The threats from oil palms
The conversion of forest to oil palm cultivation is the major threat today. Indonesia and
Malaysia are the world’s major oil palm producers accounting for 83% of total
production. Between 1967 and 2000 oil palm planting in Indonesia grew from under
2,000 km2 to over 30,000 km2. The demand for palm oil is expected to increase, so that by
2020 an estimated 30,000 km2 of forest will be converted annually. Indonesia has
converted double the land for palm oil compared with Malaysia but produces only half
the yield due to land suitability and fertility. The soil in Borneo is less fertile for oil palms,
yet clearance continues, especially of the peat swamp forests, which are the orang-utan’s
preferred habitat. The European Union aims to cut greenhouse emissions by 20% by
2020, partly by demanding that 10% of all vehicles be fuelled by bio fuel. Thus the
demand for palm oil from western countries could lead directly to the destruction of
Indonesian and Malayan forests. Peat swamp forests store huge amounts of carbon, i.e.
they are ‘carbon sinks’, and clearing and burning them for oil palm plantations will not
cut green house emissions, but will instead exacerbate the problem by releasing stored
CO2 into the atmosphere.
Most of the land cleared for oil palms is nowadays peat swamp forest that had become
orang-utan refuges when other lowland forests were converted to rice growing or put to
other agriculture purposes. When an area is cleared for oil palms many animals
including orang-utans are killed, as areas are ringed without any corridors to allow
animals to escape. When animals try to flee the area, they are shot and orang-utans are
also killed when they venture on to plantations to find food. Many plantation owners pay
150,000 Rupiah (£8.30) for the right hand of an orang-utan to prove it has been killed as
they consider orang-utans to be pests, in the same way as we view rats. If you want to
help preserve them, please look at the ingredients in the products you buy when
shopping, as palm oil is used in many products including soap, crisps and biscuits. By
reducing the demand for it, we can stop the habitat destruction.
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Thoughts on Green Design
Ken Yeang, former Junior Member
Saving our environment is the most vital issue that humankind must address today,
feeding into our fears that this millennium may be our last. For the designer, the
compelling question is: How do we design for a sustainable future? Industries face
similar concerns of seeking to understand the environmental consequences of their
business, to envision what their business might be if it were sustainable, and to find ways
to realize this vision with ecologically benign strategies, new business models,
production systems, materials and processes.
An ecological approach to our businesses and to design is ultimately about
environmental integration. If we were able to integrate our business processes and
design and everything we do or make in our built environment (which by definition
consists of our buildings, facilities, infrastructure, products, refrigerators, toys, etc.) with
the natural environment in a seamless and benign way, there would, in principle, be no
environmental problems whatsoever.
Simply stated, ecodesign is designing for bio-integration. This can be regarded at three
aspect levels: physically, systemically and temporally. Successfully reaching these levels
is, of course easier said than done, but herein lies our challenge.
We start by looking at nature. Without human beings, nature exists in stasis. Can our
businesses and our built environment be made to imitate nature’s processes, structures,
and functions, most particularly its ecosystems? For instance, ecosystems produce no
waste, everything is recycled within them. Thus by imitating them, our built
environment will produce no waste. All emissions and products are continuously reused,
recycled within and eventually reintegrated into the natural environment, in tandem
with efficient uses of energy and material resources. Designing to imitate ecosystems is
ecomimesis. This leads to the fundamental premise for ecodesign: our built environment
must imitate ecosystems in all respects.
Our built forms are essentially enclosures erected to protect us from the inclement
external weather whilst at the same time enabling some activity (whether residential,
office, manufacturing, warehousing, etc.) to take place within. Ecologically, a building is
just a high concentration of materials in one location (often using non-renewable energy
resources) extracted from and manufactured at some place distant in the biosphere,
then transported to that location and turned into a built form or an infrastructure such
as roads and drains, whose subsequent operations bear further environmental
consequences and whose eventual after-life must also be accommodated.
In a nutshell, ecodesign is designing the built environment as a system within the
natural environment. The system’s existence has ecological consequences and its sets of
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
29
interactions, being its inputs and outputs as well as all its other aspects (such as for
example transportation) over its entire life cycle, must be benignly integrated into the
natural environment.
In the biosphere the ecosystems are definable units containing both biotic and abiotic
constituents acting together as a whole. Following this concept, our businesses and built
environment should be designed analogously to the ecosystem’s physical content,
composition and processes. For instance, instead of regarding our architecture output as
just art objects or as serviced enclosures, we should regard it as artifacts that need to be
operationally integrated with nature.
As is self-evident, the material composition of our built environment is almost entirely
inorganic, whereas ecosystems contain a complement of both biotic and abiotic
constituents, or of inorganic and organic components. Our myriad of construction,
manufacturing and other activities are, in effect, making the biosphere more and more
inorganic, artificial and increasingly biologically simplified. To continue along this path
without balancing the biotic content means simply adding to the biosphere’s artificiality,
thereby making it increasingly more and more inorganic. This results in the biological
simplification of the biosphere and a reduction of its complexity and diversity. We must
first reverse this trend and balance our built environment with greater levels of biomass,
thereby ameliorating biodiversity and ecological connectivity in all built forms.
We should improve the ecological linkages between our designs and our business
processes with the surrounding landscape, both horizontally and vertically. Achieving
these linkages should ensure a wider level of species connectivity, interaction, mobility
and sharing of resources across boundaries. Any such real improvements in ecological
nexus enhance biodiversity and further increase habitat resilience and species survival.
As an example, providing ecological corridors and linkages in regional planning is crucial
in making urban patterns more biologically viable.
We must biologically integrate the inorganic aspects and processes of our built
environment with the landscape so that they mutually become ecosystemic. We must
create ‘human-made ecosystems’ compatible with the ecosystems in nature. By doing so,
we enhance the ability of human-made ecosystems to sustain life in the biosphere.
Ecodesign is also about discernment of the ecology of any given site. Any activity from
our design or our business takes place with the objective to physically integrate benignly
with the ecosystems. Therefore we must first understand a locality’s ecosystem before
imposing any human activity upon it. Every site has an ecology with a limited capacity to
withstand stresses imposed upon it, and if stressed beyond this capacity, it becomes
irrevocably damaged. Consequences can range from minimal localized impact (such as
the clearing of a small land area for access), to the total devastation of an entire land area
(such as the clearing of all trees and vegetation, the levelling of topography, diversion of
existing waterways, etc.).
To identify all aspects of this carrying capacity, we need to analyse and understand a
site’s ecology. We must ascertain its ecosystem’s structure and energy flow, its species
diversity and other ecological properties. Then we must identify which parts of the site (if
any) have different types of structures and activities, and which parts are particularly
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sensitive. Finally, we
must consider the
likely impacts of the
intended
construction and its
use.
This is, of course, a
major undertaking. It
needs to be done
diurnally over the
year and in some
instances over years.
To reduce this
lengthy effort,
landscape architects
developed the sieveDesign for an exemplary green masterplan for a development of 500,000 m2
mapping technique
for landscaping mapping. As we map the layers, we overlay them, assign points, evaluate
the interactions in relation to our proposed land use and patterns of use, and produce a
composite map or guide to our planning (e.g. the disposition of the access roads, water
management, drainage patterns and shaping of the built form(s), etc.). We must be
aware that this method generally treats a site’s ecosystem as static and may ignore the
dynamic forces acting between the layers and within an ecosystem. There are complex
interactions between each of these layers, thus analyzing an ecosystem requires more
than mapping, we must also examine the inter-layer relationships.
We must also look into ways to configure the built forms and operational systems for
our built environment and our businesses as low-energy systems. In addressing this, we
need to look into ways to meet internal comfort requirements. There are essentially five
modes to consider: Passive Mode (or bioclimatic design), Mixed Mode, Full Mode,
Productive Mode and Composite Mode.
Designing means looking at Passive Mode strategies first, then Mixed Mode to Full
Mode, Productive Mode and to Composite Mode, all the while adopting progressive
strategies to improve comfort conditions relative to external conditions. Meeting
contemporary expectations for comfort conditions, especially in manufacturing, cannot
be achieved by Passive Mode or by Mixed Mode alone. The internal environment often
needs to be supplemented by using external sources of energy, as in Full Mode.
Full Mode uses electro-mechanical or mechanical and electrical systems to improve
the internal conditions of comfort, often using external energy sources from fossil-fuel
derived sources or from local ambient sources. Ecodesign of our buildings and
businesses must minimize the use of non-renewable sources of energy. In this regard,
low-energy design is an important objective.
Passive Mode is designing for improved comfort conditions over external conditions
without the use of any electro-mechanical systems. Examples of Passive Mode strategies
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31
include adopting appropriate building configurations and orientation in relation to a
locality’s climate, or appropriate façade design paying attention to solid-to-glazed area
ratio and suitable thermal insulation levels, the use of natural ventilation, and the use of
vegetation.
The design strategy for the built form must start with Passive Mode or bioclimatic
design. This can significantly influence the configuration of the built form and its
enclosural form. Therefore, this must be the first design consideration in the process,
following which we can adopt other modes to further enhance energy efficiency. Passive
Mode requires an understanding of the climatic conditions of the locality, then designing
not just to synchronize the built form’s design with the local meteorological conditions,
but to optimize the ambient energy of the locality into a building design with improved
internal comfort conditions without the use of any electro-mechanical systems.
Mixed Mode is where we use some electro-mechanical systems. Examples include
ceiling fans, double facades, flue atriums and evaporative cooling.
Full Mode is the full use of electro-mechanical systems, as in any conventional
building. If our users insist on having consistent comfort conditions throughout the year,
the designed system heads towards a Full Mode design. It will be clear by now that lowenergy design is essentially a user-driven approach and a life-style issue. We must
appreciate that Passive Mode and Mixed Mode designs can never compete with the
comfort levels achieved in a high-energy, Full Mode one.
Productive Mode is where the built system generates its own energy, for example by
deploying photovoltaics to convert solar energy, or by making good use of wind energy.
Ecosystems use solar energy that is transformed into chemical energy by the
photosynthesis of green plants and thus drives the ecological cycle. If ecodesign is to be
ecomimetic, we should seek to do the same. In the case of Productive Modes (e.g. solar
collectors, photovoltaics and wind energy), these systems require sophisticated
technological support. They subsequently increase the inorganic content of the built
form, its embodied energy content and its use of material resources, with inevitably
increased impacts on the environment.
Finally Composite Mode is a composite of all the above modes and is a system that
varies over the seasons of the year.
Ecodesign also requires the designer to use green materials and assemblies of
materials, and components that facilitate reuse, recycling and reintegration for temporal
integration with the ecological systems. We need to be ecomimetic in our use of
materials in the built environment. In ecosystems, all living organisms feed on continual
flows of matter and energy from their environment to stay alive, and all living organisms
continually produce wastes. Actually, an ecosystem generates no waste, one species’
waste being another species’ food. Thus matter cycles continually through the web of
life. It is this closing of the loop in reuse and recycling that our human-made
environment must try to imitate.
We should unceremoniously regard everything produced by humans as eventual
garbage or waste material. The question for design, businesses and manufacturing is:
What do we do with this waste material? If these wastes are readily biodegradable, they
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can return into the environment through decomposition, whereas the other generally
inert wastes need to be deposited somewhere, currently as landfill or as pollutants.
Ecomimetically, we need to think about how a building, its components and its
outputs can be reused and recycled at the outset in design before any actual production.
This determines the processes, the materials selected and the way in which these are
connected to each other in manufacturing and in our built form. For instance, to
facilitate reuse, the connection between components in the built form and in
manufactured products needs to be mechanically joined for ease of demountability. The
connection should be modular to facilitate reuse in an acceptable condition.
Another major design issue is the systemic integration of our built forms and its
operational systems and internal processes with the ecosystems in nature. This
integration is crucial because if our built systems and processes do not integrate with the
natural systems surrounding it, then they will remain disparate, artificial items and
potential pollutants. Their eventual integration after their manufacture and use can only
be through biodegradation. Often, this requires a long-term natural process of
decomposition.
While manufacturing and designing for recycling and reuse within the human-made
environment relieves the problem of deposition of waste, we should integrate not just
the organic waste (e.g. sewage, rainwater runoff, wastewater, food wastes, etc.) but also
the inorganic ones as well.
We might draw an analogy between ecodesign and prosthetics in surgery. Ecodesign is
essentially design that integrates our artificial systems, both mechanically and
organically, with its host system being the ecosystems. Similarly, a medical prosthetic
device has to integrate with its organic host, being the human body. Failure to integrate
well will result in dislocation in both. By analogy, this is what ecodesign in our built
environment and in our businesses should achieve: a total physical, systemic and
temporal integration of our human-made, built environment with our organic host in a
benign and positive way.
Some of the key issues outlined above should help us approach the ecological design
of artefacts and our businesses to ensure they become environmentally responsive.
There are of course many other aspects to address and a large number of theoretical and
technical problems remain to be solved before we achieve a truly ecological built
environment.
Note:
Dr Ken Yeang was a PhD student at Wolfson College 1971–74, and the above material is
presented in full in his book Ecodesign: A Manual for Ecological Design, published in
2006 by John Wiley & Sons.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
33
Archaeology links Cambridge and the Red Sea:
the Suakin Project Workshop 2007
Laurence Smith, Senior Member and Michael Mallinson, architect
In February, Wolfson hosted a distinguished delegation from Sudan, who were in
Cambridge to attend a workshop on the archaeological and conservation project at the
historic town of Suakin, on the Red Sea coast of Sudan about 40 miles south of presentday Port Sudan. The importance of Suakin was as the sole major port for Sudan
throughout the later Medieval and early modern periods, although an earlier Roman
port may have existed there, called Evangelon Portus. It was a major port for the Hajj,
and formed one of the main nodes in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea trade network at
least as early as 10th–12th century AD. The site comprises the remains of a complete town
built in the local coral, forming one of the few remaining examples of the ‘Red Sea’ style
of architecture, with buildings dating essentially from the period of Ottoman control,
from 1517 onwards, and from the mid-19th century when control passed to Egypt. The
site flourished as a port during the latter half of the 19th century, following the opening of
the Suez Canal, but declined after the establishment of Port Sudan in the early 20th
century. Since the 1920s Suakin has been largely uninhabited, and many of its fine
buildings have fallen into decay.
It was to change this situation that in 2002, the Sudanese National Corporation for
Antiquities and Museums (NCAM), with responsibility for ancient remains in the country,
established the Suakin Project with the aim of studying and preserving the site. This
project includes personnel from the Universities of Cambridge, Khartoum, Ulster and
UCLA. Archaeological work investigates the earlier medieval town and the origins of the
settlement, including architecturally and historically significant buildings. Conservation
involves the stabilisation and reconstruction of the most significant houses, former
Government buildings and a Mosque. One of these houses is intended to become the first
of two on-site museums which will provide information for the public on the value of the
historic heritage, both Islamic and earlier, and also of the coastal marine environment.
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At the beginning of this year, the Project had done four seasons of archaeological
investigations, with longer periods after each being devoted to building reconstruction.
This was a suitable point at which to review progress and consider the direction of the
Project, in the light of current plans for the economic development of the coastal zone.
Consequently, it was decided to hold a workshop to involve those having the closest
interest in the future of the site and its environs. This took place in the McDonald
Institute for Archaeological Research, and was attended by the Sudanese delegation,
including H.E. the Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport, H.E. the Governor of the Red Sea
State, H.E. the Commissioner of Suakin, H.E. the Ambassador of Sudan to Britain, the
Chairman and the Director General of NCAM, together with the Head of the Archaeology
Department in Khartoum University and HM Ambassador to Sudan. Participation was
welcomed from colleagues working on other archaeological projects along the Red Sea
coast, from those working on the presentation of cultural heritage sites generally and
from members of the fieldwork teams of different seasons.
The workshop was considered to be successful in bringing the Sudanese central and
state authorities together with the foreign academics assisting in the work. As a result of
discussions during the workshop, a major new initiative for conservation and restoration
of Suakin’s buildings has been planned, with contributions from the Sudanese Ministry
of Culture, the Red Sea State, Sudan, and from private enterprise. This work is being
integrated with the new development plans for the region, which include cultural
tourism, in order to best benefit the peoples of the Red Sea State.
Suakin Project Workshop participants
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
35
A Pakistani Woman at Wolfson
Dushka Saiyid, Allama Iqbal Visiting Fellow
The last three years at my parent university had
been fun but intense, and as the Chair of the
Department of History and the President,
Academic Staff Association, at Quaid-i-Azam
University, Islamabad I had accomplished what I
had set out to do and wanted to move on. The
Allama Iqbal Fellowship at Wolfson, a three-year
commitment, offered an opportunity to explore
new horizons and do some fresh research. It was a
difficult decision, and I agonized over it for
months. Friends cautioned against leaving my
husband and son on their own, the latter just a
year away from his O levels, and a mother who
was in fragile health. But all three rallied in
support of my taking up the Fellowship, and I took
the leap with some trepidation and arrived at
Wolfson in October 2004.
Having lived in London and Manhattan as a student, the move to Cambridge was not
a big deal, except that now I was neither young nor single. Faced with the dreary English
weather and quite friendless, frequent trips home helped to keep me afloat. But slowly
the College became home away from home. Wolfson is a microcosm of the global village,
and it provided an opportunity to get to know people from different corners of the world.
But the world had changed since the 1970s, when I was a student here. The post 9/11
world was divided along religious lines: Muslims versus the rest. Pakistan was perceived
as a country with strong terrorist links, and Muslims as violent and obscurantist. The
profound and long-term implications of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were far from
clear at the time. The British had come out in millions against the war, and now that
their troops had been committed, they accepted it as a fait accompli. The gulf widened
further with the mindless London bombings of 7/7 in 2005, and the war in Lebanon, the
year after. Huntington’s thesis on the clash of civilizations was becoming a living reality.
It was a sensitive but a challenging time to be the Iqbal Fellow at Wolfson.
The issue of the legality and morality of the Iraq war aside, it was clear to the
discerning that the invasion of Iraq was going to be self-defeating, and would only
spawn terrorism. Islam is a religion of peace, but there is no concept of offering the other
cheek; the aphorism, violence begets violence, could not be more apt than in this
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situation. But such were the persuasive powers of the Bush/Blair duo that no one was in
a mood to listen. At an inter-faith dialogue in Cambridge, with some august dons from
the Divinity Faculty gracing the occasion, when I argued that the conflict was not interfaith but political and territorial, there were no takers. Fascinating how societies create
their own orthodoxy!
Given the general political climate, there was a natural curiosity about the position of
women in Islam, and as to what extent was I representative of Pakistani women. Islam
does not have a clergy, nor is there any room for intermediaries between believers and
God. An important concept in Sharia or Islamic law is ijtihad, that Islam and its practices
can be freshly interpreted, in consonance with the changing times. That these central
and important features of Islam had fallen into disuse, is a reflection of the general
intellectual and moral decline of Muslims. Marriage in Islam is simply a contract, which
can be conducted by any Muslim. A woman can insert any clauses in it to safeguard her
position and rights, but like any contract, they have to be acceptable to the other party,
in this case, her prospective husband. She has complete right and control over her
property and finances, even if married. She has the right of divorce, although it is
discouraged. The Prophet’s first wife, Hazrat Khadijah, was much older than him and
was a very successful entrepreneur; the Prophet worked for her and managed her
business. It is only after she died did he marry others; many of these marriages were for
the purpose of making tribal alliances. After his death, his wife Ayesha went to war
against his cousin and son-in-law Hazrat Ali, and was on the battlefield leading from the
front in the Battle of Camel. The Prophet’s granddaughter, Bibi Zainab, took on the
powerful Umayyad establishment, when all the men folk belonging to the Prophet’s
family had been brutally massacred at Karbala. This is the Islam I know, not the
obscurantist version that is grabbing the headlines in the West. Their interpretation of
Islam is as representative of this great religion as the Inquisition was of Christianity!
As for Pakistani women, there is a need to distinguish the educated from the poor and
illiterate. There has been a radical transformation in the lives of the educated middle and
upper middle class women in the last few decades. Women are highly visible in Pakistan
and are making in-roads in all professions. They constitute almost 50% of the students in
our universities, most of which are co-educational. The Pakistan Air Force recently
started recruiting women as fighter pilots, and the ranks of the army have also been
opened to them. There is no concept of differentials in salary or retirement age between
the genders, whether in the private or public sector. There are over half a dozen women
ambassadors or high commissioners representing Pakistan all over the world. We have a
higher representation of women in our elected bodies than, I suspect, in most western
countries: 33% of seats in the District Councils and 22% in the provincial and national
assemblies is now mandatory. Imagine my shock when once asked at Wolfson whether
women were allowed to drive cars in Pakistan!
However, life at Wolfson had picked up after the dismal first term. I managed to
organize two international conferences, in collaboration with the Institute of Strategic
Studies, Islamabad, and support from the College and the President. The first one was in
2005 on ‘Pakistan after 9/11: The Turnaround’. The Centre of South Asian Studies helped,
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
37
and its Director, the late Dr Raj Chandravarkar, participated wholeheartedly in this twoday event. The following year we managed a repeat, but on the theme of ‘Pakistan-India
Dialogue: Quest for Peace’. We succeeded in attracting some leading writers and thinkers
to both conferences, and they generated a healthy debate and discussion. The Institute
of Strategic Studies later published the papers that had been presented.
With the increased British involvement in the Afghan war in 2006, the media had
begun to focus on it. Once again Pakistan was in the eye of the storm, with accusations
that Pakistan was not doing enough. I decided to give a Research Colloquium at the
College, one of the most rewarding experiences of my stint here. I explained to a packed
room, with the help of a Powerpoint presentation: the difficulty of the terrain, the tenuous
hold of the government in the tribal areas (FATA or the Federally Administered Tribal
Areas) since the time of the British, how we had already lost over 600 troops fighting the
militant supporters of the Taliban in the last one year, and that the same tribes lived on
either side of the border with Afghanistan, a border that they crossed with ease from time
immemorial, and which they did not recognize; I found a receptive audience. It was a
good feeling that people were willing to listen to a cogently presented case.
My book changed from a historical study of Pakistan’s first year, after it came into
being in 1947, to the accession of the Princely States to it. I have had to combine work on
my book with presentations on different aspects of Pakistan’s current situation, which I
consider to be equally important. A seminar at the Centre of South Asian Studies and the
presentation of a paper at a conference in Southampton University celebrating Pakistan’s
60 years, were good sounding boards for my findings and line of argument in the book.
But it was not all work: I discovered the joys of rambling in Cambridgeshire, dancing
with the Cambridge Dancers Club, and riding a bike after many decades. I am left with
sweet memories of having tea and scones at the Orchard in Grantchester, or going to the
movies at the Arts Picture House with my odd assortment of friends.
It has been a time of renewal and self-discovery. Women often come into their own
when their kids have grown; I got my second wind at the College. It was a chance to
come out from the shadows of my brilliant and high profile husband, and establish my
own credentials. To work in the peaceful and beautiful surroundings of the College,
undisturbed by any
pressures, was a luxury.
Wolfson has been a place
where I have found
intellectual stimulation,
encouragement and support;
the dreams and aspirations
of youth, which had fallen by
the wayside, have been
revived; I go back hoping to
make a better and a bigger
Mrs Naveed Faruqi, Dr Kathy Wheeler (Fellow of Darwin), Dr Peter D’Eath
of Wolfson), Ms Clare Ackland, Professor Dushka Saiyid, Dr Maleeha
contribution to Pakistan than I (Fellow
Lodhi (High Commissioner for Pakistan to the UK) and Dr Gordon Johnson
at a farewell dinner hosted by Dr Lodhi
have been able to do so far.
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Film Makers Sabiha Sumar and
Sachithanandam Sathananthan
Photo by Ravi Amaragunta
David Harris, Senior Member
Sabiha Sumar and
Sachithanandam
Sathananthan (‘Satha’)
were research students at
Wolfson College 1984–85
and 1976–84 respectively;
Satha was born in Jaffna,
Sri Lanka and read for a
PhD in Land Economy and
Sabiha, born in Karachi,
studied Film making and
Political Science at Sarah
Lawrence College in New
York before reading History
and Political Thought at
Cambridge.
They subsequently co-founded Vidhi Films and have produced several films that
have crystallised critical debates on social change. They have since directed both
documentaries and narrative films that have won world acclaim. Their films have
included ‘Suicide Warriors’ a documentary about the women suicide brigade of the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and ‘Khamosh Pani/Silent Waters’, a feature film
about the growth of Islamic extremism in Pakistan, which won the Golden Leopard for
Best Film and the Leopard for Best Actress at the Locarno International Film Festival.
Their debut documentary ‘Who will cast the First Stone?’ won the Golden Gate Award
at San Francisco.
Their latest project, and Satha’s directorial debut, ‘Dinner with the President: A
Nations’ Journey’ is their experience of looking for democracy and women’s rights in
Pakistan and received its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September
2007. They both had dinner with Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf and his wife
and attempted to create an interesting visual setting that tells more about the man and
his interaction with the woman closest to him in order to reveal aspects of his
character. The film engages President Musharraf in a discussion about his vision, his
intentions, the political past and the means by which he proposes to bring democracy
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
39
to Pakistan. Further insights are derived from encounters with religious parties, a tribal
parliament, truck drivers, young elite partygoers, a Sindhi peasant woman and her
husband, and people on the street. The film raises the central issue that a democracy
without women is a contradiction, and draws a picture of a country riven by huge
ideological, cultural and gender divisions.
Sabiha is currently working on a new narrative film ‘Rafina’ for ZDF/ARTE.
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Prizes 2006–2007
University Prizes
Henry Roy Dean Prize
Laura Spence
College Prizes
Jennings Prize
(for a First Class or a Distinction in a University Examination)
Meha Adya
Tobias Graf
Yi Li
Daniel Edmonds
Nicola Cartledge
Hilary Nabarro
Niomi Abeywardena
Eva Nanopoulos
Sebastian Schulenberg
Laura Spence
Dr Gail Hayward
Dr Sarah Street
1st in Economics IIB
1st in History Part II
1st in Engineering IIA
1st in Law IB
1st in Philosophy IA
1st in BTh
1st in LLM
1st in LLM
1st in LLM
Distinction in GCM (3rd year)
Distinction in GCM (4th year)
Distinction in GCM (4th year)
Bevan Prize
(For the most distinguished performance by a Wolfson student in the LLM)
Sebastian Schulenberg
Williams Prize
(for the best performance by a Wolfson student in Part II of the Law Tripos)
Adrienne Copithorne
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
41
Studentships 2006–2007
Guan Ruijun
Yi Liu
China
MPhil
Management Science
O’May
Patrick Skinner
UK
PhD
Archaeology
Roger Needham
Rupert Gill
UK
PhD
Philosophy
Wolfson
Ioannis Giannopoulos
Daniel Birnstiel
Greece
Germany
PhD
PhD
Engineering
Oriental studies
India
Cananda
PhD
PhD
Oriental Studies
Pure Mathematics
Luke Barnes
Anthony Dede-Benefor
Australia
Ghana
PhD
MPhil
Harankahathanne Mallikarachchi
Sri Lanka
PhD
Astronomy
Advanced Chemical
Engineering
Engineering
China
Syria
Uruguay
BA
PhD
PhD
Law
Mathematics
Biochemistry
Israel
China
China
China
PhD
PhD
MPhil
MPhil
Neurology
Computer Science
International Relations
Management Science
Wolfson Cambridge Commonwealth Trust
Continuing:
Radhika Govinda
Jeanine Van Order
New:
Wolfson Cambridge Overseas Trust
Continuing:
Wei Huang
Tamer Tlas
Ana Toribio
New:
Sharon Geva
Yuguo He
Fan Huang
Yi Liu
42
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Examination Results 2006–2007
Doctor of Letters
Professor Robin Alexander
Doctor of Science
Professor George Salmond
Doctor of Philosophy
Amir Raslan Abu Bakar: Developing a good corporate reputation framework for the UK
oil and gas industry
Ismael Al-Amoudi: Constituting rules: the production of legitimacy in two European
organisations
Ryan Alexander Anderson: Phase-based object matching using complex wavelets
Aarti Anhal: Internationalising Tibet at the United Nations, 1950–2005
Sui-Yan Au: Role of myosin VI in membrane trafficking in polarised epithelial cells
Jukka Petteri Aurikko: Structural studies of FGF and NGF signalling systems
Jamil Bacha: Studies of the effects of promoter sequence variation on gene expression in
human chromosome 22
David Alan Barrowclough: Multi-temporality and material culture: an investigation of
continuity and change in later prehistoric Lancashire
Guillaume Pierre Bascoul: Double-diffusive convection in stars
Catherine Jane Berriman (née Hanson): Examination of the role of Bcl-2 in calcium
homeostasis
El’vis Beytullayev: Soviet policy towards Turkey, 1944–1946
William Henry Billingsley: The Intelligent Book: technologies for intelligent and adaptive
textbooks focussing on Discrete Mathematics
Yvonne Jane Birch: The sustainability of schools with a history of failure: viability,
performance trends and social capital
Mark David Blumenthal: Gigahertz quantised charge pumping
Nadine Boksmati: Hellenisation deconstructed: space, material culture and identity in
Beirut
Søren Brage: Objective monitoring of physical activity in the epidemiological setting
using accelerometry and heart rate monitoring
Adel Bririd: Study of decoherence and architecture for quantum computers
Andrew Brown: Implementing performance management in primary schools
Jui-Fen Chang: Charge transport mechanisms of microcrystalline conjugated polymer
thin film transistors
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
43
Ashley Clements: Aristophanes and the philosophy of sensory perception
Patrick Gerard Cullen: Living with conflicting institutional logics: the case of UK and US
research-led business schools
Giuseppe Di Graziano: Topics in credit derivatives, stochastic volatility and equilibrium
pricing
Kathryn Lynette Franko: Regulation and intrauterine programming of glucogenic
capacity
Shiri Freilich: Towards relating the evolution of the gene repertoire in mammals to tissue
specialisation
Damian James Gardiner: Electro-optic studies of bistable smectic A organosiloxane
liquid crystals
Rami Ghannam: Study of lateral electric fields from nanostructured electrodes on
nematic liquid crystals
Carrie Gillespie: Dye Doped Liquid Crystal Lasers
Ofer Golan: Systemising emotions: teaching emotion recognition to people with autism
using interactive multimedia
Yael Golan: Kinder-egg children: identities and experiences of transracially adopted
children
Andrew James Grime: Extreme response prediction for floating production systems with
uncertain design parameters
Daren John Hlaing: Characterisation of a novel mammalian rhomboid protease
Joo-Nyung Jang: Electroclinic effect and layer rotation mechanism in the chiral smectic C
phase
Iman Javadi: ‘Per te poeta fui’: T. S. Eliot’s debt to Dante
Stephen Kingsley Jull: Exploring the utility of student behaviour self-monitoring in
mainstream schools: reconsidering antisocial behaviour within the inclusion project
Rebecca Alice Keenan: The development of B cells in vivo and in vitro
Gil Pinhas Klein: Oral towns: the institutional topography of late antique Sepphoris
(Zippori) and the rabbinic consecration of the city
Mei-Ching Lee: Glucose-sensitive holographic sensors
Zhong Liu: Alternative approach to organizing the wire-line broadband access market
for competition, with special reference to urban China
Stephen Richard Livermore: Aspects of buoyancy driven natural ventilation
Eamonn Long: On charged solitons and electromagnetism
Shi Ruey Joey Long: Containment and decolonisation: the United States, Great Britain,
and Singapore 1953–1961
Phing-How Lou: Mitochondrial uncoupling in obesity & ageing
Lisa Marlow: The hominid dispersal into Early and Middle Pleistocene Europe: an
approach from biogeography
Pik Ki Peggy Mok: Influences on vowel-to-vowel coarticulation
Sebastian Mosbach: Explicit stochastic and deterministic simulation methods for
combustion chemistry
Ulrich Paquet: Bayesian inference for latent variable models
44
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Dimitrios Pinotsis: The Dbar formalism, Quaternions and applications
Mushtaqur Rahman: Evaluation of the effects of screening on the development of
complications of diabetes
Fabien Amaury Guilhem Roques: Investment incentives and security of supply in
liberalised electricity markets
Russell Glen Ross: Cluster storage for commodity computation
Ana María Rossi: Activating inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptors
James Benjamin Smith: The influence of Bertolt Brecht on British drama
Catherine Lucy Stace: Functional studies of phosphatidic acid production by
phospholipase D1: 1. phosphatidylinositol 4-phosphate 5-kinase, 2. caveolin trafficking
Thomas Taverner: Protein complex architecture from mass spectrometry, crosslinking
and informatics
Andrew Stuart Troup: Magnetoresistance in silicon-based semiconductor-metal hybrid
structures
Maria-Elena Villamil: The epidemiology of common mental disorders around retirement
age
Andrea Gaël Vincent: Leaf litter manipulation and soil nutrient availability to plants in a
Panamanian moist forest
Julien Georges Robert Vincent: Disestablishing moral science: John Neville Keynes,
cultural authority and religion in Victorian England (1860–1900)
Achmad Yanuar: Impact of forest fragmentation on the siamang (S. syndactylus) and agile
gibbon (H. agilis) around Kerinci-Seblat national park, Sumatra, Indonesia
Rida Zaidi: Ownership, corporate governance and firm financing in developing
economies: a case study of Pakistan
The President,
Andrew Troup (PhD
2007, Junior
Research Fellow
2007–) and his father
Alan (PhD 1977,
Junior Research
Fellow 1976–1977) ,
Congregation 24
February 2007
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
45
Master of Arts
Rosemary Jennifer Akester
Chii Jou Chan
Andrew Counsell
Nicholas Alan Cutler
Martin Thomas Greenup
David John Howard Huber
Varun Khanna
Kate Louise Klocker
Kenneth Tze Shien Kwek
Ko Lii Lim
Anusha Mahalingam
Steven James Mann
Jane Rosemary Mills
Christoph Johannes Neugebauer
Guy Rohan Sims
Stamatis Vorias
Kenneth Yuan Yee Wong
Master of Arts (under provision of Statute BIII6)
Lesley Gray
Professor Robert Dewar Jr
Professor Robert E Dewar Jr (Fellow), receiving his MA (statute B1116) from the Vice-Chancellor,
Professor Alison Richard (Honorary Fellow), who is also his wife
Master of Laws
Niomi Anuradha Yapa Abeywardena
Leonardo Borlini
Simon Cachia
Neil Anil Gobardhan
Xiao Liu
Eva Nanopoulos
Georgios Papadopoulos
Sebastian Schulenberg
Anubhav Singhvi
Theodora Souma
Master of Philosophy
Apostolos Aravanis
Trivikram Arun Ramanathan
Michaela Asenova
Alexa Elizabeth Aston
Aparajita Basu
Guillaume-Alexandre Christian Bessi
Caroline Marie Emilie Bicocchi
Elizabeth Catherine Blake
46
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Rebecca Claire Blyth
Sarah Elizabeth Bryant
Jaime Alberto Caballero-Santin
Jocelyn Ann Campanaro
Sally Laura Cave
Ran Chen
Felicia Pei-Hsin Cheng
Huei-Chun Cheng
Kong Chyong Chi
Nicholas William Clark
Simon Julius Clark
John Paul Comerford
Ryan Daniel Costella
Cindy Georgette Julia Daniel
David Micha de Bruijn
Fabien Delahaye
Ewan James Delany
Whitney Marie Dirks-Schuster
Whitney Clara Duim
Julien Régis Duvaud Schelnast
Justin Basile Echouffo Tcheugui
Matthew David Edmonds
Rachel Natalie Feinmark
Gianluca Flego
William Offe Laurence Ford
Rosalind Margaret Frost
Irina Igorevna Gavrilenko
Anya Stephanie George
Yann Eric André George
Tobias Samuel Harris
Karsten Heise
Ken Victor Leonard Hijino
Jacqueline Fay Hobbs
Ashshema Saadiyaa Hosany
Zhao Huang
Shao-Feng Jeff Hung
Adeep Husain
Roshan Iqbal
Matthew Owoyemi Iwajomo
Foivos-Spyridon Karachalios
Petros Karatsareas
Asma Mehreen Khalid
Masahiro Kodera
Ioannis Korkontzelos
Ian David Korner
Stella Kourouzidou
Nathanaël Krivine
Griselda Kumordzie Broun
Pisute Leekijwatana
Olivia Eliane Lefebvre
Chung Hang Leung
Da Li
Du Li
Xiaoxing Li
Xi Liang
Yi Liu
Tatjana Ljujić
Peiqin Ma
Michael Clifford Mabrey
Andrea Parisa Mann
Peter Charles Manners-Smith
Jonathan Martin Marley
Lauren McMullan
Amir Feisal Merican
Kenneth Mark Neil Metcalfe
Ceyda Mete
William Mifsud
Christian Scheurer Miller
Marina Mina
Shabnam Mirsaeedi Farahani
Adnan Mufti
Arthi Murugesan
Thade Nahnsen
Georgina Yaa Oduro
Michael Kum Wai Ong
Julian Andres Parra
Luis Guilherme dos Santos Marques Pedro
Marianne Christina Pohl
Luis Orlando Poulter
Hui Qiu
Alistair William Reese
Charlotte Louise Ridgway
Peter Owen Roderick
Raphael Chayim Rosen
Laurie Christiane Juliette Rousson
Martin Thomas Karl Saag
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
47
Erin Galadriel Sánchez
Flavius Dietrich Octavian Schackert
Henrik Otto Schoenefeldt
Imran Faisal Shafi
Binhui Shao
Ruwan Silva
John Allan Prain Sinclair
Robert James Smith
Baltazar Solano Rodriguez
Eirini Spyropoulou
Vanja Stanišić
Paul Daniel Stilley
Kenneth Kung-Hao Sun
Surekha Talari
Ka Shing Tam
Lan Tao
Blaise Roger Marie Thomson
Nicholas Treuherz
Hung-Yi Tsai
Praerung Uennatornwaranggoon
Xiaowen Wang
Ziqi Wang
Emily Lowell Warren
Tae Joon Won
James Ching Tung Wong
Yeuk Ting Gloria Wong
Di Xu
Yohan Yoo
Alasdair George Young
Yang Yu
Shanshan Zhao
Liang Zong
Master of Engineering and Bachelor of Arts
Wee Tiong Toh
Master of Business Administration
Neeraj Agarwal
Ka Chun Cheung
Yiu Hung Chong
Chrysanthos Chrysanthou
Andrea Dalmaso
Noelle Dyer
Curtis Warne Forsyth
Sylvain Gingras
Dominic Miang Ti Heng
Kenji Hirooka
Jabari Jackson
Master of Education
Simon Peter Anderson
Anne Edith Cunningham
Gary Carlyle Davis
Anthony John Delany
William Alan Fisher
Jenny Elizabeth Gould
Susan Anne Lyons
Shelagh Mary Mackenzie
Barbara Jean Monks
48
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Marc-André Jeuck
Ji-Un Lee
Arun Prasath Muthirulan
Aleksey Postnikov
Mohamed Imtiyaz Rahaman
Sarah Asad Sadiq
Puay Leng Su
Francisco José Toledo Santander
Jumpei Yamashita
Chene Zhuang
Andrew Noon
Janet Brenda Ollerenshaw
Patricia Jean Outen
Marziyah Panju
Kristina Stutchbury
Harminder Thandi
Miraz Triggs
Heather Dawn Waddington
Rowena Jane Williams
Master of Studies
Paul Stephen Brackett
Alexander Fitzgerald Carlos
Montserrat Chivite
Andrew Marcus Coats
Paul Henry Creighton
Sean Cross
Marek Krzysztof Da˛browski
Robert DiVasto
Derek William Ford
Terence Gilbert
Paul Joseph Grimes
Andrea Johannes
John Ieuan Jones
Ka Chi James James Lai
Philip Raymund Latham
Wai Ming Eric Lau
Bachelor of Medicine
Chungu Chitumbo
Shalini Chopra
Ruth Farrington
Kamal Sanjiva Hapuarachchi
Gail Nicola Hayward
Bronwen Margaret James
Lisette Emma Lyne
Eoin Michael Macdonald-Nethercott
Bachelor of Surgery
Chungu Chitumbo
Shalini Chopra
Ruth Farrington
Gail Nicola Hayward
Bronwen Margaret James
Lisette Emma Lyne
Eoin Michael Macdonald-Nethercott
David Andrew Lockhart
Philip Richard McClennon
Fergus John McCormick
Aleta Moriarty
Richard Neil Pamenter
Jonathan M Papoulidis
John Michael Scott
Gareth John Siddorn
Krzysztof Sowa-Piekl⁄o
Andrew Roderick Taylor
John Robert Thomson
Louise Tranter
Stephen George Tunnicliffe Wilson
David John Wickham
Jing Zhao
Diarmuid Brendan Nugent
David O’Regan
Holger Norbert Petry
Annette Jacqueline Victoria Rose
Deepa Narendra Shah
Sarah Judith Street
Dominic Mark Summers
Meera Surti
Diarmuid Brendan Nugent
David O’Regan
Holger Norbert Petry
Annette Jacqueline Victoria Rose
Sarah Street
Dominic Mark Summers
Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine
Tamsin Stephanie Blyth
Elisabeth Arabella Watson
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
49
Bachelor of Arts
Meha Adya
Philippos Aristidou
David Barton
Xianjie Boey
Simone Marie Bovair
Rebecca Ann Bowker
Sonja Bremauer
Tirthankar Chakravarty
Lauren Adrienne Copithorne
Christopher Craggs
Yahaira De La Rosa
Meiling Gao
Tobias Peter Graf
Marcus Qin Yu Hou
Meili Huang
Wei Huang
Teerna Khurana
Pia Kim
Maria-Danae Koukouti
Yili Lai
Ian John Moore
Barbora Patkova
Samini Philip
John Prime Saraan
Katalin Szücs
Dimitrios Tsekoyras
Rebecca Louise Williams
Bachelor of Theology for Ministry
Simon Elliott
Janet Hopewell
Hilary Mary Nabarro
Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics
Pierre-Louis Becq de Fouquieres
Iason Konstantopoulos
Frank De Zeeuw
Jorge Iván Silva Lobo
Olga Goulko
Clemens Ralf Thielen
Muhammad Ali Khan
Diploma in Computer Science
Mark John Batty
Anna Biney
Diploma in Economics
Karina Meave Doorley
Thang Than Toan Pham
Bryony Reich
Approved pre 2006–2007 but proceeded to degree during the academic year of
2006–2007
Doctor of Philosophy
Omar Alí de Unzaga: The use of the Qur’an in the Epistles of the Pure Brethren (Rasa’il
Ikhwan al-Safa’)
Marco Cariglia: Supersymmetry, gravity, and special geometric structures
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Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Master of Philosophy
Yvonne Jane Birch
Stephanie Constantine
Wenzao Du
Seung-Jae Jang
Stephen Richard Livermore
Hussein Mohamed Hassan Mehanna
Ingvild Lundeberg Oia
Richard Yajuvendra Persaud
Xenophon Savva
Earl Edric Victor
Jeremy David Yallop
Jun Ying
Master of Studies
Louis Ember Gyoh
Gregory Hereward Johnsson Hardie
Bachelor of Arts
Nicholas William Clark
Freshers 2007 (see next page)
Row 6: S.C.Bledoeg, T.K.W.Hougaard, K.Karagaurikidou, K.Glover, K.Sinclair, B.Taylor, X.Boey, B.Soong,
S.Sharples, D.Leduc, A.R.O.Lebatie, Y.Tazi, F.E.Nasrallah, S.Tan
Row 5: C.D.Tong, S.Taha, E.Akcura, B.Chen, K.Spanke, K.Kretzschmar, D.Peeva, L.Vesely, G.J.Coates,
S.A.J.Orriens, P.Goudes, I.Georgiou, K.Bledsoe, I.Papathanasiou, R.J.Cashmore, K.Mouyis, D.G.Wakeman,
K.Vyas, A.Kiyani
Row 4: D.Sharma, R.Imam, T.Mach, N.Metzner, Z.C.Zhang, L.Su, J.Teahan, K.F.Aeberli, W.B.Liechty, R.Basters,
A.R.Dixon, C.W.H.Rumball, P.Vogl, J.H.Chuah, Y.K.K.Tam, J.K.Rogers, S.J.Kelly, C.S.Betton, J.A.Garcia
Row 3: C.M.Duriev, A.U.R.Hashim, N.K.Yeung, S.C.Isaacson, Y.R.Khokher, T.Elsharief, L.Wilson, P.Escott,
F.De Witte, K.Wong, H.B.Engemann, M.Michalet, A.M.Lidji, T.Labeeuw, Y.Yan, L.Smith, V.Daggupaty,
F.I.Mashiter, A.Moayyeri
Row 2: A.N.Pham, M.Achilova, G.Wong, D.Masifa, Y.Hao, M.Mangold, A.A.Awan, R.F.Lemos, J.G.Dodds,
S.D.S.Brandao, J.Schwarz, N.E.Paul, D.R.Papst, D.Chen, D.Y.Q.Wang, J.A.Duncan, C.R.K.Hughes,
G.A.Rusak-Filkov, S.Faruqi, N.Stiastny
Front row: C.L.Lim, P.Howe, N.W.Zhang, S.Raisharma, A.Datta, M.Lovatt (Tutor), C.Granroth (Tutor),
D.Jarvis (Senior Tutor), D.MacDonald (Vice-President), G.Johnson (President) B.D.Cox (Praelector),
C.S.M.Lawrence (Bursar), D.Luhrs (Head Porter), J.Flowerdew (Admissions Tutor), S.Church (Tutor), D.Lyons,
K.Day, T.Wei, M.Amrith
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
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Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
The Wolfson Course and Programme:
Keeping in Touch
Dr Don Wilson, Director Emeritus of the Wolfson Course and Programme
Elsewhere in this issue of the magazine you will read a tribute to Jack King who died in
March this year. Jack was the undisputed architect of the Wolfson Course and former
members of the Course who knew him as their Director, and others who met him after
his retirement, will have their own memories of his robust character, his sense of fun,
and the generous help and support he gave to them during their days in Cambridge. He
will be greatly missed by us all.
Jack was responsible for negotiating the arrangement whereby the Malaysian
company Sime Darby Berhad* provided funding for senior military officers, and police
officers, to come to Wolfson for a term, and he would have been especially pleased to
hear the details of my visit to Kuala Lumpur in May this year to attend the annual Sime
Darby Wolfson Alumni Gathering. This was a magnificent event bringing together about
half of the 57 Malaysians who have completed the course since Michaelmas term 1987,
and it was made possible by the generous support, both financial and in the provision of
facilities and administrative help, of Sime Darby. The programme for the day started at
7.30 am with a shooting competition organised by Brigadier General Affendy
(Michaelmas 2006) on a military rifle range. After much needed practice, and an
individual competition, a team match was organised. Three teams participated,
representing the military, the police, and Sime Darby managers. The police team
included Assistant Commisioner of Police (R) Datin Salmah Dalib (Lent 1997) and her
husband, a former Chief of Police. They were short of junior ranks to make up numbers
so they promoted me to honorary police officer for the morning – perhaps the main
reason for our team achieving bottom place overall! After a lunch consisting of army field
rations, (of superior quality and quite different flavours from those I remember from my
days in the British Army) we swapped equipment to participate in an individual
competition on the magnificent 18-hole golf course at the Kuala Lumpur Golf and
Country Club. This is a long and challenging course and it was a relief to find that we had
the use of golf buggies equipped with cold boxes and a plentiful supply of cool drinks
because the afternoon temperature was above 35 degrees.
With only a short rest after the golf match we assembled for a Reception before the
Alumni Dinner at the newly completed Sime Darby Convention Centre. Dato’ Ahmad
* Sime Darby has now merged with two other government-linked firms to form a new company, Synergy
Drive, which should be operational from November 2007. According to press reports it is expected to be
Malaysia’s biggest company and the worlds largest listed plantation group.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
53
Zubir Hj Murshid, the Group Chief Executive of Sime Darby, hosted the event and the
Guest of Honour was the Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, Datuk Seri Najib Tun
Razak. Members of the Board of Directors and several senior managers from the
company were among the guests and they mingled with the large number of former
Wolfson Course members who were busily swapping stories about their time in
Cambridge.
Formal proceedings started with a welcome from the Group Chief Executive. The
Deputy Prime Minister then delivered the keynote speech. He emphasised the value of
the partnership between government and the company, and the importance of
education and international links. I then had the daunting task of following the Deputy
Prime Minister to the rostrum to describe the origin of the links between Malaysia and
Wolfson College and the high value we placed on the special relationship with Sime
Darby. I then used specific examples of the lecture programmes and research projects
tackled by recent participants on the Programme to illustrate both the flexibility we
offered and the high quality of the work completed by the officers who spent a term with
us. I also emphasised that our visitors made significant contributions to the College
community by virtue of their career backgrounds and their experience of strategic
decision making at most senior level. As is customary on these occasions, an exchange of
gifts took place after the speeches and both the Deputy Prime Minister and the group
Chief Executive were pleased to receive from me a copy of Jack King’s book ‘Wolfson
College Cambridge 1965 – 2005: A Personal Chronicle of Events, People and Bricks and
Mortar over 40 Years’. Television cameras were present throughout and an edited version
of the speeches appeared on national TV later in the evening.
During dinner I had the privilege of sitting at the table with the Deputy Prime Minister,
the Group Chief Executive of Sime Darby, Mohamed Ishak Abdul Hamid (Group Head –
Human Resources) and other distinguished guests including the Chief of Air Force and
Defence Staff General Dato’ Nick Ismail (Easter 1999). All appeared to be well-briefed about
Wolfson and pleased with our recent decision to designate the senior Malaysian visitors as
Sime Darby Fellows. They also gave every indication of their continuing support.
The rest of the evening was taken up with an excellent dinner and a prize giving
ceremony. Many of our former students were rewarded for their skills with rifle or golf
club, and a number of the Sime Darby managers were high on the list of prize-winners. I
was surprised and proud to be called forward for a special prize – awarded to me for
returning the best golf score in the competition by a left-handed player. In all honesty, I
must now admit that I was the only left-hander on the course that day.
In concluding this brief outline of a long and eventful reunion I would like to pay
tribute to the organising committee assembled by Claudia Cadena, Manager, Talent and
Performance at Sime Darby, and the contribution made by several military officers,
including Major General (R) Mamat Ariffin (Michaelmas 1997), Brigadier General Affendy
(Michaelmas 2006), and especially Brigadier General Abdul Rani (Michaelmas 2002)
whose meticulous organisation of the many complexities of the day was vital to its
success. Brigadier Rani has since retired from the army after achieving the distinction of
becoming the Director of the Royal Military Police Corps, the first Malaysian Military
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Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Police Officer to be promoted to the rank of Brigadier General, and the only one so far to
be appointed Provost Marshall. He will in future be involved in training and team
building in non-government organisations but he assures me he will still be available to
help with any future reunions.
My flight to Malaysia allowed a stopover in Hong Kong therefore I contacted Senior
Superintendent Alice Leung (Michaelmas 2005) in the hope that she would be able to
arrange for me to meet a few of her colleagues who had been at Wolfson. I expected a
small informal gathering but instead found myself enjoying five star treatment that
included a dinner party attended by almost all the recent Hong Kong participants in the
Wolfson Programme, and individual meetings with Eamon Leung (Michaelmas 1997)
(now a Chief Superintendent) who is Deputy Director of the Hong Kong Police College,
and an afternoon as a special guest at the Grand Passing Out Parade of the Customs and
Excise Department’s Training School where the Commandant, Senior Superintendent
C C Leung, is a former Wolfson Course member. The Parade was a grand affair. It marked
the completion of the training of a cohort of Customs Inspectors, many already holding
BA, BSc and Masters degrees in subjects as diverse as Mechanical Engineering,
Biochemistry, Economics or Computer Science. We were treated to displays of marching,
rifle drill (Hong Kong Customs and Excise is an armed force) and music, including the
most surprising moment of the day – a performance by a marching band dressed in kilts
and playing bagpipes.
The Honourable Frederick Ma Si-hang, JP, the Secretary for Financial Services and the
Treasury in the Hong Kong government took the ceremonial salute and I had the
pleasure of meeting him at the Reception which followed the parade. He was interested
to hear about possible opportunities for government officials to study in Cambridge, and
was clearly impressed by the large number of Customs and Excise Officers who had
spent time with us and then achieved promotion to senior ranks.
In this short article I have been unable to list all who were kind enough to give their
time to look after me, and my report does not provide a true picture of all the successes
of our alumni and the many interesting stories they have to tell. May I therefore repeat
my request from the 2005–2006 issue of the College Magazine – “Please let me know of
your progress in the real world – the steps you have taken towards the top in your chosen
career, any study or teaching you have done, in fact anything you would care to tell us of
your life after Cambridge. I truly look forward to hearing from you”. My intention is to
prepare a proper record of the Wolfson Course and Programme and its influence on the
careers of those who were a part of it. My e-mail address is [email protected].
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
55
Teacher Leadership: a New Journal created by
Wolfson Members
David Frost, Fellow and Tutor
For the last eight years Wolfson College has seen
a steady stream of teachers from the nearby
county of Hertfordshire participating in the
part-time MEd in Leading Teaching and
Learning. Every September they gather at
Wolfson for the HertsCam Annual Dinner and
residential conference where they celebrate
their achievements and welcome a new cohort
of students. When these teachers embark on the
MEd, they commit themselves not only to
leading innovation in their schools, but also to
contributing to a body of professional
knowledge. One of the ways they do this is to
contribute to a journal recently created to
publish accounts of teachers’ leadership of
development work in schools. The aim of the
journal is to bring into the spotlight teachers’ heroic efforts to improve the quality of
teaching and learning in their schools.
The HertsCam Network is a ‘knowledge creation engine’ in which members work
together to accumulate the professional knowledge arising from teachers’ development
work and make it available to all schools in Hertfordshire and beyond. Teacher
Leadership breaks new ground because it is exclusively dedicated to the work of teachers
whereas most academic journals publish papers written predominantly by professional
researchers working in universities. Teacher Leadership provides a forum for teachers to
present credible yet accessible accounts of their learning-centred leadership work.
Teacher Leadership carries two different kinds of material: articles and stories. The
articles are all based on masters theses which have been subject to the rigours of the
University assessment system. They have not been subject to the sort of peer review that
we are accustomed to seeing in academic journals, but the material has been defended
and scrutinised in a way that may be even more demanding than the traditional peer
review system. In these articles teachers provide well-focussed accounts of projects that
are both strategic and inquiry-based. The ‘stories’ are quite different in character to the
articles. They are all written on behalf of the authors rather than by them directly. These
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Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
brief case studies are drafted by the journal’s editors on the basis of the portfolios of
evidence presented by the teachers for the award of the Certificate of Further
Professional Studies. These stories are extremely useful in professional contexts because
they provide brief glimpses of innovations in teaching and learning which can be read in
just a few minutes. This is of great benefit to teachers who have very little time for
reading. By the time the third issue is published later this term the journal will have
published fifteen articles and twenty stories with titles such as ‘Using drama as a
technique to improve writing in the primary school’, ‘Developing a culture of student
leadership and volunteering’, and ‘Students as Teachers at Sir John Lawes School’.
These accounts constitute an impressive body of work which demonstrates that, in
spite of the unprecedented pressure that teachers are under, there is still an enormous
capacity to take on the challenge of change and improvement. They show that, given the
right opportunity and appropriate frameworks of support, teachers will devote
considerable enthusiasm and energy to the business of investigating, evaluating,
reflecting on, and most importantly, acting strategically to improve the quality of
teaching and learning in our schools.
The first issue attracted a great deal of attention from teachers and other education
professionals across the world. This created a welcome opportunity to branch out and
broaden the scope of the journal. In the second issue we took a tentative step forward by
publishing an article from a teacher in another network in the UK and in the third issue,
an article from a teacher in a network in Sydney, Australia. These ‘guest articles’ were
mediated and edited by network facilitators who are known to the journal editors and
who share our aims. This approach enables us to maintain coherence and remain true to
our original aims.
In future issues the editors of Teacher Leadership will seek to further widen the
journal’s scope to include accounts of teacher-led development work from a range of
networks both in the UK and in other countries. The journal is published by the Faculty
of Education of the University of Cambridge and has its own website
http://www.teacherleadership.org.uk; for further details please contact me by email at
[email protected]. I hope that the Wolfson alumni may be able to help us identify
collaborators in teacher networks across the world and may wish to subscribe to the
journal or even persuade their local university library to subscribe.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
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Journalism in a Networked Society
John Naughton, Director of the Wolfson Press Fellowship Programme and Professor of
the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University
Introduction
It is a truism that our communications
environment is changing. It was ever thus: all ‘old’
media were new media once.1 But there is
something special about our present situation at
the beginning of the 21st century. The combination
of digital convergence, personal computing and
global networking seems to have ratcheted up the
pace of development and is giving rise to radical
shifts in the environment.
Because we are living through this upheaval, it
is difficult to take the long view of it. Our problem
is not that we are short of data, or even of
information; au contraire, we are awash with it, as
companies and governments turn to consultants
and market researchers for enlightenment or
guidance. But the resulting glut of information doesn’t seem to be making us much wiser.
Indeed our current state might be best described as one of ‘informed bewilderment’.
Part of our difficulty is that we lack a discourse that is appropriate to what is
happening. Traditionally, we have drawn linguistic and analytical tools from economics,
and as a consequence seek to interpret what is going on through the prism of that dismal
science. But economics – at least the economics on which we have relied to date – is the
study of the allocation of scarce resources, whereas an important feature of our emerging
media environment is abundance, not scarcity.
Besides, much of the cultural production which characterises the new environment is
driven largely by non-economic motives and takes place entirely outside market
processes. In the words of Yochai Benkler, what we are seeing is the emergence of:
“a flourishing non-market sector of information, knowledge and cultural
production, based on the networked environment, and applied to anything that the
many individuals connected to it can imagine. Its outputs, in turn, are not treated
as exclusive property. They are instead subject to an increasingly robust ethic of
open sharing, open for all others to build on, extend and make their own.”2
1
2
Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Eds), New Media 1740–1915, MIT Press, 2003.
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom, Yale
University Press, 2006, page 7.
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For these and other reasons, a discourse rooted in market-based economic analysis
seems unequal to the task of understanding what is going on in our media environment
just now. This essay explores the utility of an alternative conceptual framework borrowed
from science, specifically from ecology – the study of natural systems.
An ecosystem is a dynamic system in which living organisms interact with one
another and with their environment.3 These interactions can be very complex and take
many forms. Organisms prey on one another; compete for food and other nutrients;
have parasitic or symbiotic relationships; wax and wane; prosper and decline. And an
ecosystem is never static. The system may be in equilibrium at any given moment, but
the balance is precarious. The slightest perturbation may disturb it, resulting in a new set
of interactions and movement to another – temporary – point of equilibrium.
This seems to me a more insightful way of viewing our communications
environment than the conventional ‘market’ metaphor more commonly used in public
discussion, because it comes closer to capturing the complexity of what actually goes on
in real life.
Just to illustrate the point, consider what has happened when new technologies have
appeared in the past. When television arrived, it was widely predicted that it would wipe
out radio, and perhaps also movies and newspapers. Yet nothing like that happened.
When the CD-ROM appeared on the scene, people predicted the demise of the printed
book. When the Web arrived, people predicted that it would wipe out newsprint. And
so on.
These ‘wipe-out’ scenarios are a product of a mindset that sees the world mainly in
terms of markets and market share. Yet the reality is that while new communications
technologies may not wipe out earlier ones, they certainly change the ecosystem. The
CD-ROM did not eliminate the printed book, for example, but it altered forever the
prospects for printed works of reference. Novels and other books continued to thrive.
A vivid illustration of ecological adaptation comes from the interaction between
television and newspapers in the UK. There came a point, sometime in the late 1950s,
when more people in Britain got their news from broadcast media – especially television
– than from newspapers. This created a crisis for the print media. How should they
respond to the threat?
Basically, they reacted in two different ways. The popular papers – the ones with mass
circulations and readers lower down the social scale – essentially became parasitic
feeders on television and the cult of celebrity that it spawned. The broadsheets, for their
part, decided that if they could no longer be the first with the news, then they would
instead become providers of comment, analysis and, later, of features. In other words,
television news did not wipe out British newspapers, but it forced them to adapt and
move to a different place in the ecosystem.
The ‘organisms’ in our media ecosystem include broadcast and narrowcast television,
movies, radio, print and the internet (which itself encompasses the web, email and peerto-peer networking of various kinds). For most of our lives, the dominant organism in
3
Clapham: Natural Ecosystems, Macmillan, 1973.
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59
this system – the one that grabbed most of the resources, revenue and attention – was
broadcast TV.4
This ecosystem is the media environment in which most of us grew up. But it is in the
process of radical change..
Life after broadcasting
Broadcast TV is in serious – and apparently inexorable – decline. It is haemorrhaging
viewers, or at least the viewers who are the most commercially lucrative. And its
audience is fragmenting. In particular, it has been eaten from within: the worm in the
bud in this case is narrowcast digital television, in which specialist content is aimed at
specialised, subscription-based audiences and distributed via digital channels.
The problem is that the business model that supports broadcast is based on its
ability to attract and hold mass audiences. Once audiences become fragmented, the
commercial logic changes. And, to compound the difficulty, new technologies have
emerged – such as Personal Video Recorders (PVRs), which record onto hard drives
rather than tape and are much easier to program. They are enabling viewers to
determine their own viewing schedules and – more significantly – to avoid
advertisements.
When I say that broadcast TV is declining, I am not saying that it will disappear.
That is what the computer scientist John Seely Brown calls ‘endism’5, and it’s not the
way ecologists think. Broadcast will continue to exist, for the simple and very good
reason that some things are best covered using a few-to-many technology. Only a
broadcast model can deal with something such as a World Cup final or news of a
major terrorist attack – when the attention of the world is focused on a single
event or a single place. But broadcast will lose its dominant position in the
ecosystem, and that is the change that I think will have really profound consequences
for us all.
What will replace it? Simple: the ubiquitous Internet.
Note that I do not say the ‘web’. The biggest mistake people in the media business
make is to think that the net and the web are synonymous. They are not. Of course the
web is enormous6, but it’s just one kind of traffic that runs on the internet’s tracks and
signalling. And already the web is being eclipsed by other kinds of traffic. According to
data gathered by the Cambridge firm Cachelogic, peer-to-peer (P2P) data exceeds web
traffic by a factor of between two and ten, depending on the time of day.7 And I have
no doubt that in ten years’ time, P2P traffic will be outrun by some other ingenious
networking application, as yet undiscovered.
4
5
6
7
Note that ‘broadcast’ implies few-to-many: a relatively small number of broadcasters, transmitting content
to large audiences of essentially passive viewers and listeners.
John Seely Brown and Andrew Duguid, The Social Life of Information, Harvard Business School Press, 2000.
At a recent conference at the Open University, the Head of Research at Yahoo estimated the size of the
public web as 40 billion pages. The ‘deep’ web – the part that lies beyond the reach of search engines has
been estimated to be 400 – 550 times larger than the public web.
www.cachelogic.com/home/pages/studies/2004_03.php
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Already, the signs of the net’s encroaching centrality are everywhere. We see it in, for
example, the remarkable penetration of broadband access in developed countries; the
rapid growth of e-commerce; the streaming of audio – and, increasingly, video across
the net; declining newspaper sales8 and the growth of online news; the expanding use
of the web as a publication medium by public authorities; the spread of public Wi-Fi;
and in the remarkable growth of Internet telephony – spurred by the realisation that,
sooner rather than later, all voice telephony will be done over the net.9
The point of all this is that while my (baby boomer) generation grew up and came to
maturity in a media ecosystem dominated by broadcast TV, our children and
grandchildren will live in an environment dominated by the net. Which begs an
interesting question: what will that mean for us, and for them?
A net-centric world
In thinking about the future, the two most useful words are ‘push’ and ‘pull’ because they
capture the essence of where we’ve been and where we seem to be headed.
Broadcast TV is a ‘push’ medium: a relatively select band of producers
(broadcasters) decide what content is to be created, create it and then push it down
analogue or digital channels at audiences which are assumed to consist of essentially
passive recipients.
The couch potato was, par excellence, a creature of this world. He did, of course, have
some freedom of action. He could choose to switch off the TV; but if he decided to leave
it on, then essentially his freedom of action was confined to choosing from a menu of
options decided for him by others, and to ‘consuming’ their content at times decided by
them. He was, in other words, a human surrogate for one of B F Skinner’s pigeons10 – free
to peck at whatever coloured lever took his fancy, but not free at all in comparison with
his fellow pigeon perched outside on the roof.
The other essential feature of the world of push media was its fundamental asymmetry.
All the creative energy was assumed to be located at one end (the producer/broadcaster).
The viewer or listener was assumed to be incapable of, or uninterested in, creating
content; and even if it turned out that s/he was capable of creative activity, there was no
way in which anything s/he produced could have been published.
The web is the opposite of this: it’s a pull medium. Nothing comes to you unless you
choose it and click on it to pull it down into your computer’s working memory. So the
first implication of the switch from push to pull is a growth in consumer sovereignty. We
saw this early on in e-commerce, because it became easy to compare online prices and
8
9
10
At least in the Anglo-Saxon world. Newspaper circulation is holding up well in other parts of the world, e.g.
Asia and the Indian sub-continent.
“It is now no longer a question of whether VOIP will wipe out traditional telephony, but a question of how
quickly it will do so. People in the industry are already talking about the day, perhaps only five years away,
when telephony will be a free service offered as part of a bundle of services as an incentive to buy other
things such as broadband access or pay-TV services. VOIP, in short, is completely reshaping the telecoms
landscape.” Economist, 15 September, 2005.
B.F. Skinner, ‘‘Superstition’ in the pigeon’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol.38, 1974.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
61
locate the most competitive suppliers from the comfort of your own armchair.11 The US
automobile industry has discovered, for example, that a majority of prospective
customers turn up at dealerships armed not only with information about particular
models, but also with detailed data on the prices that dealers elsewhere in the country
are charging for the exact same cars.12
But the Internet does not just enable people to become more fickle consumers. It also
makes them much better informed – or at least provides them with formidable resources
with which to become more knowledgeable.13 The net is also making it much harder for
companies to keep secrets. If one of your products has flaws, or if a service you provide is
sub-standard, then the chances are that the news will appear somewhere on a blog or a
posting to a newsgroup or email list. And when it does, conventional PR news
management techniques are ineffective.14
The emergence of a truly sovereign, informed consumer is thus one of the
implications of an internet-centric world. This is significant, of course, but it was
predictable, given the nature of the technology. And in the end it may turn out to be the
least interesting part of the story.
The couch potato bites back
My conjecture is that the most significant consequence of an internet-centric world lies
not in the arena of consumption, but in that of production. In blunt terms, the
asymmetry of the old, push-media-dominated ecosystem looks like being replaced by
something much more balanced.
The implicit assumption of the broadcast model, remember, was that audiences are
passive and uncreative. In recent years, what we’re discovering is that that passivity and
apparent lack of creativity may have been more due to the absence of tools and
publication opportunities than to intrinsic defects in human nature.
Take blogging – the practice of keeping an online diary. Currently, there are
somewhere between 70 and 100 million blogs in existence, and new ones are being
created at a rate approaching two per second. Many of them are, no doubt, vanity
publishing with no little literary or intellectual merit. But hundreds of thousands of blogs
are updated every day or so, and many of them contain writing and thinking of a very
high order. In my own areas of professional interest, for example, blogs are often my
most trusted online sources, because I know many of the people who write them, and
some of them are leading experts in their fields.15
What is significant about the blogging phenomenon is its demonstration that the
11
12
13
14
15
Erik Brynjolfsson and Michael Smith, ‘Frictionless Commerce? A Comparison of Internet and Conventional
Retailers’, Management Science, vol.6, no.4, April 2000, 563–585.
‘Crowned at last’, Economist, 31 March, 2005.
Battelle, John, The Search, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2006.
Companies which have discovered this include Kryptonite, manufacturers of expensive bicycle locks, and
the Sony BMG corporation, which used DRM (digital rights management) software on CDs which covertly
installed a ‘rootkit’ on the customer’s PC, thereby potentially exposing it to malware attacks.
For example www.freedom-to-tinker.com and orweblog.oclc.org.
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traffic in ideas and cultural products isn’t a one-way street, as it was in the old pushmedia ecosystem. People have always been thoughtful, articulate and well-informed, but
up to now relatively few of them ever made it past the gatekeepers who controlled access
to publication media. Blogging software and the internet gave them the platform they
needed – and they have grasped the opportunity in very large numbers.
The result is a dramatic reversal in the decline of what Jürgen Habermas calls ‘the
public sphere’16 – an arena which facilitates the public use of reason in rational-critical
debate and which had been steadily narrowing as the power and reach of mass media
increased. In recent years, the political implications of a re-energised public sphere have
begun to emerge, notably in the debates among Democrats in the US about how to
challenge Republican political ascendancy and the Bush presidency.17
Another remarkable explosion of creativity comes from digital photography. In the last
few years an enormous number of digital cameras have been sold – and of course many
mobile phones now come with an onboard camera. So every day, millions of digital
photographs are taken. Until the advent of services like Flickr.com, an understandable
response to this statement would have been “so what?” But these services allow people
to upload their pictures and display them on the Web, each neatly resized and allocated
its own unique URL.
Flickr now hosts hundreds of millions of photographs. For me, its most intriguing
aspect is that users are encouraged to attach tags to their pictures, and these tags can be
used as the basis for searches of the entire database. Just now I searched for photographs
tagged with ‘Ireland’ and came up with 880,914 images! Of course I didn’t sift through
them all, but I must have looked at a few hundred. They were mostly holiday snaps, but
here and there were some memorable pictures. What struck me most, though, was what
they represented. Ten years ago, those holiday snaps would have wound up in a shoebox
and would certainly never have been seen in a public forum. But now they can be – and
are being – published, shared with others, made available to the world.
Blogging and conventional journalism
The explosive growth in blogging has prompted a predictable outburst of ‘endism’ – as in
questions about whether the phenomenon marks the end of journalism. Yet, when one
looks at it from an ecological perspective, what one sees instead is the evolution of an
interesting parasitic/symbiotic relationship between blogging and conventional
journalism. Several case studies – for example the Harvard study of the Trent Lott case18,
and the 60 Minutes saga19 (which led to the premature retirement of TV news anchorman
Dan Rather) – have delineated the contours of this relationship.
16
17
18
19
Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, MIT Press, 1989.
Frank Rich, ‘Ideas for Democrats?’, New York Review of Books, October 19, 2006.
‘‘Big Media’ Meets the ‘Bloggers’: Coverage of Trent Lott’s Remarks at Strom Thurmond’s Birthday Party’,
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Case Program, 2004.
Dave Eberhart, ‘How the Blogs Torpedoed Dan Rather’, NewsMax.com, 31 January, 2005. Available online at:
www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/1/28/172943.shtml.
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What has happened is that a new organism has arrived in our media ecosystem and
existing organisms are having to accommodate themselves to the newcomer. And vice
versa. Interesting, complex – and essentially symbiotic – relationships are emerging
between the new medium of blogging and more conventional print journalism. My
conjecture is that this is beneficial to both: bloggers need conventional news media to
provide the raw material for commentary; and conventional journalism needs blogging
to detect and punish error and misrepresentation.
The wealth of networks
The explosion of user-generated content has been made possible by a conjunction of
several technologies: the personal computer; inexpensive but powerful software tools;
and the open Internet.20 The most persuasive narrative to have emerged to date about
the significance of generativity is Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks.21 In it, he
charts the remorseless industrialisation of the information economy from the early 1800s
to the 1960s. In that century and a half, communications technologies tended to
concentrate and commercialise the production and exchange of information.
“High-volume mechanical presses and the telegraph combined with new business
practices to change newspapers from small-circulation local efforts into mass
media. Newspapers became means of communications intended to reach everlarger and more dispersed audiences, and their management required substantial
capital investment. As the size of the audience and its geographic and social
dispersion increased, public discourse developed an increasingly one-way model.
Information and opinion that was widely known and formed the shared basis for
political conversation and broad social relations flowed from ever more capitalintensive commercial and professional producers to passive, undifferentiated
consumers.”
This model was readily adopted and amplified by radio, television and – later – cable and
satellite communications. But the economics of long-distance mass distribution systems
that were needed to reach expanding and geographically dispersed populations were
typified by very high up-front costs and low marginal costs of distribution. These cost
characteristics made the mass-media model of information and cultural production the
dominant form of public communication in the twentieth century.22 This was the world
in which – as the old joke put it – freedom of the press was available to anyone who was
rich enough to own a newspaper.
The combination of personal computing and the Internet has, Benkler argues,
changed all that. The core functionalities needed to create, store and disseminate
information, knowledge and culture are now widely available and cheap – at least by
Western standards.
20
21
22
Jonathan Zittrain, ‘The Generative Internet’, Harvard Law Review, vol.119, no.7, May 2006.
Benkler, op. cit.
Benkler, op. cit., page 29.
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“Any person who has information can connect with any other person who wants it,
and anyone who wants to make it mean something in some context, can do so. The
high capital costs that were a prerequisite to gathering, working, and communicating
information, knowledge, and culture, have now been widely distributed in the
society. The entry barrier they posed no longer offers a condensation point for the
large organizations that once dominated the information environment.”23
What has happened, in other words, is that ownership of the means of cultural
production has passed from those who could afford their high capital costs in the old
ecosystem to just about anyone who has a computer, some appropriate software and an
internet connection. One does not have to be a devout Marxist to realise that such a
radical shift in the means of production will, in due course, impact on what Marx called
the ‘superstructure’ – the culture that sits atop the fundamental economic realities of
production.
Conclusion: the emerging media ecosystem
We can now begin to see the outlines of the media ecosystem that is emerging under the
pressure of the developments discussed above. Some commentators have speculated
that what we are witnessing is the evolution of a ‘Fifth Estate’.24 What seems
incontrovertible is that the new order will be significantly different from the ecosystem
that was dominated by broadcasting technology, and in which all of our regulatory
apparatuses and many of our business models were designed.
The new ecosystem will be richer, more diverse and immeasurably more complex
because of the number of content producers, the density of the interactions between
them and their products, the speed with which actors in this space can communicate
with one another, and the pace of development made possible by ubiquitous
networking.
The problem – or ‘challenge’, to use the politically-correct term – is whether older
business models can be adapted to work in the new environment. As far as journalism –
the traditional ‘Fourth Estate’ – is concerned, the answer seems simple: professions that
don’t adapt are in for what the Chinese call “interesting times”.
23
24
Benkler, op. cit., page 32.
For example, William Dutton, ‘Through the Network (of Networks) – the Fifth Estate’, Inaugural Lecture,
Examination Schools, University of Oxford, 15 October 2007. Available online at
http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/dutton/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/5th-estate-lecture-text.pdf
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Postgraduate Course returns to Wolfson
Tim Brown, ACDMM Course 32
Ten years after starting their Advanced Course in Design, Manufacture and Management
(ACDMM) over two thirds of course 32 (1997) returned to Wolfson for a reunion. The
intention was to reminisce, re-engage, share their professional and personal experiences
and enjoy a formal black tie dinner in the beautiful surrounds of Wolfson College. The
high turnout percentage showed the depth of shared experiences and enduring
friendships that the course engendered and continues to foster even today.
The weekend included various professional team exercises, a fiercely competitive
game of football and the obligatory delights of Cambridge’s nightlife. It was lovely to see
three former Tutors and their delight at witnessing the development of former course
members built on their strong tutelage.
It was clear to all involved in the weekend that despite people’s different career and
personal choices the indomitable Course 32 spirit allowed everyone to still ‘Ring True’ in
classic Wolfson style. The celebrations and reminiscing was best summed up by course
member Ronny Chandra who said, “Since being involved in the course I have never
looked back. I can’t imagine my life if I hadn’t done ACDMM; it was the best decision I
have ever made. You guys give me inspiration every single day.”
During the weekend, course members enjoyed the tranquil surrounds of Wolfson and
viewing the tasteful incremental development of the College’s facilities. It is clearly an
exciting time for Wolfson and the intimate fresh feel of the College still remains.
Special thanks must go to James Hammersley assisted by Jon Key for painstakingly
organizing the event and the kind assistance of the Wolfson staff for such a warm
welcome, faultless coordination and yet another exquisite meal. Well done everyone!
The ACDMM course involved a year of immersion in industry, including 100 visits to
companies and a series of live projects supported by lectures in design, management
and manufacture. It is an intense year, during which close friendships are formed and
course members get an unmatched understanding of international manufacturing and
management skills. Details of the course and its new MPhil status can be found on the
University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing website
http://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/acdmm/.
Any former Course 32 member wishing to reconnect can use the website below:
www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4827923673.
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Back left to right: Alan Davies, Simon Pearce, Tim Brown, James Hammersley, Richard Sanders, Arnaud Haquin, Prakash Lad, Nadir Hamidou, Nich Walker
Middle: Keith Ovenstone, James Newell, Tim Sandberg, Nils Jolliffe, Nick Brown, Adrian Eddy, Stephanie Baldwin (née Matthews), Ewen Malloch
Front: Pete Jennings, Seb Koerner, Dr Alison Cooke, John Gatiss, Dr David Clode, Jon Key, Welsey Hunt, Andrew Lambert
Wolfson College Research Colloquium
Dr Thomas D’Andrea and Dr John Henderson, Fellows
This year the College Research Colloquium saw the gradual integration of topics in the
natural sciences with topics in the humanities, in preparation for the resuscitation of the
Wolfson College Philosophical Society in 2007–8. The Society was formed in the early
days of the College and was dedicated to sponsoring and promoting colloquia, seminars,
and occasional lectures across all the academic disciplines, and open to the full
Membership of the College and Members’ guests. The Wolfson Philosophical Society will
henceforth organise the College Research Colloquium and other public academic events
in the College, combining the natural sciences with the humanities, and it will continue
to build up an intellectual community in the College by seeking participation from
Fellows, Senior Members, Junior Members, and Visiting Fellows and Scholars in all its
sponsored events.
Michaelmas Term
Thursday, 5 October
Sir Ian Barker (formerly Chancellor of Auckland University and Justice of the High
Court in New Zealand)
The Saga of the Pitcairn Trials – Justice in Britain’s Smallest Colony
Thursday, 19 October
Dr Mara Patessio (Faculty of Oriental Studies, Junior Research Fellow, Wolfson
College)
From readers to writers: Japanese women and magazines during the 1880s and 1890s
Thursday, 2 November
Dr David Adams (Faculty of History, Junior Research Fellow, Wolfson College)
Richard Overton and the Leveller movement: Secret printing and radical politics in Civil
War London, 1644–6
Thursday, 23 November
Dr Anabela Pinto (Dept. of Veterinary Medicine, Senior Member, Wolfson College)
The Evolution of Morality: From Genes to Human Behaviour
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Lent Term
Thursday, 18 January
Professor Dushka Saiyid (Dept. of History, Quaid-i-Azam University, Allama Iqbal
Visiting Fellow)
Pakistan and the International War on Terrorism
Thursday, 1 February
Dr Frank Whitford (Deputy Art Critic, The Sunday Times, Senior Member, Wolfson
College)
Austria’s Mona Lisa: Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer
Thursday, 15 February
Dr Carolina Armenteros (British Academy Fellow, Faculty of History, Research Fellow,
Wolfson College)
The Art of Possessing Souls: A Brief History of Educational Philosophy during the French
Revolution
Thursday, 8 March
Ms Patrizia Brusaferro (PhD student in Dept. of Archaeology, Wolfson College)
Function, space and memory: an analysis of the cloister at Norwich Cathedral
Easter Term
Thursday, 3 May
Dr Charles Jones (Centre of International Studies, Fellow, Wolfson College)
American Civilization?
Thursday, 24 May
Dr Claudia Fritz (Faculty of Music, Junior Research Fellow, Wolfson College)
Acoustical science: between composers, performers, and instrument makers
Thursday, 31 May
Dr Conrad Guettler (Cambridge University Press, Senior Member, Wolfson College)
Has academic publishing changed irrevocably?
Thursday, 7 June
Mr Rex Hughes (PhD student in Centre of International Studies, Wolfson College)
Governing the ungovernable? The international relations of the internet
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The Lee Pineapple Story
Dr Anna Snowdon, Senior Member
In the early 1970s, when Wolfson was in its first
decade and was still called University College, a
young woman student from Singapore applied to
pursue her studies here. She was delivered to
College by her parents, Mr and Mrs Lee Seng Tee,
and they were received and welcomed by the then
college tutor Dr Peter Lowings, who was also
lecturer in Plant Pathology in the University
Department of Applied Biology. Having ensured
the safe arrival of their daughter, Mr and Mrs Lee
prepared to return to Singapore, and Peter
Lowings offered to drive them to Cambridge
station. During this brief car journey it transpired
that Mr Lee owned large pineapple plantations in
Malaysia (in the southern state of Johore), but he
was greatly concerned because of an aggressive
field disease that appeared in a substantial
proportion of the crop just before harvest. The fast-developing symptoms provided the
descriptive name of ‘pineapple fruit collapse’ or ‘ghost fruit’, and in some years losses
were catastrophic. Peter, being a plant pathologist, immediately offered to oversee an
investigation into the disease, and in due course it was arranged that a Malaysian
research student, Lim Weng Hee, would investigate the problem, working partly in
Malaysia at the Agricultural Research and Development Institute, MARDI, and partly in
Cambridge in the Department of Applied Biology. He became a member of College and
was financed by a Wolfson studentship funded by the Lee Pineapple Company.
Lim’s review of the literature showed that the disease was first recorded in 1935 but
attempts to identify the causal organism had been unsuccessful. In 1957 a bacterium,
Erwinia carotovora, had been isolated from infected pineapples; losses in various
plantations varied from 0 to 58%, with a mean annual loss of 10% of the national crop.
During his three-year PhD project in the 1970s, Lim identified the causal bacterium as
Erwinia chrysanthemi pv. ananas, establishing the fact that this strain attacks only
pineapples. He demonstrated that infection occurs primarily through the open flowers
via the style, and that the bacteria then remain quiescent in the fruitlets (pineapple
being a compound fruit) for about two months. Symptoms become apparent two to
three weeks before harvest, when infected fruits undergo rapid rotting and collapse. Lim
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found that rain at flowering time is conducive to infection, and that the bacteria are
transmitted in the field by two species of ant which visit the flowers in search of nectar.
Spraying the crop with insecticides or bactericides proved ineffective, and it was found
that the ants could be better controlled by means of an ant bait, together with a contact
insecticide sprayed on the ground between plants. Further important control measures
include the use of carefully timed sprays of ethephon (Ethrel), used both to synchronise
flowering at 120-day intervals and, subsequently, to suppress flower opening so that ants
cannot enter. The planting of disease-resistant cultivars is limited by the fact that
Malaysian pineapples are grown chiefly for canning, and so fruit shape is critical (the
fruits must be cylindrical rather than bulbous). Already by the 1970s when Lim was doing
his research, Malaysia had 16,000 hectares devoted to the canning pineapple, making it
the world’s third largest producer after the US and Taiwan. Whereas the predominant
cultivar in Malaysia was the Singapore Spanish or its improved form Masmerah (both
highly susceptible to fruit collapse), Lim recommended changing to Smooth Cayenne or
its close derivative Sarawak, because of their significant disease resistance. Lim’s thesis
was submitted in 1977, entitled ‘Studies on the etiology, epidemiology, ecology and
control of pineapple fruit collapse’. In 1979 a paper by Lim & Lowings was published in
the American journal Plant Disease Reporter, entitled ‘Pineapple fruit collapse in
peninsular Malaysia: symptoms and varietal susceptibility’.
Following on the heels of Lim Weng Hee, two further Malaysian research students
continued the investigation into various aspects of pineapple production, likewise
dividing their time between MARDI and Cambridge. Tay Tian Hock concentrated on the
fact that in Malaysia, in contrast to all other pineapple-producing countries, the crop is
grown on peat soil, which must be cleared, drained and appropriately fertilised. Tay’s
thesis, submitted in 1980, was entitled ‘Some effects of water table and potassium levels
on pineapple grown on Malaysian peat’. Lee Soo Ann worked on the control of lalang,
the most troublesome weed in South East Asia, and especially important on newly
cleared peat swamp forest. Lee’s thesis, submitted in 1983, was entitled ‘Control of
Imperata cylindrica (L.) Beauv.’
Meanwhile Mr Lee Seng Tee had been so delighted with the initial results of the
pineapple research, enabling his plantation managers to control the fruit disease and
halt the losses, that he forged a close relationship with Wolfson College, donating works
of art and such large sums of money that the College was able to proceed with ambitious
building plans. The Lee Seng Tee Hall, flanked by the Betty Wu Lee Garden dedicated to
Mr Lee’s wife, and the magnificent Library are a testament to Lee Seng Tee’s generosity.
All this arose from collaboration between a businessman with a problem and a scientist
who believed that it could be solved. The exchange of information during that brief car
ride to the station has had extraordinary consequences.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
71
Wolfson Science Day
Christian Fink, Junior Member
How do you bring the college science community closer together? As co-organizer of the
Wolfson Science Colloquia, a bi-weekly series of talks by Wolfson scientists, I had the
great opportunity to invite junior members to present their projects to a more general
audience. A great number of students were interested in presenting their work, so
selecting just a few candidates for the colloquia proved to be a difficult task.
Then I had the idea of a one-day event, where really every student would have the
opportunity to present his or her work, and to network too. Non-scientists would also be
invited, so they could learn more about the fascinating science carried out by members
of the College. This idea was met with great enthusiasm by fellow students Ben Hunter,
Lisa Ehrenfried and Lino Scelsi – the four of us then formed the Wolfson Science Day
Committee.
Over the next weeks our committee had regular meetings and during many
discussions the idea took shape and turned into a proper plan. The College President
was very encouraging and supported us in every way. To publicise the event we prepared
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posters and flyers that we put up in the whole college and distributed into all
pigeonholes. We advertised it amongst our friends, and sent out general announcement
e-mails. It was pretty much impossible for anybody not to know about this event.
Finally our big day came. More than 30 junior researchers had followed our call and
registered to present their projects. The Lee Hall was filled with an atmosphere of
excitement, as more and more participants arrived to install their presentations. Dr Jarvis
welcomed the audience and expressed the College’s full support for this event. In her
opening address Dr Anna Snowdon recounted the story of Mr Lee and the pineapple (see
page 70). In great detail she gave evidence of how Science contributed to the forming of a
deep bond between Wolfson College and its influential benefactor.
For the next hour the invited student speakers entertained the audience on
multidisciplinary topics in medical sciences: Adam Naguib, a genetic scientist, gave a
beginner’s guide to cancer, Lisa Ehrenfried, an engineer, shared her enthusiasm about
bio-materials, and Joe Stevick, a physicist, presented recent advances on imaging
techniques in medicine.
After so much intellectual nourishment it was time for some physical sustenance and
food and drinks were served. Now came the highlight of the evening: our so-called
scientific exchange session, where the imagination of the participants was impressive. All
poster boards were filled with colourful science posters, computer simulations showed
virtual experiments, a plant revealed an invasive insect species, a music instrument rang
Caribbean sounds. In all this the non-science visitors found plenty of evidence of how
fascinating real science can be.
It proved a genuine challenge for the jury of Fellows to select the three best
presentations during this event. Finally, Sharon Geva received the first prize for her
engaging presentation, Dawn Muddyman the second prize for clarity in her poster
presentation, and Lisa Ehrenfried the third prize for her enthusiastic demonstration.
Long after the majority of the 80 attendees had left, you could still see participants
discussing their projects and exchanging ideas. After this first success I am very
confident that the Wolfson Science Day will become an annual event in the College.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
73
Music at Wolfson 2006–2007
Photo by Daniel Oi
Lyn Alcántara, Fellow and Director of Music
One of the recent achievements of the Wolfson College Music Society has been the
development of our society website which can be accessed through the college site or via
www.srcf.ucam.org/wolfsonmusic. We do hope you visit
the site regularly. Thanks are due to Daniel Oi and Natalia
Biletska for generously donating their time and expertise
in creating the website and to William Mifsud for
maintaining it. The society also welcomes a new member,
Christopher Lawrence, our new bursar. He is a fine tuba
player and will be performing at this Michaelmas term’s
Music and Madeira with his group ‘Prime Brass’. We also
say thank you and farewell to committee members:
pianist Felicia Cheng (2007 WCMS President), composer
Luis Poulter, psychologist Thomas Stainsby, and bass John
Bispham (who leaves for the Royal Northern College of
John Bispham (bass)
Music to further his vocal studies).
Music & Madeira evenings continued in Michaelmas term with South African pianist
and composer David Earl performing his own composition Mandelas and a wonderful
rendition of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata.
Lent term’s beautiful recital was given by the Consortium5 recorder ensemble who
performed works by Locke, Frescobaldi,
Boismortier, Tavener and Koomans. This prizewinning ensemble formed in 2005 whilst still at the
Royal Academy of Music to “advance their skills in
the mildly addictive art of consort playing”. The
Easter term performers were The Rusalka Quartet
led by Tim Craggs.
Lunchtime concerts were given by Nattie Mayer
Hutchings (soprano) and Felicia Cheng (piano)
and Consortium5. Martin Ennis (piano) and I gave
a programme of works by Zemlinsky, Strauss and
Montsalvatge (thanks to visiting scholar and
musicologist Francisco Parralejo Masa from
Salamanca University for his help with translations
Consortium5
of the Montsalvatge).
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Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Photo by Daniel Oi
The Michaelmas Term
concert was held on 25
November by the College choir
accompanied by Felicia Cheng
and James Bendall. The choir
presented a programme of 19th
and 20th century part-songs
including Elgar’s rarely
performed Songs from the
Bavarian Highlands and more
recent compositions by Bob
Felicia Cheng (piano)
Chilcott and Richard Rodney
Bennett. Solos were provided by
John Bispham (bass) accompanied by past Wolfson student Ryo Ikeshiro (piano), and
also by Felica Cheng (piano).
Wolfson’s traditional Advent Service was once again held at St Mark’s Church in early
December. The provision of music at College services has been greatly helped by a
generous donation of hymn books by Keith Riglin and St Columba’s Church. These
replace our very old and worn copies. December also saw the 80th birthday celebrations
of senior member, Mr John Mott. Vocal quartet ALCANTARá4 (four members of the BBC
Singers) and the Rusalka Quartet performed at this very enjoyable event.
For our Lent term concert we were joined by visiting Italian choir Coro Amici in
Musica to perform the Schubert Mass in G and Vivaldi’s Gloria. Soloists for this concert
included soprano: Eli Rolfe Johnson, alto: Lynette Alcántara, tenor: David Ciavarella
(also known as the singing conductor) and Wolfson bass: John Bispham. The small
orchestra was ably led by local violinist Tim Craggs. Wolfson players included Anna
Jones – cello, Philip Down – timpani (instruments loaned by Fitzwilliam College),
Jonathan Impett – trumpet and Nick Tippler and Lisa Ehrenfried – violins.
During Easter Term the Wolfson Chamber Singers met under the baton of James
Bendall to perform May Day madrigals at the University Centre for the Newcomers and
Visiting Scholars Group. The
singers have been warmly
invited back to sing next year.
James Bendall also played organ
and keyboard at the various
College services and at Jack
King’s moving memorial where
the choir and I farewelled Mr
King from the College forecourt
in Mozartean style.
17 June was a busy day for
College music with the Summer
Wolfson Chamber Singers conducted by James Bendall
concert given by Stockholm
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
75
Photo by Daniel Oi
Photo by Daniel Oi
Vivaldi Gloria in San Lorenzo in Lucina, Rome
Photo by Daniel Oi
Wolfson Choir and friends performing in Monte Porzio June 2007
Auld Lang Syne Rome 2006. Viviane Baesens, 2nd from left
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ensemble the Rienzi Trio. This
talented young piano trio
played trios by Haydn,
Shostakovich and Dvorak.
Special thanks are due to kind
donors Richard Meade and
Owen and Jo Edwards who
made the trio’s visit possible.
The same day saw the
University Brass Band and the
College Choir performing as
usual at the College garden
party.
The following week the
College Choir and I travelled to
Rome for our annual choir
tour. Three concerts were
given by Wolfson College Choir
and Strings who joined forces
with Coro Amici in Musica and
Roman instrumentalists
conducted by Marco Boido.
Concert programmes included
Pergolesi Stabat Mater (sung
by soprano Yuri Takenaka and
myself), Vivaldi Beatus Vir and
Vivaldi Gloria, and as an
encore Mozart’s well loved Ave
Verum Corpus. The most
inspiring venue was San
Lorenzo in Lucina, one of
central Rome’s oldest places of
Christian worship.
We also performed in
Monte Porzio in the Frascati
wine region and in Frasso
Sabino in Rieti. All concerts
were dedicated to the memory
of Viviane Baesens whose
untimely death in May is
mourned by the choir. Viviane
had sung alto in Wolfson Choir
since the early 1990s.
Wolfson Art Exhibition
Helen Cavill, Junior Member
The Art Society’s annual exhibition was held in College during June 2007. Although
organised by the Society, work by any artist with a Wolfson connection is displayed. A
wide range of artists – Fellows, staff, current and previous students, the amateur and the
more accomplished – all came together for the exhibition. The Wolfson exhibition tends
not to constrain itself with a theme, but if a theme were to be chosen retrospectively it
would definitely be ‘vibrant’ this year. Rich colours and bold imagery were plentiful in
oils, acrylic, watercolour and pastel crayon. The winners and short-listed entries from
the Wolfson Photography Competition held earlier in the year were also on display.
The exhibition was open for one week and saw many visitors in this time. The opening
evening was a particular success, with almost fifty people attending, giving a chance for
the artists to explain their work informally and talk painting techniques together.
Another exhibition will be held in 2008 and submissions are warmly invited.
Contributors to the 2007 art exhibition were: Tom Alexander, Daniel C. Bryan, Helen
Louise Cavill, Tom Davies, Lisa Ehrenfried, Saman Fahimi, Anina Furness, Sharon Geva,
Olga Goulko, Radhika Govinda, Fan Huang, Joanna Knaggs, Seyi Latunde-Dada, Alicia
Murcia, Eric Rees, Asela Samaratunga, Phil Stigwood, Casey Synge, Ella Urbaniak,
Jeanine Van Order and Ding Yu.
The Wolfson College Art Society meets weekly to paint, draw and generally have fun
trying out new materials and improving members’ artistic skills. It provides the chance
for people of all abilities to enjoy creating artwork in a relaxed, informal atmosphere.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
77
Wolfson Sport: Blues and other
Outstanding Achievements
Lino Scelsi, Junior Member
Duane Rowe played on the top board for the Wolfson College Chess Team and led the
team to winning the 3rd division College league. He was undefeated throughout the
entire season. Duane also represented Cambridge University at the 125th Varsity Chess
Championship against Oxford University held at the Royal Automobile Club in London
on 10 March 2007. Cambridge won the match with a score of 5–3. Of the eight players
on the team, Duane was awarded the ‘Cambridge Best Game Prize’ at the event and
also earned a Half Blue for his participation.
Andreas Werner led the Wolfson Chess team as captain with all of his games won on
board 2 in the league. At University level he was a member of the chess blues team that
won the Varsity match against Oxford, and was awarded a Half Blue. He was also in the
Volleyball Blues team that won the league, and Captain of the second University
volleyball team (UCCM) with a personal record of twice ‘most valuable player’ of a
match in the league.
Sarah Street was Cambridge University’s (and Wolfson College’s) first ever and only
representative in a prestigious national Surfing competition, the BUSA Surfing
Championships, with over 400 surfers competing from universities across the UK. She
came second overall in the female competition out of 140 participants.
Clare Watkinson was Captain of Cambridge University Women’s Ice Hockey Club for
2006–2007. Besides her exceptional organizational commitments that included even
masterminding an annual training camp in Finland, Clare was a key player and the last
to surrender in the Varsity game that the Light Blues unfortunately lost to Oxford.
Simon Cachia played for the
Cambridge University Water
Polo team and was awarded a
Full Blue for the Varsity water
polo victory (11–8) over Oxford
on 3 February 2007. He also
played for the University team
throughout the whole year in
BUSA, the UK University Water
Polo League, and scored six
goals in one of the matches
against Oxford.
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Photo: Jessamyn Liu
Lisa Grimes played Football for the University Blues’ team, representing the
University every Sunday in the Premier Eastern Region Women’s League from midAugust 2006 to mid-May 2007. She earned a Full Blue by being in the starting eleven in
the Varsity match against Oxford on 24 February 2007.
Laura Spence ran for Wolfson College gaining second place in the Fresher’s Fun Run
in October 2006 and fifth place in the Cross-country cuppers in November 2006.
Running for Cambridge University, she was awarded a Half Blue at the Cross-country
Varsity Match on 2 December 2006 and earned a second place in the Bury 10-mile race
in February 2007.
Adeel Khan represented Cambridge University in the Annual Varsity Yacht race with
Oxford at the end of March 2007. He was a member of the first boat crew, acting as
trimmer of foresail and spinnaker. Cambridge finished behind Oxford’s first boat but
ahead of the second Oxford boat.
Alex Appelbe competed for Cambridge in the British Universities Snow Sports
Championships main event (BUSC) at Les Deux Alpes, France. Though this was his
first competition since a bad injury, Alex achieved second place overall in the Men’s
Halfpipe (an Olympic discipline) gaining Cambridge’s only podium position and
valuable BUSA points for the University. He also earned a Half Blue for participating in
the Cambridge University Polo Varsity team.
Lisa Grimes playing in the Varsity match 2007
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
79
Wolfson College Boat Club 2006–2007
Kenny Stoltz, Junior Member
The 2006–2007 academic year marked more impressive performances from the
members of WCBC. We were set on recruiting and training the College’s top talent and
in Michaelmas we were able to introduce over 50 new junior members to the sport of
rowing, as well as inviting back many past members in a Friends of Wolfson Boat Club
invitational boat in the Fairbairn’s Cup race at the end of Michaelmas term. Notable
results were that both of the two men’s crews went up in the Lent Bumps and the 2nd
Men’s VIII ascending five places in both Lent and May Bumps, earning their blades in
the Mays. The senior women faced very strong crews in both Bumps, and fell two
places in Lents and three in Mays. We also welcomed a beautiful new boat to the fleet,
a Lola Aylings XST pair/double to be christened the Custis Wright, thanks to generous
donations from the Friends of Wolfson Boat Club.
Novice Term
Michaelmas term is
affectionately called ‘Novice
Term’, because in it we take in
new rowers, mostly from new
junior members, and transform
them from uncoordinated, wetbehind-the-ears novices into
amazing specimens of physical
prowess. Or so we hope. In the
process we also introduce them
to the fun and excitement of
participating in the most
Training novices in tubs
popular sport in Cambridge.
As Wolfson traditionally takes in many one-year Master’s students, we tend to
experience a sharp decrease of senior rowing talent at the beginning of each year, but
this has the benefit of allowing all of the seniors to focus on giving something back to
the club and training up a new crop of Wolfsonians. This year was slightly different:
due to the amazing success of the previous years we had record numbers of senior
men, which meant record numbers of coaches. We recruited enough novices for three
novice men’s boats and one novice women’s boat.
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After teaching everyone the
basics of rowing, we thrust them
into the limelight at the Queens’
Ergs Competition, an indoor
relay race where each crew
member rows 500 m on the
ergometer (rowing machine).
The competition has the
ambiance of a dance hall with
screaming fans and thumping
house music. The results were
impressive: one novice, Luke
Knowles, was the 15th fastest
The Novice 1st VIII at the Queens’ Ergs Competition
man, with many other men in
our 1st novice men laying claim
to double digit positions out of a field of about 300. Unfortunately our 1st novice men fell
one place short of the finals, but were in 11th place overall. Our 2nd novice men were
placed 10th overall in the 2nd men’s races. The 1st women came in 35th in the first
division though with a respectable average.
The other key races for novices include the Emma Sprints, in which the 1st novice men
were eliminated due to what Wolfson supporters considered very unfair umpiring.
However they made up for it by dressing in an inspired theme combining a caveman cox
and golfing rowers. Three novice crews, two men’s and one women’s, were entered in the
Clare Novice Regatta, the 1st novice men made it to the quarter-finals before being
eliminated by a strong Fitzwilliam crew. The 1st women also made the quarter-finals but
were eliminated by CCAT, who went on to win the regatta.
The rite of passage of all novice rowers is, of
course, the Fairbairn’s Cup race, one of the longest
races held on the Cam at 2,700 m. After two months
of training we entered two novice men’s crews and
one novice women’s crew. The novice men finished
at 17th and 44th places in a field of 70, and the
women finished 45th in a field of 62. The
graduation of our rowers from novice status to
senior status was celebrated by all at a particularly
fantastic formal Boat Club dinner, organized by our
Social Secretary Nick Laugier which saw our newest
members coming together with some of our former
members who returned to row in the Fairbairn’s
Cup. At the dinner, Dawn Muddyman was
presented with the Novice Award in recognition of
Luke decides to throw himself in the river after
Mays
her enthusiastic participation in the sport.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
81
Seniors in Michaelmas Term
The Boat Club was lucky enough to have over a dozen men and four women continuing
on as seniors in the autumn. It turned out to be rather difficult to organize a great deal of
senior outings with most attention focused on the novices. The men decided to focus on
training an VIII for the Fairbairn’s Cup, while the women were able to enter a IV in the
Fairbairn’s as well as a few prior races.
For the men, it became clear in the weeks leading up to the race that more training
would have been a great benefit, because the crew only got synchronized in the final few
outings. The physical fitness was also lacking for the gruelling 4.3 km race, and the results
reflected this. The crew finished a respectable 22nd, but were capable of much better, and
were bested by the returning Friends of Wolfson College Boat Club boat, composed of
returning members from the past ten years. The Friends clearly demonstrated that rowing
doesn’t end upon graduation, finishing in 15th place and besting several other colleges’
first boats. The women fared somewhat better, coming in at 13th place in their IV.
1st Senior Men (Sally Williams)
Coach: Tom Davies
Cox: Rebecca Simmons
Bow: Christian Popp
2: Kenny Stoltz
3: Andy Troup
4: Christian Füllgrabe
5: Joseph Stevick
6: Francis Maguire
7: Nick Clemons
Stroke: Chris Cragg
Lent Term
Lent term is typically the coldest, most gruelling
time for training on the Cam, as previously novice
rowers are brought up into the senior boats, where
the standard is generally higher, more
concentration is required and the stakes are much
greater. As we headed into Lent term, we hoped
that our investments in the novice crews would pay
off, and indeed they did. Over half of both first
boats’ crews were new seniors. As such much time
was spent laying the ground work for good form
and crew timing, starting with erg sessions, leading
to erg tests, and finally out onto the river with the
best in our fleet.
The 1st men found the first few weeks shaky, as
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The 1st men preparing for a cold outing in Lent
term
the crew was being led by Chris Craggs,
the Boat Club Captain, until a football
injury forced him to drop out. The first
women spent the time getting basic
technique and integrating the newer
members in to the crew. The 2nd men,
who were largely experienced rowers,
went straight into training.
After a few weeks’ hard training in
The 1st Women pushing out for Lent Bumps
the cold, there was significant
improvement in both boats, particularly the Women’s 1st who were closing the experience
gap between the new recruits and the experienced seniors. The senior men were able to
recruit an experienced rower who rowed in Michaelmas, Will Ford, to fill the VIII again,
and were coming together slowly but surely as a crew. Of course with so many new
members in both boats, it was always somewhat of a gamble as to how we would perform
in the Bumps, so every crew member had to take it upon themselves to make as much
improvement as they could in the little time we had to prepare.
The first major race of the term is the Robinson Head and while both crews posted
respectable finishes, the race made clear that much progress was needed for the crews to
be in top form for racing day. However Wolfson have often had a habit of coming on late
in the season, so we kept our chins up and continued on with the cold early morning
training. The next big race is the Pembroke Regatta, a side-by-side race, but every crew
drew very difficult crews (1st Men drawing the eventual winners First and Third), and all
crews were eliminated in the first heat.
As the start of Bumps approached, I can certainly say that I wasn’t clear how my own
crew would perform let alone the other crews. I could say that our 1st Men had certainly
come a long way but there were moments in our initial outings where I doubted we
would be able to complete a race, let alone bump. Rowing often comes down to doing
your absolute best and putting your faith in your fellow crew members. I certainly placed
my faith in my crew, that we would be able to perform, and I suspect that the other crews
did the same.
Bumps is, of course, not an entirely fair way to race, but it is a lot of fun. The
prospect of hitting a boat head on gets the blood running in nearly every rower, even if
the crews are not evenly matched from year to year. For the 1st Women, this was the
unfortunate case. The crew had improved dramatically from the beginning of the term,
but below them in the order sat two very strong crews: Emmanuel II and Pembroke II,
both of which went on to win blades. So the women rowed over on two days and were
bumped by those crews on two days, for a total of down two places in the charts.
The 1st Men, however, were able to again inch closer to the first division, bumping
Girton the first day, rowing over, bumping a spoon-winning St Catharine’s, and finally
rowing over for a total of up two, and third in the second division. The two bumps
reinforced the crew’s trust in their own abilities and really boosted my confidence in
Wolfson being capable of going forward.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
83
Photo by Matthew Doughty
The 2nd Men’s Lent crew pushing off with greenery
1st Women rowing back to the boathouse from an outing
The greatest bumps success went to the 2nd Men, who went up five, bumping Selwyn
III and LMBC IV, and overbumping Sidney Sussex II on the final day. While some crews
on the Cam thought the boat might have been geriatric prior to the races, at the end of
the week they brought Wolfson M2 to within striking distance of the third division.
In the development of our club over the years, we have often wished that we could field
strong boats in the lower divisions, and while from time to time we have had enough to
field three men’s boats and sometimes even three women’s boats, the high college
turnover has made it difficult to maintain year-to-year gains. One of the marks of a top
class boat club are strong second and third boats that make viable training ground for
rowers moving up the ranks. I hope that this level of quality continues in the 2nd boat as
we bring new rowers in, and as they find their own level of commitment to the sport.
1st Men’s VIII (Sally Williams)
Coach: Tom Davies
Cox: Rebecca Simmons
Bow: Alex Appelbe
2: Will Ford
3: Ewan Delany
4: Francis Maguire
5: Quincy Goddard
6: Luke Knowles
7: Sosthené Grandjean
Stroke: Kenny Stoltz
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1st Women’s VIII (Tom, Dick and Barry)
Coach: Stephen Livermore
Cox: Gabriela Hernandez
Bow: Kat Millen
2: Alyson Horne-Douma
3: Sofie Willems
4: Dawn Muddyman
5: Jane Batchelor
6: Andrea Vincent
7: Katrina Mullan
Stroke : Maria Di Domenico
May Term Rowing
May Term proved to be much more difficult for both first boats, with many rowers
leaving to focus their energies on exams and dissertations. The time commitment does
ratchet up in May, when many members with impending deadlines and exams have to
choose between work and sport, and opt to focus on their academic pursuits. After a
rather difficult time raising both a 1st Men’s and 1st Women’s crew, the 1st Men ended up
being short a single rower, a problem that was not remedied until the very last week
before bumps when we were saved by the polo player in shining armour, Alex Appelbe.
The 1st Women ended up short a cox and transformed rower Kat Millen in to cox Kat
Millen. The men also started out short a cox but were able to bring up Patricia Verrier,
also a rower, from the 2nd Men’s boat.
The training schedule for the 1st Men was without a doubt one of the most difficult
training schedules I have ever experienced, not because of the number of water sessions
or the difficulty of the work, but because in every outing we had a different sub or subs in
the boat. Our seven rowers in an VIII was exacerbated by several crew members’
conferences which led to an average of 1.3 subs per outing! The subs were fantastic and
literally included almost every male rower in the club, past and present, but with an everchanging boat dynamic, none of the crew had the crucial experience of gelling together
as a single unit. This was reflected in most of our race results, which in fact included at
least two subs, and in some cases three! We had the disappointing experience of seeing
crews beat us in Mays that we had beaten in various races in Lents.
While we may have not synchronized in the boat, the 1st Men really demonstrated
crew spirit. Despite every difficulty, it seemed like every time we got to the boathouse,
the same level of trust that we had built in the Lent term remained.
The 1st Women’s outings were held up by the lack of a trained cox and they were
unable to get many outings before halfway through term. After this they had to work
around several conflicting
schedules to get crews out.
The crew was much the
same as the previous term
which helped in smoothing
things out.
The 2nd Men, coming
off an impressive Lent
Bumps performance held
much of the same crew,
and did very well in the
races coming up to the May
Bumps. With several wins
and a few nice mugs under
their belts, they looked
fairly well set for a good
The May 1st Men’s VIII
Bumps.
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85
But coming into Mays we were not quite sure how the two first boats would perform.
The men were in the rather precarious position of having to row twice a day, once at the
top of the second division and once at the bottom of the first. The 1st Men were able to
hold on to the position on the first day, but lost the chance at a bump after the boat they
were chasing, First and Third II, bumped Caius II and they were unable to catch the
overbump. On the following day, they were overpowered by a strong Fitzwilliam who had
been rowing strong all year. This unfortunate bump seemed to take a lot of the wind out
of the crew’s sails, and subsequently M1 were bumped by Selwyn and King’s, for a
disappointing overall result of down three.
The women had a similarly
difficult time; after a season
without a significant amount of
training the competition had a
leg up on them. On the first day
a very impressive Robinson
caught the women early in the
race. On Thursday they were
able to keep away from a Girton
II crew looking for an overbump
for a row-over. On Friday and
Saturday they were again
bumped by Caius II and Sidney
Sussex for a total result of down
The May 1st Women’s VIII
three as well.
Unaffected by lacklustre performances from the two first boats, the 2nd Men soldiered
on in the fourth division, readily beating the competition there, first with an impressive
Wednesday overbump of Pembroke III, followed by a row-over after a rather nasty bump
ahead of them caused traffic to stop on Thursday. Friday saw take out spoon-earning
LMBC IV in a scant few strokes, and Saturday they bumped First and Third IV for a final
result of up five.
The May 2nd Men’s boat overbump in Plough Reach
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Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
At the final Boat Club Dinner of the year, the exiting Captain Chris Craggs announced
the term’s awards: firstly that the second boat had been awarded blades for their stellar
performance in the bumps. The Wolfson Seat went to Luke Knowles while the coveted
Golden Erg for most land training effort went to Quincy Goddard. Just as goodbyes were
being said to all those parting members of the club, the club looked forward to the
coming year’s rowing by introducing the new committee, including myself, Kenny Stoltz,
as Boat Club Captain, Luke Knowles as Men’s Captain, Patricia Verrier as Women’s
Captain and Captain of Coxes, and Quincy Goddard as Novice Captain.
1st Men’s VIII (Sally Williams)
Coach: Tom Davies
Cox: Patricia Verrier
Bow: Joe Stevick
2: Kenny Stoltz
3: Rafi Rosen
4: Alex Appelbe
5: Quincy Goddard
6: Luke Knowles
7: Sosthené Grandjean
Stroke: Mike Hurley
1st Women’s VIII (Tom, Dick and Barry)
Coach: Stephen Livermore
Cox: Gabriela Hernandez
Bow: Tiffany Lunday
2: Alyson Horne-Douma
3: Sofie Willems
4: Dawn Muddyman
5: Jane Batchelor
6: Maria Di Domenico
7: Andrea Vincent
Stroke: Heather Harrison
The Boat Club at the May Dinner attempts to keep an even keel
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Summer Rowing
In early summer we were fortunate enough to welcome a new member of the Wolfson
fleet, a Lola Aylings XST Pair/Double, thanks to the generous donations from the Friends
of the Wolfson Boat Club. The boat arrived and was instantly greeted by ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’,
not just by Wolfson boaties either, because it sat in the Sidney Sussex bay until space
could be made for it, so everybody had plenty of time to appreciate the composite shell
and silver space man shoes. The boat is to be christened the Custis Wright officially at a
ceremony to follow in spring 2008.
We were also fortunate in having two of our returning senior rowers join the
development squad for the University Lightweights. Luke Knowles and Quincy Goddard
both rowed with the Lightweights during the summer and Quincy also trialled with the
Lightweights in the autumn. While both invested hours of training each day, the summer
floods cancelled the major races.
We all look forward to beginning the 2007–2008 year as we did the previous year,
welcoming in a new group of novices and teaching them the basics of the most famous
sport in Cambridge. We also look forward to another exciting series of bumps where we
expect all our hard work and training to pay off.
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Wolfson College Sports 2006–2007
Basketball
Geraldo Zahran
Almost there! This was the phrase to
define Wolfson College Basketball Team
in the 2006–2007 season. Led by captain
George Christopoulos, the Wolfson
Basketball Team ended in third place in
both competitions it disputed last season,
the College League and the Cuppers.
Playing at the first division of the
College League, our team had a great
season leading to a final match against
Downing College for the title. After a
dramatic end, with two free throws
missed after the clock stopped, Wolfson
lost to Downing for a one-point
difference. During the Cup, Wolfson team had no better luck, losing to Downing again on
the semifinals.
But nevertheless it was a great season, with a total of nine victories and only three
defeats. The season also marked the goodbye of some friends and outstanding players,
such as the former captain Henning Ringholz and Rainer Schmidt.
For the 2007–2008 season, the Wolfson Team is eager to return to its traditions of
victories. Wolfson was the College League champion for the 2003–2004 and 2004–2005
years, and after two years without winning the title a renewed team is focused and
determined to put its hands back on the cup.
Badminton
Sebastian Albert-Seifried
Last year was a year of restructuring for the Badminton Club; although the teams did not
achieve a great deal in the inter-university league, many improvements have been made
to the organization of the Club.
Thanks to former players, the Wolfson badminton teams have had a glorious history
since the establishment of the Club in 1998. Our men’s team was always placed at the top
of the League and the ladies’ team performed well in upper divisions. However, due to
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89
some unfortunate events in
Lent 2006, the former men’s
team opted out of the League,
and the Club experienced a
period of instability.
However, last year under the
leadership of ladies’ captain
Meiling Gao and men’s captain
Sebastian Albert-Seifried, the
Club recovered rapidly from the
previous disorder and
progressed satisfactorily. A new
men’s team was set up from
scratch. Despite the difficulties
they encountered at the start,
most players never having competed in badminton matches before, the team had a great
team spirit and grew speedily to perform well throughout the season. The ladies’ team
also had a hard time at the beginning as many former players had graduated and the
majority of new players were inexperienced. The team gave its best, though it was sadly
relegated to the Fourth Division at the end of last season.
The reorganization of the Club last year set forth new provisions on team training
and social involvement. A very important improvement in training was the
introduction of mixed men and ladies practice, which has proved to be beneficial for
both teams. In addition, thanks to the help from experienced players Yann George and
Sam Dewhurst, formal training sessions were organized regularly to aid players in
acquiring new techniques and revising existing skills. Another major advance was the
introduction of social badminton sessions as the Club aims to make badminton freely
accessible to all college members. A social badminton session was organized every
weekend and it attracted many students and even some fellows.
The 2007–2008 year will be a new adventure for the Club. After a year of
reorganization, the Wolfson Badminton spirit is back. In view of the successful
developments in formal training and social badminton last year, the Club will
continue to hold these
sessions. The Club now has
players with a great sense of
team spirit and benefits from
the enthusiasm of the new
president and men’s captain
Sebastian Albert-Seifried and
the ladies’ captain Ana-Maria
Blanaru. The teams look
forward with confidence to the
next season of matches.
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Men’s Cricket
David Gunn, Junior Member
The 2007 Wolfson cricket season
was a remarkable affair, full of
excitement, drama, tension,
anxiety and occasionally some
decent cricket as well. Having lost
a few stalwarts such as Patrick
Cullen and Alistair Robertson
earlier in the year, the team was
looking simply to re-build under
the watchful gaze of our new club
captain, Danny Dawson. This was
a slow process, but over the long
winter training nets we gradually
built up the numbers. Our first
challenge as a new team was to
(l to r) David Gunn, Ian Bond (British Ambassador), Danny Dawson
face the unknown trial of the
Latvian National squad as part
of our tour to the Baltic region at the beginning of December. Unfortunately, and even
with the support of the then British Ambassador, Ian Bond, we were unable to clinch a
first victory of the season. However, a good time was had by all who went, and it
served to heighten the appetite of the new members for the fast approaching match
period.
The season proper was underway by late April, with the first of our Cuppers games
against Churchill. This was an extremely tight match, with Wolfson winning by a mere
three runs. Our success was aided by such fine performances from Steve Mann (bowled
4–12 off 4 overs) and Luke Barnes (bowled 2–20 off 4 overs). After this first win our
Cuppers performance continued with a disappointing loss against Trinity Hall and an
amazing win against King’s. In this last match Luke Barnes scored an unprecedented 156
runs, not out! He was aided in this monumental performance by Dom Summers who
added 59 runs to the total, before being run out on the second-last ball of the game.
Further wins against Girton and St. Catherine’s advanced us through to the Cuppers
semi-final against John’s. A very tense match that finished with both sides scoring 109
runs! The rules called for a bowl-off to decide a winner; Wolfson had the steadier nerves,
and our place in the final was confirmed. This was to be against Trinity at Trinity Old
Fields. Unfortunately on the day, Wolfson were not firing on all cylinders and we lost by
five wickets.
Our MCR league matches were also off to a fine start, with comfortable wins over a
joint St Edmund’s/Girton team and Trinity. Even a loss against Corpus was not enough to
stop us advancing to the semi-finals and a match against Hughes Hall was scheduled.
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Wolfson cricket team agreeing on tactics
Wolfson cricket team fielding
Danny Dawson bowling
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Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Certain miscommunications
amongst their side, however,
meant that most of their team
did not arrive until half an hour
after the agreed starting time,
and so Wolfson were awarded a
‘win’ given their absence. This
launched us into a final against
our old foes, Caius. A very tense
match, held in Churchill’s
grounds, was enough of a pull to
drag one of our players away
from his work in the States to
play for our side! This supreme
show of dedication to Wolfson
cricket was sadly not enough,
and we lost to Caius by nine
runs.
Two finals reached in one
season is unparalleled in
Wolfson cricket history.
Traditionally, we do not get past
the first two rounds in the
Cuppers league so last season’s
performance was truly
spectacular. Certainly a fine
starting point for an even greater
feat next year!
Women’s Cricket
Bryony Reich, Junior Member
As I passed the men’s cricket stall at Wolfson Freshers’ Fair last year, I decided to ask the
question: “Can girls play?” “Actually” they replied, “Wolfson used to have a women’s
team” – an unbeaten one at that. And that was the birth of Wolfson Women’s Cricket
2006–2007.
Back to my original question: can girls play cricket? All but one of our team had never
played a serious game of cricket; the same ratio didn’t know their silly points from their
googlies or their long legs. Despite such humble beginnings, this year has seen the
development of some excellent bowlers and batswomen, a superb performance in a
University tournament at the University of East Anglia, and even a thirty-over match
against Cambridge County Women’s Club.
Throughout the winter we practised religiously for two hours in nets every Tuesday
evening. Thanks to our bowling coach, Danny Dawson, our bowling progressed from not
quite managing a distance of ten yards combined with some very inaccurate balls
(sometimes backwards) to virtual mastery of line and length. Batting was coached by
Dominic Summers and culminated in numerous fours in our summer games – we’re still
working on the elusive six.
By the time summer came we were very much looking forward to an actual match.
Our first match, against Churchill, saw the rare result of a draw between the two teams.
Or was it a tie? Essentially, we both ran up an equal score, as opposed to running out of
time – we’re still working on our cricket terminology. Grace built up our score with
numerous fours, while the bowling from all members of the team was excellent.
The tournament at the University of East Anglia comprised our team, UEA, and Essex.
Games were six aside with five overs each and we played each team twice. We didn’t win
the tournament, but there was a real improvement in everyone’s cricket over the course
of the day. Everyone had a lot of fun and gained some good experience by playing some
excellent cricketers.
Our match against Cambridge County was played on their home pitch on Parkers’
Piece and so we gave a very public display of our talents. This thirty-over match was our
longest and most challenging game of the season – when they asked us for a game they
forgot to mention they had two ex-England players on their team! Clearly the score did
not go in our favour. However, Katherine and Laura stayed at the wicket and scored a
good number of runs, despite the intense balls they were facing, and we lasted all thirty
overs. Our team also took a good number of wickets.
The University of Cambridge Women’s team were short of two players for a match
against Loughborough and asked if we could build up their numbers. Katherine and
Heather volunteered and joined the Cambridge team for a day to play Loughborough –
a University renowned for its sporting prowess, which lived up to its reputation, with a
team consisting of three members of the current England squad. They returned with
some very blue fingers to counter any doubts over whether they had given it their all.
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There are two difficulties with being a women’s cricket team: the first being a lack of
opponents and the second a lack of team-mates. However, those who joined Wolfson
Women have not only been committed to training and games, but the end of the
academic year saw a commitment to increasing our team in 2007–2008 and encouraging
other colleges to set up women’s cricket teams. We look forward to another year of
proving that girls really can throw.
Some of our team at the University of East Anglia tournament
(from left to right: Amy Chesterton, Heather Goodwin, Bernadette Barnes,
Katherine Thomas, Laura Francis)
Wolfson Women’s Cricket Team 2006–2007
Bryony Reich
Katherine Thomas
Heather Goodwin
Laura Francis
Marie Johnson
Bernadette Barnes
Emily Williamson
Amy Chesterton
Grace Thommandru
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June Event: Treasure Island
Richard Brown, Junior Member
Ahoy there landlubbers, grab ye a seat, some rum and let me tell ye a tale of treasure,
ships and pirates. In the year of our Lord 2007, intrepid sailors set out from the Port of
Wolfson College for Treasure Island. Provisions allowed for a sumptuous feast to be
served to the crew during the voyage, most eating in the main dining room. Others kept
lookout for land, eating their feast up the crow’s nest in the combination room.
As soon as the crew’s bellies were full and the grog had been drunk, a ship was sighted
in the distance. It was the ship ‘Thriller’, that of the most bloodthirsty pirate to sail the
seven seas, Michael Jackson. He soon drew up alongside and boarded the ship, but to the
surprise of the terrified crew, Michael had come to join them. Michael set about relaxing
and entertaining the crew with a number of songs he had written during his long
months at sea. The crew was enjoying Michael’s sea shanties so much, that it came as a
complete shock to hear the cry from the crow’s nest, ‘land ho’. With only thoughts of
adventures and gold, the crew immediately set off to explore Treasure Island. Some dived
to Davy Jones’s locker in the club room to look for pearls and cheesy music, while others
headed inland to the seminar room jungle to enjoy a number of unusual cocktails drunk
by the natives.
The Committee photo at
6am in the morning:
Back Row (left to right):
Abhi Veerakumarsaviam,
Virginia Newcombe,
Rene Keller,
Nathan Thomas,
Karan Gokani,
Richard Brown,
Christian Popp;
Front Row (left to right):
Rob Williams,
Emma Wiggins,
Dawn Muddyman
(President), Kat Millen,
Kenny Stoltz (Vice-President).
Not in the picture are
Alois Maderspacher and
Alex James-Painter
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Survivors June Event 2007
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Those who just wanted to relax after the long voyage lay out on the beach in the
Lee Room. Around the island, natives provided exotic forms of entertainment
unknown in the old world; dodgems, a bouncy castle, a big wheel and a bucking
bronco. Some say that the fountain of youth itself was found, though others say that it
was something much better, a fountain of chocolate. After many happy hours, the crew
had amassed enough gold at the smugglers’ den casino that they decided it was time
to head for home. They boarded the ship, where the galley managed to rustle up
survivors’ breakfast for the return voyage. Almost unnoticed due to the eating of food
and the weariness of the crew, the ship sailed back into Wolfson College Port. The
happy crew departed the ship and headed home to rest and spend their well earned
loot, their voyage remembered forevermore in tales told by old sea salts such as myself.
And now, me hearties, I must set sail for ports and adventures unknown, in the hope of
rivaling the rewards of those in my tale. I wish ye all fair wind, calm seas and rich
plunder.
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The Wolfson Gardens: Garden Design Trends
since Foundation
Philip Stigwood, Head Gardener
Many areas within the College gardens have existed for over 100 years, when individual
gardens belonging to large Barton Road properties were created. Many of the mature
trees in the College grounds were of course planted before the College was formed in
1965. Indeed, ever since Capability Brown used large cedars, wellingtonias and holme
oaks in the 18th century, in landscape design for large estates, it has been ‘desirable’ to
have one or more of these ‘exotic’ large trees in one’s own garden. It was in many ways
the ‘status symbol’ of the time. Wolfson College has large examples of all three of these
‘non-native’ trees, probably planted around the turn of the 19th century, along with
mature weeping limes, yew, ash and maple.
In the 1960s large manicured lawns were the order of the day, with occasional rose
beds and woody herbaceous borders containing perennials such as Chrysanthemum,
Dahlia, Phlox and Polygonatum. Herbaceous borders have their origins in the formal
French and Dutch gardens of the 17th century, but it was not until the early 20th century
that they became popular in English gardens.
Garden centres, as we know them today, were not in existence in the 1960s. Instead,
small specialist nurseries sold roses, trees as bare root specimen, perennials and very little
else. Few were container-grown, so had to be planted in autumn or winter when they
were lifted, ‘bare root’. It is thus easy to understand why most gardens were rather
monotonous and lacking
diversity. This lack of
diversity created disease and
pest problems. Black spot
became a big problem on
roses, spreading readily
from plant to plant within
the ‘rose bed’. Plant breeding
over the last 50 years has
since introduced genetic
resistance into many repeat
flowering and desirable
roses.
Increased diversity
occurred in the 1970s and
All photos by Philip Stigwood
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1980s, due to the desire for
new, innovative planting
schemes and also to a
greater range of pot plants
being readily available in
nurseries and emerging
garden centres. Shrubs, both
evergreen and flowering,
were being more widely
planted and (dwarf)
conifers and heathers
became very sought after.
This new ‘trend’ was largely
initiated by Blooms of
Bressingham. Wolfson
College assigned Blooms to create a conifer and heather border in the late 1970s
(adjacent to the car park in the Old Library/Sundial lawn). Blooms laid peat blocks to
create an acidic planting medium that most heathers prefer. The conifers used were not
the unruly Leylandii thugs, but newly introduced dwarf thujas, blue spruces and
prostrate junipers. Some shrubs such as euonymus were also planted within the border.
The ‘dwarf’ conifers still exist in the Sundial border in a range of colours from blue to gold
green and silver. Most of the heathers have died of either old age or lack of correct
pruning.
The trend for conifers and heathers lost favour in the 1980s, having been ‘over-used’
and planted en masse in many small gardens. The period from the 1990s to the present
day has seen a diversity of planting becoming very important.
One of my first objectives when I became head gardener here was to start to introduce
much more variety and a range of perennials, shrubs and ornamental grasses. This use of
ornamental grasses, perennials, shrubs and conifers has become very popular in the 21st
century – planting them in borders along with bulbs and annuals to create ‘naturalistic’
planting schemes. Such planting or border design not only looks good throughout the
year but also encourages wildlife and natural predators, such as ladybirds, to thrive in
the garden.
‘Prairie’ style (naturalistic) planting is very popular with leading landscape and garden
designers. Piet Oudolf is the best known of these designers and has been commissioned
to design gardens and large city parks in the USA, Europe and UK (RHS Wisley). Here at
Wolfson I am very keen to diversify the planting schemes, not only to look more
naturalistic and interesting, but also to encourage more wildlife and natural predators, so
reducing the need for pesticides.
The ‘Sundial border’ and ‘Long border’ (adjacent to the car park path) have had many
of the dead and diseased plants removed, replacing them with perennials such as
rudbeckia, aster, echinacea (daisy family) and ornamental grasses such as miscanthus,
hakonechloa, calamagrostis, pennisetum, etc.
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Flowering shrubs have
also been planted, along
with roses, to create a lovely
range of colour, interest
and ‘movement’
throughout the whole year.
The overall aim is to have
colour and interest in
winter and summer. The
grasses look fantastic
covered in hoar frost or
swaying in the breeze. The
evergreen and flowering
shrubs add colour and
scent to the border. Many
viburnums flower in winter and have a particularly strong scent to attract the few
pollinators brave enough to work in winter.
Wolfson now has a ‘winter’ garden behind the Lee Hall, which I designed and
planted over the last few years. My objective here was to create a garden room full of
colour, scent and structure, to stimulate the senses during the cold winter months,
when low light levels and short days dominate. Winter-flowering bulbs, shrubs and
perennials lift the gloom, along with the coloured stems of cornus, bamboo, rubus and
salix (red, orange, yellow
and white stems). Small
trees with lovely bark (coral
red and shrimp pink snake
skin acers, polished
mahogany-coloured prunus,
and paper bark maples) are
also in the winter garden,
the bark shown off to full
effect when the tree is
without leaves. Dividing
large gardens up into
‘garden rooms’ is now very
popular, creating intrigue
and diversity.
Finally, at the other end of the garden design spectrum lies Wolfson’s ‘Chinese’
garden: the Betty Wu Lee Garden. The minimalist design is calming and serene, using
hard landscaping and simplistic planting to achieve this effect. Colour is not the main
ingredient here.
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Remembering the Early Days of the College
Bill Kirkman, Emeritus Fellow
When University College came into existence in 1965 it was small, and everyone knew
everyone. Even in the early 1970s it was possible for most members of the College to
know each other, and to know how the College was developing. As the College grew, that
direct involvement inevitably diminished.
With that in mind, in 2003 the Society of Emeritus Fellows proposed the creation of an
oral archive of the memories, anecdotes and personal reminiscences of early members
of the College, to complement the official records.
As the proposer of the idea, I was pleased that it was greeted with enthusiasm. I
should not have been surprised that there was equal enthusiasm for the idea that I
would get it going, and carry out the interviews.
In fact, it is an agreeable task. People have been happy to take part, recalling (with real
pleasure) their memories of Wolfson (and University College). Some of the recordings
have been conversations with several people. Most have been interviews. Both formats
work well; the choice is made on the purely practical issue of getting people together at
the same time.
So far conversations have been recorded with Professor Mary Hesse and Dr Bridget
Allchin; Dr Norma Emerton, Dr Janet West and Dr Don Wilson; Professor Sue Howson
and Dr Anna Snowdon. One-to-one interviews have been recorded with Professor Ernest
Nicholson; Dr Madeleine Devey; Miss Ruth Webb; Mr Mike Sharman; Mr Graham
Pollard; Sally Oliver (Lady Oliver); Mr Mike Farbrother (and a short conversation with the
two of them – who arrived as students on the same day). I have interviewed Professor
Hugh Bevan. (He was not at Wolfson in the early days, but brings a special perspective
because of his long years at Hull, and his continuing involvement in supervising
students.) Also in the archive is a conversation between Mr Jack King, Bursar at the time
of major development, and Mr Michael Mennim, the College architect, with Dr John
Seagrave as the moderator on this occasion. That was recorded not long before the sad
deaths of Jack King and Michael Mennim. To complete the list so far, I have interviewed
myself! There are, of course, more recordings to be made. The problem is time.
The interviews have been copied on DVDs, two copies of each of which are deposited
in the College Library.
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Jack King’s Chronicle of Wolfson College
Gordon Johnson, President
One of the tasks Jack King set himself in retirement
was to write a short history of the College he had
done so much to create. As Secretary of the original
Trustees, and then Bursar for the crucial years until
1979, he was well-placed to do so. Indeed, most of the
early official archive of the College was written by
him, and, after he stepped down from the Bursarship,
he continued to produce and edit the College
Magazine and remained influential in determining
the main thrust of the College’s development.
He turned with new vigour to the task of writing
his Chronicle after overseeing the College’s Fortieth
Anniversary Celebrations in 2005. The work was
substantially complete before he became ill in late
2006 and bears all the hallmarks of his clear thinking
and lucid prose. The early chapters are of especial value to the historian, since they
combine to a fine degree personal reminiscence tempered by the written record. The
later chapters continue by giving formal shape to the more public perception of the
College as he liked to see it: increasing recognition of its achievements and the
involvement of its members in University affairs more generally.
We were delighted, therefore, that the book was printed in time for him to see the
fruits of his labours, and, on
30 January, we launched it at
a luncheon party in the
Combination Room. His
family turned out in force for
the event, and other old
friends, including Professor
Owen Chadwick (Chairman
of the Trustees), Professor
Mary Hesse (an early Fellow),
and representatives of the
Wolfson Course, lent their
support. He signed copies for
those present.
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Book Review
Rex Walford: The Growth of ‘New London’ in Suburban Middlesex (1918–1945) and the
Response of the Church of England. The Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, Queenston,
Lampeter, xiii +461 pp, ISBN-13: 978-07734-5352-4; ISBN-10: 0-7734-5352-0, 2007, hardback
Reviewed by Bill Kirkman, Emeritus Fellow
Rex Walford, Emeritus Fellow, had a distinguished career as a geographer in the
Department of Education at Cambridge. He is a former President of the Geographical
Association and a former Vice-President of the Royal Geographical Society. In 2005 his
book Geography in British Schools, 1850–2000 was published. It is a scholarly work, which
is eminently readable by non-specialists and non-geographers.
In a completely different field, Rex has great experience, and distinction, as a director
of plays. After retiring from his University job, he carried out research, in yet another
different field – of social and ecclesiastical history – for a PhD. This volume is based on
that research, expanded and widened.
Once again, it is eminently readable, and indeed makes fascinating reading for anyone
interested in the huge changes which took place in British society in the period between
the two world wars. (Let me make a slightly flippant point: anyone who can include in a
serious academic work a relevant reference to the William Brown stories deserves to be
widely read. Both Geography in British Schools and the present work meet that criterion.)
In the early chapters of this book, the author sets the Church of England developments
which are detailed in later chapters in their historical and social context, and in doing so
provides an interesting indication of how many false assumptions were current. They
include the journalist René Cutforth’s inclusion, in his list of a hundred people thought
‘quintessential’ to the 1930s, of Shirley Temple but not William Temple “probably the
leading cleric and theologian of the Church of England at the time” (p 1). They include
also the passing reference to figures in the Church of England in A J P Taylor’s English
History 1914–1945: “Harold Davidson (Rector of Stiffkey) . . . attracted more attention while
he lived than, say, Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury. Which man deserves a greater
place in the history books?” (p 2) and his dismissive comment that religious faith was
losing its strength and church-going universally declined. This, and similar examples
from other scholars, serves as a good reminder that even the academically distinguished
can be blinkered rather than rigorous in their approach to evidence.
In reality, as the author found in the last years of the twentieth century when doing
some geographical field work in the Middlesex suburbs which had grown dramatically as
the population of London had expanded and moved outwards, there was a plethora of
modern and apparently active Anglican churches. As he had grown up living in the area
himself, his interest was fanned; hence this research and this book. It makes fascinating
reading. Rex Walford explores the political, economic, cultural and social issues in Britain
from 1870 to the beginning of the First World War, and then the expansion of the
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
103
Middlesex suburbs after 1918 until the beginning of the Second World War. He reminds us
that the concept of the mortgage was new, and opened the possibility of home
ownership to thousands for whom it had previously seemed an unattainable dream.
He discusses at length and in revealing detail the response of the Church of England,
and specifically the Diocese of London, to the challenge presented by this expansion, the
challenge of providing a response relevant to the new-style communities which did not
fit easily into the traditional parish structure, providing for all residents the ‘care of souls’.
The author describes the imaginative and visionary ‘Forty-Five Churches Fund’, set up
by the Diocese to raise money to send Missioners to the newly growing areas, as a
prelude to building new churches, and he provides detailed profiles of a number of these
new parishes, some of which were successful, some less so. He also gives interesting
insights into the attitudes, and the strengths and weaknesses, of many of the
personalities involved, including Bishop Winnington-Ingram, Bishop of London for an
extraordinary period of 38 years (1901–1939).
Recognition of the challenge facing the church was not always matched by
appropriate response. As Rex Walford puts it: “Bishop Winnington-Ingram alluded to the
problem (of ‘unchurched suburbs’) with increasing frequency in his speeches and
sermons. But (as Chapter 4 has shown) the rhetoric seemed, at first, largely a substitute
for action, rather than an adjunct to it.” (p 233). That said, the overall response was
remarkably successful and “the Middlesex inter-war churches quickly gained not only
admiration but affection from those who worshipped in them and who contributed to
their genesis … As places of practical liturgy and of mission, they worked.” (p 313)
In describing the church’s mission and strategy, Rex ranges very widely. For example,
he considers geographical issues (not surprisingly), such as the position of new
churches, design questions, including the need for new church buildings to reflect new
approaches to worship and liturgy, and the financial pressures on the Diocese, during
the period of economic recession.
Throughout the book Rex Walford places much emphasis on the testimony of
individuals, gleaned in interviews which he carried out. He also uses the evidence of
figures of attendance from the churches in his sample. The story which he reveals in this
wide-ranging and extremely perceptive study is of course not one of unqualified growth
and success. It is, however, a story of far greater growth in the Diocese of London, as
‘suburban Middlesex’ grew, than in the rest of the Church of England: 49 new parishes
between 1923 and 1944, compared with an average of fewer than 20 per diocese. It is a
story showing that “in a supposed period of general decline, church life showed growth
(by many measures) in the Middlesex suburbs in the inter-war years”. (p 384)
In his final chapter the author analyses the reasons for the success of the C of E’s
engagement with suburban issues in Middlesex in the 1930s, and also the reasons why
that success has been largely overlooked by both social and ecclesiastical historians. He
also makes the point that the work of the Church of England in that inter-war period in
Middlesex shows that ‘the church need not necessarily and automatically be on the
defensive in a modern (or post-modern) urban/suburban situation’. (p 389).
It is a truly gripping book.
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Recent University Appointments 2006–2007
Except for the Wolfson affiliation, these Appointments and Grants of Title 2006–2007 are
reproduced below as they originally appeared in The Reporter.
Appointments
University Senior Lecturer in the Judge Business School. Dr Peter Fleming, appointed from
1 October 2007 until the retiring age.
University Lecturer in Continuing Education. Dr Nigel Charles Kettley, MPhil, PhD, BA,
Essex, appointed from 1 July 2007 until the retiring age.
Grants of Title
Clinical Medicine. Dr David Mark Baguley has been granted the title of Affiliated Lecturer
from 1 November 2006 for two years.
Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages. Dr Kate Victoria M. Daniels has been
granted the title of Affiliated Lecturer from 1 October 2006 for one year.
Archaeology and Anthropology. Dr Robert E. Dewar Jr has been granted the title of
Affiliated Lecturer from 1 October 2006 for two years.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
105
John and Elizabeth Morrison Memorial
On 13 January 2007 the
ashes of John Morrison
(the first President) and of
his wife Elizabeth were
interred in the flower bed
below Bredon House. The
granite stone depicts the
trireme, which John
Morrison had
reconstructed from literary
and archaeological
evidence. A clue as to how
the oars were arranged is
shown to the left of the
mainsail.
Professor Owen Chadwick (Chairman of the Trustees of
University College) speaking at the dedication of the
memorial stone to the Morrisons
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The Revd Canon Maggie Guite and Andrew Morrison
Members’ News
The Editor has received news of members of the College as follows:
1966
Dr Henry Harvey retired in 2005 as Head of Nature Conservation with the National Trust
and is Secretary of the Europe-wide nature conservation organisation EUROSITE. He
continues to give guest lectures for the Universities of Sussex and Bristol.
Roger Mansfield stood down as Director of Cardiff Business School in 2005 after 28 years,
and continues to work at Cardiff University as the Sir Julian Hodge Professor of
Management and as Dean and acting Head of the School of Healthcare Studies. He
received the BA Businessman of the Year Award (2005).
Joyce Whittington is a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Psychiatry,
University of Cambridge.
1967
Professor Fu-san Huang has recently published ‘Female Workers and the Industrialisation
in Post-war Taiwan’, ‘Shi Shi-bang and his family, The Pioneer of the Large-Scale Irrigation
System in Taiwan’s Agricultural Development in the Qing Dynasty’ and ‘The Oral History
of the Privatisation of a Government Enterprise, Chunghua Telecom’.
1968
Professor George Ellis is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, University of Cape Town. He
was admitted to the Royal Society as a Fellow in 2007.
Professor Barbara Harriss-White is national chair of Development Studies for the RAE in
2007–08 and is also creating a new MSc in Contemporary India for the School of Area
Studies, on which she will teach afterwards. Recent books include: ‘Trade Liberalisation
and India’s Informal Economy’, ‘Defining Poverty in Developing Countries’ and ‘Rural
Commercial Capital: Agricultural Markets in West Bengal’.
Professor Elaine Perry has set up a new venture in Northumberland, Dilston Physic
Garden, with the aim of educating people about medicinal plants and healing herbs.
1969
Dr Rodney Curtis is a Consultant in Veterinary Pharmaceutical Product Development. He
is President of the Old Cantabrigian Society (the alumni of Hills Road Sixth Form College,
Cambridge).
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
107
Professor Fernando de Felice co-authored ‘Relativity on curved manifolds’ published by
CUP in the series Cambridge Monographs on Mathematical Physics, and is now working
on ‘Measurements in curved space times’ for the same series.
1970
Professor Gordon Klein participated in an expert panel at the International Conference
on Children’s Bone Health in Montreal in 2007, under the auspices of the International
Society for Clinical Densitometry. He was also the chief editor of the proceedings of a
National Institute of Health-American Society for Bone and Mineral Research workshop
on the pharmacology of paediatric bone held in 2005.
1971
Dr Robert Lamb was President of the American Society for Virology, a Member of the
National Academy of Sciences, USA, and has been appointed a Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Lilleith Morrison is currently studying creative writing at Bristol University having left her
post as Team Leader for Access to Higher Education at Filton College.
Alan Sainer retired in 2005 from the Inland Revenue, where he worked as an in-house
lawyer for some 26 years.
Dr Ken Yeang is one of the Managing Directors of the UK architect and planning firm,
Llewellyn Davies Yeang. Publications include ‘Ecodesign: A Manual for Ecological Design’
and ‘Eco Skycrapers’, which contains work on designing ecological tall buildings
(see page 29).
Pamela Lister and her son presenting a
garden seat in memory of her husband
Dr Raymond Lister LittD, Fellow of the
College 1971–2001
1972
Dr Robert Grudin’s book ‘American Vulgar’ was published in 2006.
Professor Stephen Hodkinson is Professor of Ancient History at Nottingham and is
currently Director of an AHRC project on ‘Sparta in Comparative Perspective, Ancient to
Modern’ and Co-Director of the University’s Institute for the Study of Slavery. In 2006 he
gave the Fordyce Mitchel Memorial Lectures at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
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Dr Ute Lischka teaches European Cinema, Aboriginal Literature and Film, German, and
Women’s Studies at the Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada.
Professor John Toye’s book (written jointly with Richard Toye, his son) on ‘The UN and
Global Political Economy’, was published by Indiana University Press in 2004. He is
editor of the journal Oxford Development Studies.
1973
Dr Helga Hoffmann has retired from the UN, and is now a member of GACINT/USP, a
group of analysts of current international affairs at the University of São Paulo.
Dr David Rose recently published a book entitled ‘Consciousness: Philosophical,
Psychological and Neural Theories’.
1974
Dr Grayson Ditchfield is Professor of Eighteenth-Century History, University of Kent.
Recent publications include ‘George III: An Essay in Monarchy’ and Volume I of ‘Letters
of Theophilus Lindsey, 1747–1788’.
Ravi Gupta has worked with the State Government of Madhya Pradesh as well as the
Government of India in various assignments and retired from service in 1998 after having
served as Deputy Governor in the Reserve Bank of India for three years.
Professor Rolly Phillips is currently teaching Latin and Greek at the Ethical Culture
Fieldston School in New York.
1975
Professor Rüdiger Ahrens OBE was awarded the Max Geilinger Prize (Zurich) in 2006 as
the co-editor of the bilingual English-German Study Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays,
which has reached 25 volumes so far.
Dr Promode Bandyopadhyay received the Biennial Freeman Scholar Award of the
American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2006), and the award for Excellence in Basic
and Applied Research of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Newport, Rhode Island,
USA (2007).
Sir Lawrence Collins LLD has been appointed a Lord Justice of Appeal.
Professor Richard Heyman’s most recent book is ‘But I Didn’t Mean That!’ following
previous books ‘How to Say It to Teens’ and ‘How to Say It to Boys’. His next book is
‘Complex Conversations with Children’.
Dr Atheer Kassab was head of the Public Health Department in the College of Veterinary
Medicine, University of Baghdad, before transferring to the College of Agriculture,
University of Salahalddin, Erbil, Kurdistan.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
109
Revd Professor George Newlands will retire from Glasgow University at the end of
2007–08. He chairs the RAE Panel 61 on Theology, Divinity and Religious Studies.
1976
Professor Clive Holes is Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World,
University of Oxford, and was elected to the Council of the British Academy in 2006.
Professor Joe Malikail is retired and is a member of the board of the International Society
for the Study of Human Ideas on Ultimate Reality and Meaning.
Dr Sachithanandam Sathananthan has recently had the film he made with his wife Sabiha
Sumar, ‘Dinner with the President’, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival
(see page 39).
Dr Ewan Walford is Professor of Art History at Wheaton College, Illinois, USA. He is
currently researching the role of satire in 16th-century Netherlandish art, as well as
exploring photography as an alternative means to reflect on the discipline of art history,
and its relevance to current artistic practice.
Dr Joe Weatherby is editor of ‘The Other World’, a third-world text book. He teaches
courses in geography and political science at Howard Payne University in Texas.
1977
Rosamina Lowi attained a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of California at
Los Angeles in 2007. She is currently teaching Academic Writing for Speakers of other
Languages at Santa Monica College and El Camino College in the Los Angeles area. She
is also the new Book Review Editor for CATESOL, the journal for California Teachers of
English to Speakers of Other Languages.
1978
Dr Mac Braid was appointed Director of Operations at CANMET Materials Technology
Laboratory. He has been Awarded the Canadian Standards Association 2007 Award of
Merit.
Dr Erik Christiansen celebrated his 40th anniversary at the History Department at the
University of Aarhus in 2007.
Professor Thomas McGinn is the Andrew W Mellon Professor-in-Charge of the School of
Classical Studies of the American Academy in Rome.
Pakorn Priyakorn has been appointed a member of the Constitution Drafting Assembly
of the Thai Parliament and also as Dean of Graduate School of Public Administration,
National Institute of Development Administration, Thailand.
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Dr Sonia Rivero Torres is a full time researcher in archaeology at the National Institute of
Anthropology and History in Mexico and has been working on the Mayan site at
Lagartero, Chiapas since 1990. The site will be formally opened to the public in 2010 to
celebrate 100 years of the Mexican Revolution.
Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science
from the University of Lincoln.
1979
Professor Gehan Amaratunga FREng was presented with the Royal Academy of
Engineering’s Silver Medal recognising his outstanding personal contribution to British
engineering, in particular his pioneering development of special silicon chips with builtin high voltage power-switching devices.
Mr Robert Amundsen has written an English version of the history of one of Norway’s
oldest shipping companies, O.T. Tonnevold.
Anne Bar Din has worked as an investigator and lecturer at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico since 1985, and is now writing her eighth book.
Councillor Robert Davis is Deputy Lieutenant for Greater London and Chairman of the
London Mayors’ Association. He is a solicitor in private practice in London and also
currently Chief Whip and Cabinet Member for Planning on Westminster City Council.
Professor Jacques-Michel Grossen has relinquished the presidency of the BIS
Administrative Tribunal. In 2007 he was invited by the Scottish Executive to join a
conference of appeal judges from England, France, Ireland and Scotland.
Otto Lampe has worked in five different countries and now lives in Berlin.
Dr William Pickering was made Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 2007 by
a decree of the French Government for his contribution to French sociological thought.
Dr Pickering is a Research Associate of Oxford’s Institute of Social and Cultural
Anthropology, and is head of the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies.
Johari bin Shafie retired from the Malaysian Civil Service in June 2006, having held the
posts of Secretary, Foreign Investment Committee, Economic Planning Unit and Prime
Minister’s Department, Putrajaya.
Janet Ulph is Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Durham, and has written a book
‘Commercial Fraud – Civil Liability, Human Rights and Money Laundering’. She was a
Visiting Scholar at the University of Florida in 2007.
1980
Dr Roger Bancroft runs a consultancy, Post-Harvest Assistance, in the fresh produce
sector, having previously worked at the Natural Resources Institute.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
111
Tomo Comer is the author of ‘Opportunities for Mathematics in the Primary School’ and
is Chief Editor of the inspection wing of Nord Anglia PLC. He retires at the end of 2007.
Geoffrey Crompton retired in 2004 and has written two books of dedication to the men
from a small village in Cheshire who died in WW1 and WW2.
Dr Andrew Herbert has been elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Professor Christopher Macann has published ‘Being and Becoming’, an original
phenomenological philosophy which seeks to do justice to transcendental philosophy
and to come to terms with analytic philosophy. This four- volume work is the
culmination of a life’s work devoted to ontological phenomenology.
John Shirbon is an advisor on strategic internal investment, specialising in China and
business development both within China and the UK.
Neil Southwell lectures in education studies at the University of Northampton, where he
has written a new module ‘Discovery Through Education Research’.
Professor Sir David Williams QC DL, former President of Wolfson College and ViceChancellor of the University of Cambridge, has received a number of honours in the last
year: he was inaugurated as the first Chancellor of the University of Swansea, made a
Patron of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, made an Honorary
Professor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and was a Visiting Professor in the
School of Law at the University of Hong Kong.
1981
Elisa Bonilla-Rius has been working at the Mexican Ministry of Public Education as
Director General for Educational Materials, latterly in charge of the National Literacy
Programme. She has recently been teaching at the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona
and is writing a book on school libraries.
Miranda French is working as a veterinary surgeon in Witney, Oxfordshire.
Dr Jean Handscombe has retired from York University, Toronto.
Professor Paolo Zatti is director of the Department of Comparative Law at the University
of Padua.
1982
Dr A Brook was awarded an honorary Doctorate by the University of Toronto in 2006.
Professor Vincent Brümmer set up a research programme in philosophical theology
whilst at Wolfson that has kept him busy ever since, publishing a number of papers and
books. At present he is working on a revised and greatly expanded edition of his 1984
book on prayer.
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Professor Charles Carlton retired after 32 years at the North Carolina State University.
Keith Hudson has become a director of THL (North East), a sustainable/renewable
energy company specialising in wood fuelled heating systems.
Dr Armando Hung Chaparro is Dean and Head of the Laboratory of Clinical Pathology
and Molecular Biology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Universidad Peruana Cayetano
Heredia in Peru. His main area of research is focused on the health of alpacas and
llamas.
Ian Hyams is enjoying retired life in New England and working as a freelance radio
journalist including contributions to BBC programmes.
Professor Fred Aman Jr has been appointed Dean of the Law School at Suffolk University
in Boston, Massachusetts.
1983
Professor William Blakemore was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College
of Veterinary Surgeons and retires from the University of Cambridge’s Department of
Veterinary Medicine at the end of 2007.
Dr Eleanor Boyle is working on a Masters degree in Food Policy through the City
University, London.
Dr Peter Coates has been promoted to a personal chair in American and Environmental
History in the Department of Historical Studies, University of Bristol.
Dr Jacques Colom is keen to develop exchanges and contacts on subjects relating to
Human Rights, media, internet and copyright.
Sara McKenzie took early retirement from her job in Further Education following her
accident in which she broke her back.
Professor Brian Moore has been selected to receive the Award of Merit from the
Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO) which will be awarded at the annual
meeting of the ARO in February 2008.
Professor Roger Sell OBE is Dean of Åbo Akademi University’s Faculty of Humanities in
Finland, and will be moving to a Distinguished Research Professorship in 2008.
Maurice Smith retired in 2007 from his post as a consultant veterinary surgeon.
1984
The Hon. Dr Paul Flather is a Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford, and serves as
Secretary-General of the Europaeum, an association of 10 leading European universities.
He is chair of the Noon Educational Foundation, which supports young Pakistani
scholars to study at Oxford and Cambridge.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
113
Professor H Futamura is Emeritus Professor of Doshisha University.
Dr Priscilla Jones has returned to the US Air Force Historical Studies Office (Washington,
DC) after a tenure as the first Chief Historian of the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security.
The Hon. Justice Susan Kiefel was appointed to the Australian High Court on 3
September 2007. She will sit alongside Justice Susan Crennan, making it the first time
Australia has had two female High Court Judges at the same time.
Anatole-François Krattiger served as Editor-in-Chief of ‘Intellectual Property
Management in Health and Agricultural Innovation: A Handbook of Best Practices’.
Dr John Rolfe was awarded the Royal Aeronautical Society’s 2006 Silver Medal for his
contribution to aerospace, and the Society’s Flight Simulation Medal for a significant
long-term contribution in the field of flight simulation.
Professor Malvern Smith retired from Rhodes University in 2002 and has finished a book
on the earliest European images of Africa and Africans.
Dr Adrian Travis is on leave from Cambridge University and working in Seattle.
Professor Kazumi Yamagata has finished editing ‘Selected Works of Kazumi Yamagata’ in
24 volumes. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Tsukuba and Professor at the
Graduate School of Seigakuin where his subject of research and teaching is European
Cultural Studies.
1985
Robert Geofroy is continuing to work in Grand Cayman at the University College of the
Cayman Islands where he is now the Provost and continues to teach Mathematics and
Computer Science. He has just completed a Master in Virtual Education with the
Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Sucre, Bolivia.
Dr Carrie Herbert has recently celebrated ten years as founder and director of Red
Balloon, a unique organisation which specialises in the recovery of bullied children, with
centres in Cambridge, Norwich and London.
Professor Geoffrey Lindell has published a book containing a selection of speeches and
extra-judicial writings of Sir Anthony Mason, a former Chief Justice of Australia.
Professor Pamela Sharpe is Professor of History at the University of Tasmania.
Professor Ezra Zubrow is President of the Buffalo Center Chapter of the United
University Professions, the largest chapter of the largest higher education union in the
United States. He will be at the Center for Advanced Study (La Trobe) in Melbourne from
January to April 2008 and then will be in Cambridge for the Easter Term.
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115
Mr Lawrence prospecting the Bursarship of the College at the Spring Ball of 1986. Were you there?
1986
Professor Hugh Bevan has received an Honorary Fellowship from the University of
Swansea. He continues to supervise students from several Cambridge colleges for the
Law Tripos and the LLM.
Dr Barry Hymer has recently graduated from Newcastle University with a Doctorate in
Educational Psychology. He is currently co-editing the Routledge International
Companion to Gifted Education.
1987
Peter Hilken OBE since retirement has founded and chaired The Cambridge Storytellers
and The Michaelhouse Centre, in Trinity Street, Cambridge.
Dr Timothy Le Cras was awarded tenure at the Associate Professor level at the
Department of Paediatrics, University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.
Dr Scott Levy is the founder of an investment management business providing
institutional money management for individuals.
Bob Miller is the Founder and Chairman of the T S Eliot Society (UK) at Little Gidding.
He has also founded two literary society cricket teams for P G Wodehouse and Siegfried
Sassoon.
Professor Pier Luigi Porta has been elected to the Senate of the University of MilanoBicocca and is a Life Member of the prestigious Istituto Lombardo-Accademia di Brera in
Milan. He has recently edited the ‘Handbook on the Economics of Happiness’.
Elie-Louis Robert-Nicoud is now a crime writer, working under the pseudonym of Louis
Sanders. He has published three novels in English and has written the script of a feature
film entitled ‘Quelques Jours Avant la Nuit’ to be released in 2008.
Professor Malcolm Warner (with Dr Jane Nolan) has a Nuffield Foundation New Career
Fellowship grant to investigate the social networks of foreign and local financial experts
in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Zhu Zhongdi recently moved from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics
(SHUFE) to Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade (SHIFT), continuing as a Professor in
International Economics and Trade.
1988
Professor David Anderson is currently at the University of Stockholm and University
College, London.
Pierre Bosset has joined the Department of Law of the Université du Québec à Montréal
(UQAM), as Full Professor. He was previously Director of Research and Planning with the
Québec Human Rights Commission.
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Professor Donald Horowitz has been elected President of the American Society of
Political and Legal Philosophy and has been appointed to the US Secretary of State’s
Advisory Committee on Democratization.
Dr Josef Martens has been elected as Vice-chair of the Board of Directors of the German
School, Washington DC.
Victor Mhizha-Murira is a Commonwealth Association Certified Trainer of Directors in
Corporate Governance in Zimbabwe, having previously lectured on the University of
Zimbabwe MBA programme. In 2006 he led a team of consultants that compiled the
Zimbabwe NGO Corporate Governance Manual.
Graeme Millar is working as Chief Marketing Officer at MTS, a large mobile telephone
operator in Moscow.
Martin Mühleisen was promoted to Division Chief in the IMF’s Western Hemisphere
Department in charge of Chile, Paraguay, and Peru.
Professor Shaul Shaked received the Israel Prize in linguistics in 2000. In 2001–2004 he
served as President of the International Academic Union in Brussels and is currently its
Honorary President.
Frank Van Diggelen was recently chosen as one of the top leaders to watch by GPS
Magazine and now has over 30 US GPS patents.
Dr Thomas Vogel is Head of Information Management, Novartis Pharma.
1989
Dr Adarkwha Antwi was appointed in 2005 to lead a DFID funded project in Ghana on
strengthening customary land administration.
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, has become Chief Executive of the Medical Research
Council, succeeding Professor Colin Blakemore.
Russell Carter was awarded Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) status in 2007.
Dr Neil Anthony Dodgson was awarded a Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching in
2007.
Faruq Faisel is dividing his time between Canada (advising World Accord, a Canadian
development agency with projects in Honduras and Guatemala) and Nepal (working as
an International Advisor for UNESCO to implement training for Nepalese journalists in
election coverage).
General Sir Michael Jackson has recently retired from the Army, after nearly 45 years of
service and latterly as Chief of the General Staff.
Keshavdeo Ramroop is currently based in Johannesburg working for ARUP.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
117
Hiten Ramnik Shah works in investment banking in London.
Professor Tomoyuki Shiomi has published his ‘Studies in Chaucer’ and ‘Medieval Gothic
Art and Chaucer’. He will retire from Taisho University, Tokyo, in 2008.
1990
Dr Gordon Adika lectures in the University of Ghana where he has been the Acting
Director of the Language Centre for the past four years. He is Editor of the Faculty of Arts’
journal, Legon Journal of the Humanities.
Colin Greenhalgh is Vice-Chairman of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation
Trust.
Paul Latimer is on sabbatical from the Monash University Department of Business Law
and Taxation at the University of Montreal Law School.
Shuji Sato has been teaching at Chuo University, Tokyo, as one of the professors in the
Department of English Studies. He is to retire in 2008.
Dr Gary Trotter was a Professor of Law at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario from
2000 to 2005 and is now a judge to the Ontario Court of Justice, where he presides over
criminal cases.
1991
Professor Thom Fischer was recently elected Chair of the Bainbridge Island
(Washington) Planning Commission, and was awarded a Distinguished Service Award by
the Access to Justice Institute for his seminar for Washington state judges on the Hague
Convention on International Child Abduction.
Jacqueline Inskipp is General Manager of Destination Milton Keynes Ltd, a privatelyowned company re-establishing tourist information services for Milton Keynes and the
surrounding area.
Dr Robert Metcalfe serves on the audit committee of the US National Academy of
Engineering and received the National Medal of Technology from President George W.
Bush. He is a Life Trustee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr Eleni Nardi had her monograph ‘Amongst Mathematicians: Teaching and learning
mathematics at university level’ published in 2007.
Professor Ray Petridis teaches advanced economics students at Murdoch University and
Notre Dame University as well as continuing his research activities and assisting with the
editing of the History of Economics Review.
Professor Patrick Waddington has recently completed work on a broad-ranging survey of
the impact of spiritualism on English authors of the mid-19th century, notably the
Trollopes, the Lyttons and the Brownings.
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1992
Muhammad Adam is working in Ghana’s Diplomatic Service and has been posted to
the Ghana Embassy in Madrid as Minister-Counsellor.
Roy Brooke is working for the United Nations on environmental and humanitarian
assistance.
Professor François Knoepfler had the third edition of his book ‘Droit international privé
suisse’ published in 2005.
Dr Richard Korn was elected as President of the Nottingham Hebrew Congregation in
May 2007.
Dr Ubong Samuel Nda was appointed as Head of the Theatre Arts Department in the
University of Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, in 2006.
Dr David Wills has written ‘The Mirror of Antiquity: 20th Century British Travellers in
Greece’.
1993
Professor Evan Bukey’s book ‘Hitler’s Austria’ won the National Jewish Book Prize in 2001
and the Austrian Cultural Book Award in 2002. In recent years he has published several
historiographical articles in Austria and has embarked on a study of the experience of
the Gentile-Jewish families in Nazi Vienna.
Dr Nittala Chalapathi Rao received the National Mineral Award, which is the highest
professional award in Earth Sciences given by the Government of India.
Janet Copeland was appointed as a Magistrate and sits on the Bolton Bench.
Professor Qiang Xu has published two research books on language testing in China and
has served as a part-time consultant for Shanghai Educational Examinations Authority
and as an examiner for the China Scholarship Council.
1994
Albert Birkner has been elected Managing Partner at CHSH Cerha Hempel Spiegelfeld
Hlawati.
Jake Boxer runs a real estate investment and development company in Vancouver, BC,
with projects across North America.
Nizar Al-Hariri is currently Managing Director of Capital Advisory Group and CEO of
Takamul’s Investment Holding Company.
The Rt Hon. John Steele has retired from full-time judicial activities but currently serves
as an Acting Judge of the Supreme Court, New Zealand. He is President of the Pitcairn
Court of Appeal and a member of the Cook Islands Court of Appeal.
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Professor Tony Lentin is a Visiting Professor at the Open University and is an Open
University Tutor in Law in Cambridge. He is a chairman of the Cambridgeshire County
Council Local Education Appeal panels.
Nwabunwanne Franklin Nnebe worked in the IT industry in the United States for several
years, before leaving in 2005 to join the African Network Information Center (AFRINIC)
which assigns IP addresses for the African region.
Professor Steven Olswang has completed three years as Interim Chancellor at the
University of Washington and has returned to his faculty position as Professor of Higher
Education and Law at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Dr Yaroslav Pylynskyi has published his research on immigration to Ukraine in
‘Nontraditional Immigrants in Kyiv’.
Dr Yasuhiko Sakai became Professor at Nagoya University in 2001. He is Chair of the
Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Nagoya University in Japan.
Professor Jack Shepherd, former Director of the Global Security Fellows Initiative (at
Cambridge and Wolfson 1993–1999) will retire in 2008 from his position as Professor of
Environmental Studies and Director of the Africa Foreign Study Program at Dartmouth
College, Hanover, NH, USA.
1995
Dr David Baguley was appointed Raine Visiting Professor at the Ear Sciences Institute,
University of Western Australia, in 2007, with a focus on tinnitus research.
Man-Wai Cheng retired from the Hong Kong Correctional Service in 2004 as a Chief
Superintendent.
Dr Stan Kutcher was appointed to the Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental
Health in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He and Dr Chehil recently published ‘Suicide Risk
Management: A Manual for Health Professionals’.
Motohiro Maeda is currently on secondment to the international arbitration team of
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in Paris, representing clients in arbitration disputes
before ICSID and also advising states on issues of public international law.
Bela Maheshwari has joined Universal Legal, a leading law firm in India, as their Partner
in charge of the New Delhi office. She looks forward to creating one of the best law firms
in New Delhi.
Dr Anatole Menon-Johansson is a specialist registrar in GUM at Chelsea and
Westminster Healthcare, London.
Dr David Money has co-edited ‘Ramillies, a commemoration in prose and verse of the
300th anniversary of the battle of Ramillies, 1706’.
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Dr Elizabeth O’Beirne-Ranelagh is working as a Farm Conservation Adviser for Cambs
and Herts FWAG. She has written a textbook on managing horse-grazed grassland.
Dr Daniel Oi is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Non-linear and Quantum Optics
at the Department of Physics, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.
Sumio Saito is involved in a project to publish an abridged edition of ‘The Iwakura
Embassy, 1871–73’, an account of the 50-member Embassy, led by Iwakura Tomomi,
which visited the United States and 12 major European countries in search of ways in
which Japan could modernise her social and economic infrastructure.
Dr James Yudong Yao is organizing the Heilongjiang International Investment Fair during
the famous Harbin Ice and Snow Festival in January 2008.
Dr Ineta Ziemele is a judge of the European Court of Human Rights with respect to
Latvia. Her book ‘State Continuity and Nationality : The Baltic States and Russia. Past,
Present and Future as Defined by International Law’ was published in 2005.
1996
Dr Kevin Armstrong is now a lecturer in Applied Linguistics and TESOL at the University
of Leicester.
Dr Joseph Boyle has been granted a personal fellowship (BHF Gerry Turner Fellowship)
allowing him to research a new type of white blood cell that is beneficial to heart
disease.
Dr Paul Gates was recently promoted to a permanent University Research Fellowship in
the School of Chemistry, University of Bristol.
Dr Luis Giron Blanc was awarded the Honorific Medal of the Universidad Complutense
de Madrid.
Dr Assimina Kaniari is an academic visitor at the Department of Art History at the
University of Oxford.
James Kennedy is currently working as an emergency shelter consultant, designing
shelter programmes for post-natural disaster and post-conflict situations. He has
recently worked for a number of large NGOs in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kenya and
Somalia.
Dr Dorothy Moore has received Honorary Life Membership of the Canadian Association
of Schools of Social Work. She continues as an Adjunct Professor at the School of Social
Work at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Rahim Rajan is based in New York City and is leading the creation of Aluka – a not-forprofit and scholarly digital archive about Africa.
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121
Stephen Snobelen is Assistant Professor in the History of Science and Technology
Programme at the University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is spending the
2007–2008 academic year on sabbatical at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society
at the University of Victoria, writing a book on Isaac Newton’s theology.
Shigeko Tanaka has recently published an article for the Asiatic Society of Japan of which
she has been a council member for more than 20 years.
Dr Wen-Ji Wang has transferred from the Department of History, National Taipei University
to the Institute of Science and Technology Studies, National Yang Ming University.
1997
Professor Frank Bongiorno has taken up a Senior Lectureship at the Menzies Centre for
Australian Studies, King’s College, London.
Estelle Boulton is enjoying a completely new career in adult education and charity work,
after nearly twenty years in the National Health Service.
Dr Randolf Cooper is working at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he is
responsible for introducing an executive education masters programme.
Dr Thomas D’Andrea has recently published ‘Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue: the
Thought of Alasdair MacIntyre’.
Professor Michael Fielding is now working at the School of Educational Foundations and
Policy Studies, University of London Institute of Education.
Carolyn Jones is now Foreign Editor at ‘The Age’ newspaper in Melbourne, a daily
metropolitan newspaper which shares six correspondents (in Washington, New York,
Jakarta, Beijing, London and Jerusalem) with its sister newspaper The Sydney Morning
Herald.
Po-tak Eamon Leung was recently promoted to Chief Superintendent and has just taken
up the post of Deputy Director of the Hong Kong Police College.
Dr Bernhard Linser graduated from the University of Vienna with a PhD in Political
Science in 2006.
Peter Neyroud became the First Chief Executive of the new National Policing
Improvement Agency in 2007 and was recently appointed Editor of the new Oxford
Journal of Policing.
Professor Nick Oliver, formerly Professor of Management at the Judge Business School in
Cambridge, took up a position as Head of the School of Management and Economics at
the University of Edinburgh in 2007.
Udo Osisiogu completed his PhD in criminology from the University of Hull in 2002.
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Zoë Preston is currently working in medical communications and is helping to set up a
new company in Oxford.
Jose Ramirez-Perez lectures at the Seminario Teologico Centroamericano in Guatemala
City.
1998
Abdul Al-Maymoon is working as Senior Technical Consultant with the Saudi Industrial
Development Fund.
Dr Alan Hajek is now Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences at
the Australian National University, Canberra.
Dr Donna Jackson has been appointed to the position of Lecturer in Modern History at
the University of Chester. Her book ‘Jimmy Carter and the Horn of Africa: Cold War Policy
in Ethiopia and Somalia’ was published in 2007, as was her article ‘The Carter
Administration and Somalia’ in the series Diplomatic History.
Maya Korlas-Martin (married to Wolfson alumnus Andrew Martin) has worked in
architecture in London and Leeds and now writes short stories in her native Russian
language.
Dr Narayan Lakshman graduated with a PhD from the London School of Economics in
2006 with a thesis entitled ‘The Political Economy of Resource Allocation by the State in
India: An Inter-state Comparison of Public Policy and Distributional Outcomes for the
Poor’.
Dr Sandra Leaton Gray spent 2006–07 working as Researcher to Professor Geoff Whitty,
Director of the Institute of Education, London University, before taking up a Lectureship
in Education at the University of East Anglia where she will be course convenor for the
new undergraduate degree in Education.
Stefano Mastropietro (married to Wolfson alumna Alice Richard) lives in Switzerland.
Ken McGoogan, who conceived and began his book ‘Fatal Passage: The Untold Story of
John Rae’ while a Press Fellow at Wolfson, recently helped finish the filming of a
docudrama based on that work. It will air in 2008 on BBC and the History Channel.
Dr Jocelyn Probert has left the University of Birmingham to return to the Centre for
Business Research in Cambridge.
Dr Dervis Salih is in his second year of post-doctoral research at the Department of
Genetics, Stanford University, USA.
Revd Margaret Sweet is currently Curate at The Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon.
She was ordained as a Priest by the Bishop of Coventry in Coventry Cathedral in 2007.
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123
Professor Hugh Thirlway retired in 2007 from the post of Principal Legal Secretary of the
International Court of Justice. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol and
the University of Leiden.
Peter Vickery is living in Dubai working for Barclays Bank as Head of Branches and
Distribution in Emerging Markets covering 12 countries in Africa and Asia.
Dr Seng-Guan Yeoh was recently promoted to Senior Lecturer in the Arts Programme of
the Monash University Sunway Campus in Malaysia, and was also elected to the
Regional Committee of the Asian Public Intellectual Fellowships Programme supported
by the Nippon Foundation.
1999
Barbara Brisig was awarded a PhD from the University of Basel, Switzerland, for her
thesis ‘Dynamic combinatorial libraries of complexes with oligopyridine ligands’.
Dr Karel Fuka was recently promoted to the position of Software Development Team
Leader working on various software projects in the Prague office of Accenture.
Clive Hinkley is Chief Superintendent and BCU Commander of ‘A’ Division in the
Derbyshire Constabulary.
Dr Charles Jones has published a book ‘American Civilisation’ (University of London
School of Advanced Studies, 2007).
Neil McCartney has become a partner in the law firm of Atwood Labine Arnone
McCartney, Barristers and Solicitors, of Thunder Bay, Canada.
Gitanjali Prasad has written ‘The Great Indian Family: New Roles, Old Responsibilities’.
She lives in Delhi and is a consultant to CII in their newly set up Creative Industries Cell,
including areas such as Media, Publishing, Advertising and Entertainment.
Dr Loizos Symeou was appointed Head of the Department of Education Sciences at
Cyprus College (European University of Cyprus) in 2007.
Mr Gilbert K Y Tan of Singapore was a Visiting Scholar in the Michaelmas Term.
Dr Carey Watt has published a monograph ‘Serving the Nation: cultures of service,
association and citizenship in colonial India’. He is associate professor of South Asian
and World History at St Thomas University.
2000
Dr Cornelis (Kees) Doevendans chaired the Task Force of the Dutch Protestant Churches
on Preservation and Reuse of Church Buildings. This builds on his book prepared during
his stay at Wolfson, ‘The Church in the Postindustrial Landscape’.
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Lincoln Flake graduated from St Andrews University with a PhD in International
Relations in 2007.
Dr David Frost is involved with the journal ‘Teacher Leadership’ which was launched in
2006. It arose from the Hertfordshire MEd around which has grown a network of
teachers: the HertsCam Network (see page 56).
Dr Axel Gelfert has been appointed to a Visiting Fellowship in the Department of
Philosophy, National University of Singapore, for the academic year 2007–08.
Dr Mohammed Jankju-Borzelabad has moved from Yazd University to the University of
Ferdowsi in Mashhad, Iran.
Karan Khemka is moving from London to Mumbai to open the India office of The
Parthenon Group and will based there full time from January 2008.
Professor Karen Spärck Jones FBA (1935–2007) was awarded the British Computer
Society’s Lovelace Medal and the Association for Computer Machinery/AAAI Allen
Newell Award.
Cordula van Wyhe is a lecturer at the History of Art Department, University of York.
2001
Dr Hisham Abu-Rayya holds a Fellowship at the School of Psychology, University of Sydney.
Karen Brown has just returned from a year’s teaching in France, at the Ecole Normale
Supérieure in Lyon. She is now finishing her DPhil at Oxford.
Philippe Chalon works in London as a Project Manager at International SOS (provider
of medical assistance, international healthcare and security services) and is also in
charge of the French London-based Think-tank ‘Le Cercle d’outre-Manche’.
Reverend Guenter Daum was ordained in the Church of the Order and is now serving in
the parish of St. Georgen, Bayreuth, Germany.
Lloyd Haugen III is currently the Vice-President of Marketing and Sales of a
semiconductor test and qualification firm. He is also active as an Elder in the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and currently acts in his local
congregation as Ward Mission Leader.
Professor Takanori Ida is now teaching Industrial Economics
and Info-communication Industry at Kyoto University in
Japan. He is currently writing a book ‘Broadband Economics’.
Rabbi Leon Klenicki was named by Pope Benedict XVI a Papal
Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great; he has also
published two articles: ‘Jonah’s Challenge’ and ‘God’s
Forgiveness and Ours’.
Rabbi Leon Klenicki
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Liam Lyons has recently been appointed as Head of Religious Studies, Citizenship &
PSHE at Collingwood College, where he has taught since leaving Wolfson in 2002.
Margaret Martin has taken up the position of Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law at
the University of Western Ontario.
Victor Navarrete is currently in charge of the Family Mediation Programme at the
Superior Court of Justice of Mexico City and in 2007 he was admitted to the Mexican
Branch of the International Law Association.
Alex Novikoff is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of History at St. Joseph’s University
in Philadelphia.
Dimitrios Pinotsis works as an EPSRC Research Fellow at the University of Reading,
having previously been a Visiting Researcher at DAMTP in Cambridge.
Dr Kathreen Ruckstuhl has received the Alberta Ingenuity New Faculty Award for her
study on breeding migrations in Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep.
Professor John Smith is the currently elected Vice President for Science Policy of the
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
Vassiliki Stathopoulou is teaching Language at a school on Anafi, an island of the Greek
Cyclades.
Maratovna Tulepbaeva Roza completed a MA in International Relations at Bilkent
University, Ankara, Turkey, in 2004. She has worked for four years as a Chief Legal
Counsel and the Head of the Legal Department in the Kazakhstan Institute of
Management, Economics and Strategic Research.
2002
Dr Ismael Al-Amoudi was awarded a Best Paper Award by the Academy of Management
for ‘Revisiting Rules: an Ontological Study of Social Rules’ and represented the
Cambridge University Tai Chi Chuan Society at the 19th British Open Tai Chi
Championships.
Dr Frédéric Blanqui has won the 2007 edition of the International Competition on
Certified Termination Tools for the combination of tools TPA+Rainbow+CoLoR.
Andrew Dougherty was doing not-for-profit work with the Landmine Survivors Network
in Washington, DC during 2006. Since 2007 he has been living in Singapore and Hong
Kong doing research on the Chinese economy for his own company, The Capital Group
Companies.
Professor Ian Gentles has published his book ‘The English Revolution and the Wars in the
Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652’. He is a visiting professor at Tyndale University College in
Toronto.
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Professor James Hanrahan retired from McGill University, Montreal on 31 August 2006.
Hope Johnston has been awarded the University’s Gordon Duff Prize for 2006 for her
essay ‘Henry Pepwell, Minor Printer’.
William Littlejohn works as Press Officer for Alan Duncan MP, Shadow Secretary of State
for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.
Laura Manni has moved from the University of London’s Institute of Education to Lusaka,
Zambia, where she helped set up and now teaches at the Mukwashi Trust Primary School.
Isabel Nanton is an author and journalist based in Kilifi, Kenya and Vancouver, Canada.
She works reporting on Africa’s 53 countries, specialising in the economy and politics of
the diaspora and peace-keeping on the continent.
Professor Hatsuko Niimi is teaching at Japan Women’s University in Tokyo. She is
Professor of English and Dean of Student Affairs. Her most recent publication is ‘Blake’s
Dialogic Texts’.
Dr Susan Oosthuizen was appointed to a Senior Lectureship at the University of
Cambridge in 2006 and was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 2007. Her
book ‘Landscapes Decoded: A history of Cambridgeshire’s medieval fields’ was published
in 2006.
Dr Elinor Payne is a University Lecturer in Phonetics and Phonology at the University of
Oxford, a Fellow of St Hilda’s College and a College Lecturer at Oriel College, Oxford.
Tatiana Pyatigorskaya Completed her MSc in Finance and Investment at Edinburgh
University.
Dr Maria Sapouna is a Research Fellow at Warwick University, Department of Psychology.
Professor Andrew Simester has published ‘The Mental Element in Complicity’ in the Law
Quarterly Review, and ‘Incivilities: Regulating Offensive Behaviour’.
Dr Francesca Tinti holds a lectureship in Medieval History in Bologna.
2003
Edin Agic was a Fulbright Research Fellow at Pace University, New York, and is currently
working as Head of the Economic Section of the Office of the High Representative in
Bosnia, hoping to complete his PhD by the end of 2008.
Dr Filipe Carreira Da Silva has recently published ‘G. H. Mead: A Critical Introduction’
(Polity Press, 2007).
Matt Cousins is writing a book on design quality of new housing. This stems from
research he undertook on the IDBE course at Wolfson.
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Anna Diallo spent three years in Zimbabwe working for the African Capacity Building
Foundation, an international organization whose head office is based Harare, and now
works for USAID as a Democracy and Governance Advisor for Guinea.
Ian Henry is Assistant Head Teacher at Townsend School in St Albans.
Marga Jann is now teaching at the University of Hawaii’s School of Architecture.
Georgios Karagiannis went to the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki) after
Wolfson, studying in the Faculty of Accounts and Finance, while also working as a
solicitor.
Dr Francesca Marchetti holds an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship and a Ramon y
Cajal Fellowship (Spanish Ministry for Education and Science) at the University of Oxford.
Blerta Mustafa has been working in Kosovo since graduating from Wolfson and is now
doing research as a Fulbright visiting scholar at the Ohio State University, School of
Teaching and Learning.
Professor Victor Owhotu delivered his inaugural professorial lecture at the University of
Lagos in 2007 titled ‘Understanding Applied Linguistics’ and is Head of the Department
of Arts and Social Sciences Education.
Dr Nina Persak has recently published ‘Criminalising Harmful Conduct: The Harm
Principle, its Limits and Continental Counterparts’, having obtained the MPhil in Social
and Developmental Psychology from Cambridge. She is now an Assistant Professor in
the field of criminology at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Dr Friedemann Pulvermüller has been awarded the title of Honorary Professor of Biology
at the Department of Physiology of St Petersburg State University.
Brigadier General Abdul Roslan bin Abd Rashid is now retired from the military. His last
rank and appointments were Brigadier General and Brigade Commander of the 7th
Malaysian Infantry Brigade.
Lee Russell has commenced a Masters degree at Canterbury Christ Church University.
Su-Yin Tan was Women’s Captain of the Cambridge University Karate Squad in 2006–2007.
Dr Jan Toporowski has co-edited ‘Open Market Operations and the Financial Markets’ for
the series ‘Routledge International Studies in Money and Banking’, and is currently a
Visiting Research Fellow at the Czech National Bank.
Dr Nicholas Wareham, Director of the MRC Epidemiology Unit in the Faculty of Clinical
Medicine, has been awarded the title of Honorary Professor by the University.
Oakleigh Welply has been awarded an ESRC scholarship for a MPhil in Educational
Research at the Faculty of Education in Cambridge, with an interest in comparative
education between England and France with a focus on Primary Education.
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Liwen Yue has been working at the Information Bureau of the State Council Information
Office, China, having returned to China after finishing overseas work in Russia in 2007
for the inter-state programme called ‘Chinese Year in Russia’, which helps Russians
understand aspects of Chinese culture.
2004
Dr Godfrey Asiimwe heads the Department of History, Development and Organisational
Studies at the University of Makerere in Uganda.
Sir Tony Brenton was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.
Dr Yoon Seok Chang is currently a director of the Ubiquitous Technology Application
Research Center and also assistant professor in the School of Air Transport,
Transportation and Logistics at Korea Aerospace University, Republic of Korea.
Stella Chatzitheochari was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship from the Department of
Sociology of the University of Surrey.
Dr John Clark is Associate Professor at the School of Educational Studies at Massey
University in New Zealand. In 2006 he was invited to speak on social justice at the AsiaPacific Network on Moral Education conference held at Sun Yat-sen University in
Gangzhou, China.
Ryan Costella is serving as the Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff for US Senator Bob
Casey Jr in Washington DC. He is also the Founder and CEO of a non-profit organization
called Youth Voice.
Dr David Fowler will publish his book ‘Youth Culture in the Twentieth Century’ in 2008
and is also preparing a scholarly biography of Rolf Gardiner.
Dr Andreas Georgiou was admitted as a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge.
Meredith Hooper has recently published ‘The Ferocious Summer: Palmer’s penguins and
the warming of Antarctica’, following the field work of scientists on the Antarctic Peninsula
establishing declining Adelie penguin populations as evidence for climate change.
Dr Benjamin Kipkorir presented a paper on the diplomatic aspect of his life at the end of
his stay at Wolfson, and has since been working on ‘a Marakwet memoir’.
Nora Ko works in customs and excise control in Hong Kong.
Aparna Lalingkar is in Mumbai working in educational technology.
Dr Charles Prior is lecturing in Early Modern History at the University of Hull.
Prof Jarlath Ronayne was appointed as the first Vice-Chancellor of Sunway University,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2007. Sunway is affiliated with Lancaster University and is an
academic partner of Manchester Business School.
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Professor Kurt Seelmann has a new (4th) edition of his ‘Rechtsphilosophie’ (Philosophy
of Law), translated in Italian as ‘Filosofia del diritto’; and another book ‘Dalla bioetica al
biodiritto’.
Rebecca Simmons captained the Varsity Darts Team against Oxford.
Christos Vlachos is in his first year of a PhD at the University of Patras, Greece.
Dr Akemi Yaguchi has compiled a Bibliography of Virginia Woolf Studies in English and
Japanese, as a part of Dalloway Fujin anthology of studies on Virginia Woolf.
Dr Lin Ye is Head of the Power System Laboratory in the Department of Electrical
Engineering at the China Agricultural University in Beijing.
Yusri bin Hj Anwar is now working in New Delhi, India as a Defence Advisor with the
Malaysian High Commission.
2005
Dr Martin Allen has been awarded the British Numismatic Society’s North Book Prize for
‘The Durham Mint’.
Dr Rana Behal was co-editor of ‘India’s Labouring Poor: Historical Studies c1600–c2000’, a
volume of the International Review of Social History published by Cambridge University
Press.
Professor Maria Cristina Cardona received the Best Paper Award from the Program
Committee for the Tenth Biennial Conference of the International Association for Special
Education in Hong Kong in 2007. She has recently published ‘Diversidad y Educación
Inclusiva’.
Dr Bernard Collette is currently Honorary Research Associate at Durham University,
Department of Classics and Ancient History.
Dr Timothy Duff holds a Humboldt Fellowship at the Seminar für Klassische Philologie at
the Freie Universität Berlin.
Professor Frank Dumont retired from McGill University, Montreal on 31 August 2006.
Christina Harper has recently published an article ‘Climate Change and Tax Policy’ in the
Boston College International & Comparative Law Review.
Sunny Ho serves in the Customs and Excise Department of the Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region Government.
Rumana Islam has enrolled as an Advocate in the High Court Division, Supreme Court of
Bangladesh. At present she is working as a Lecturer in Law at Stamford University,
Bangladesh, and also as an Associate with Reza & Associates, Bangladesh.
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Professor Justin London has been elected President of the North American Society for
Music Theory.
Yidi Lu is currently working for the Alta Advisers investment office in London.
Dr Aderemi Raji-Oyelade has completed a research tenure at Humboldt University,
Berlin, as Georg Forster Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
He co-edited the 2006 issue of Matatu, journal of African Literature and Culture, which
is devoted to the memory and legacy of the Nigerian scholar and poet, Ezenwa Ohaeto
who was in residence at Wolfson shortly before his death in October 2005.
Alan Sorrell returned to New Zealand and finalised his paper on Resale Royalty in
visual arts. He has also been appointed Chair of the Arts Board of Creative New
Zealand.
Antonia Spiegel is currently writing her thesis for the MLitt in Modern Art and
Connoisseurship at Christie’s Education, and is working for the Post-War and
Contemporary Department and the Impressionist and Modern Department at
Christie’s in London.
Dr Ruben Vardanyan continues his work in the History Museum of Armenia and his
research on numismatics.
Rebecca Wexler has received NEH funding to travel to Guinea in West Africa to shoot,
edit, and direct a video about the D’mba masked dance of the Baga people for
installation in the Yale University Art Gallery.
2006
Professor David Barker was made a Member of the Order of Australia for ‘service to
legal education in Australia and the Pacific region, to professional associations, and to
the community’.
Dr Dick Fenner has been awarded the 2007 George Stephenson Gold Medal by the
Institution of Civil Engineers, for a paper entitled ‘Widening engineering horizons:
addressing the complexity of sustainable development’ by Dr Dick Fenner, Professor
Charles Ainger, Dr Heather Cruickshank and Professor Peter Guthrie.
Rev Mark Garcia is Minister at Immanuel Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Oakdale
(Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, USA, and has written the following: ‘Imputation and the
Christology of Union with Christ: Calvin, Osiander and the Contemporary Quest for a
Reformed Model’ (Westminster Theological Journal); ‘Life in Christ: Union with Christ
and Twofold Grace in Calvin’s Theology’ (Studies in Christian History and Thought).
Jaquelina Jimena is working as a journalist at the Los Andes newspaper and as an
International Columnist at the Canadian Mining Journal. She is also an adviser in
Corporate Social Responsibility.
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Dr Honghai Li has moved from Beijing to Wuhan to take up a post in the Law School of
Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
Dr Cyriac Pullapilly has written two articles for the Harvard Theological Review on the
leaders of the Catholic Reformation, Saint Charles Borromeo and Bishop Matteo
Giberti. He is currently organizing the 87th Spring Conference of the American
Catholic Historical Association at Saint Marys College, Notre Dame, Indiana.
Dr Andrew Robinson has recently published ‘The Story of Measurement’.
Professor Ben-Ami Shillony had an international conference on Japan held in
Jerusalem in his honour on the occasion of his retirement. In 2007 he was invited to
present the keynote address at the History section of the biennial conference of the
Japanese Studies Association of Australia (JSAA) in Canberra.
Professor Helena Shillony retired from the department of French Literature of the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem and published an autobiographical novel in Hebrew,
‘The Bridge of Dreams’.
2007
Professor James Anderson has received an ESRC grant for a study by the universities of
Cambridge, Exeter and Queen’s Belfast entitled ‘Conflict in Cities and the Contested
State: Everyday Life and the Possibilities of Transformation in Belfast, Jerusalem and
Other Divided Cities’.
Professor Peter Stansky has published’ The First Day of the Blitz: September 7, 1940’.
Dr Farooq Wasil is Executive Principal of two schools and has written a series of books
for Kindergarten and Environmental series for Middle School.
Loving Cup
Mr Ray Palmer cutting a
celebratory cake as the Loving Cup
of England progressed through
Cambridge; in the Lee Hall on
5 February 2007
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Wolfson College Alumni Day
A major new annual event for Wolfson alumni will start in 2008. If you matriculated in
1968, 1978, 1988 or 1998 you will receive an invitation to attend a dinner in College on
Saturday 27 September 2008. This date falls in the middle of the University of
Cambridge’s own Alumni Weekend which is packed full of talks, exhibitions and events,
so this is an ideal occasion to plan a return visit to your alma mater.
Alumni will be invited as guests of the College, and partners may attend (for which a
charge will be made). Accommodation in College will be made available for those who
require it. Full details will be sent out with the invitations in 2008.
The dates for the next two such dinners have already been set, as follows:
Saturday 26 September 2009 for those who matriculated in 1969, 1979, 1989 and 1999
Saturday 25 September 2010 for those who matriculated in 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000
It is envisaged that this pattern will continue into the future, so all alumni can work out
when their next alumni dinner will take place.
Can’t get to Cambridge?
Not everyone will be able to accept the College’s invitation to return to Cambridge, but
we would encourage you to consider hosting a local event on the same day wherever you
are in the world so that you can get together with fellow alumni to remember Wolfson
from afar. The College will offer any assistance it can in helping you to get together on
this Wolfson College Alumni Day each year.
Please keep in touch
To make sure we know where to send invitations to such events and to ensure that you
receive copies of the Magazine and Ring True, please keep us informed of any changes in
your contact details. Any such changes should be sent to the Member Relations Officer at
[email protected].
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
133
Wolfson College Lawyers
A Dinner to celebrate Wolfson College lawyers
was held at Gray’s Inn on Wednesday 13 June
2007. The inspiration for such an event came
from David Fisher (Wolfson 1981–1984) and the
invitation went out from Professor Sir David
Williams, Sir Lawrence Collins (of the Court of
Appeal) and Professor Conor Gearty of LSE
(Wolfson 1980–1983). The President, Dr Gordon
Johnson, presided and Dr Jennifer Davis and
Professor Hugh Bevan along with four current
students represented Law at Wolfson today.
Thirty eight past and present lawyers attended
and Robert Davis DL has organized a further
reception to be hosted by the Lord Mayor of
Westminster in December 2007.
Professor Sir David Williams addressing the lawyers
Current students at the launch of the Wolfson College Lawyers’ Association; left to right: the President, Daniel Edmonds,
Dr Jennifer Davis – College Lecturer in Law, Adrienne Copithorne, Wei ‘Wayne’ Huang, Karan Gokani
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Marriages, Civil Partnership, Engagement
Over the last year we have been informed of the following:
Marriages
1971
1999
Eva Lloyd-Reichling to Dr David Sloan
Dr Mary Donaldson to Gawain Hammond
1979
Rachel Jones to Neil Baxter
Anne Murray to Dr David Jarvis
Anne Bar Din to Dr Pablo GonzalezCasanova
Tanya Ross to David Jackson
1989
Dr Carey Watt to Samira Farhoud
Cynthia Stone to Peter Spillman
Dr Ursula Werners to Dr Manuel Field
Ezekiel Tuma to Akusa Batwala
2000
Nicholas Bonnefoi to Laetitia Maupate
2001
Dr Hisham Abu-Rayya to Maram
Qashqoush
Dr Bernard Collette to Sandra Ducic
Guenter Daum to Dr Cornelia AngererDaum
1994
Jake Boxer to Jillian Dixon
Christopher Rydgren to Ms Ane Forr
2002
1995
Andrew Dougherty to Nicola Corck
Deborah Walker to Adam Pett
Dr Tanya Kranjac to Arso Vucevic
Dr Francesca Tinti to Dr Luis Hueso
1996
Dr Wen-Ji Wang to Kuie-Ying Huang
2004
1998
Joyce Otobo to Chidi Boniface Uba
Mei Mei Yau to Jerry Shiu
Dr Selwyn Blieden to Raylene Pokroy
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
135
Tanya Kranjac and Arso Vuceric
Civil Partnership
1981
Dr Geoffrey Hall and Professor James Lindesay
Engagement
2001
Philippe Chalon to Anna Vilhjalmsdottir
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Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Mei Mei Yau and Jerry Shiu
Births
Over the last year we have been informed of the following births and adoptions:
1991
2000
Dr Verity Sabin, a daughter, Stephanie Rose
Nicholas Bonnefoi and wife Laetitia
Maupate, a son, Elias
Dr Karina Urbach and husband Professor
Jonathan Haslam, a son, Timothy
1992
Ghislaine Harland and partner Matthew
Thorp, a son, James
2001
Dr Hisham Abu-Rayya and wife Maram
Qashqoush, a daughter, Sereen
Professor Takanori Ida and wife Hiromi, a
daughter, Kyoka, sister to Asuka
1994
Jake Boxer and wife Jillian Dixon, a
daughter, Jaclyn
1995
Arnaud Nuyts and wife Carole MoalNuyts, a son, Samuel, brother to Maya,
Tess and Joshua
2002
Helen Morrogh-Bernard and partner
Simon Husson, a daughter, Alexandra
2003
Max Westland and wife Amber Gunn
Westland, a son, Gunnar Maxwell, brother
to Pippa
Dr Ineta Ziemele and husband
Gudmunder Alfredmon, a daughter, Laura
Gudreen
2004
1997
Luyang Liu and wife, a son
Dr Balaji Iyer and wife Lavanya, a son,
Abhishek, second child and brother to
Dharma
Professor Kurt Seelmann and wife
Hoonam, first grandchild, a
granddaughter, Emilie Sophie Mathilde
Zoë A Preston and husband, Patrick, a son
2005
1999
Dr Nicholas Clemons and wife Sarah, a
daughter, Isabelle Grace
Dr Ursula Field-Werners and husband
Dr Manuel Field, a son, Daniel Matthew
Dr Carey Watt and wife Samira Farhoud, a
son, James
Simon Anderson and partner, a baby
2006
Dr Honghai Li and wife Heying Cao, a son,
Huaijian Li
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
137
College Officers and
Administration in the College
as at 1 October 2007
President
Dr Gordon Johnson
[email protected]
Vice-President
Dr Don MacDonald
[email protected]
Bursar
Mr Christopher Lawrence
[email protected]
Dean and Senior Tutor
Dr David Jarvis
[email protected]
Praelector
Dr Brian Cox
[email protected]
Tutors
Dr Sally Church
Dr John Flowerdew
Dr Christina Granroth
Dr Nigel Kettley
Dr Marie Lovatt
Dr Lesley MacVinish
Tutor for Part-time Students
Dr David Frost
Teaching Officer in Law
Dr Jennifer Davis
Press Fellowship Director
Professor John Naughton
[email protected]
Director Emeritus of the Wolfson Course and Programme
Dr Don Wilson
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Vice-Presidents’ Dinner
Upon announcing her marriage to the Dean, Ms Anne Murray resigned as Vice-President.
She was succeeded as Vice-President by Dr Don MacDonald who will serve until 2011. To
mark the occasion, the President and Mrs Johnson held a dinner party for past VicePresidents and their spouses on 1 June 2007. Photographed on that occasion are Dr Owen
Edwards, Professor Rudolf Hanka, Dr Don MacDonald, Dr Derek Nicholls, the President,
and seated Professor Mary Hesse and Ms Anne Murray. Mr and Mrs Kirkman, and Professor
and Mrs Redhead were, alas, not able to be present on this occasion.
The Vice-Presidents of Wolfson College
1976–1980
1980–1984
1984–1988
1988–1992
1992–1996
1996–2000
2000–2004
2004–2007
2007–2011
140
Professor Mary Hesse
Mr William Kirkman
Mr Jack King
Dr Derek Nicholls
Professor Michael Redhead
Professor Rudolf Hanka
Dr Owen Edwards
Ms Anne Murray
Dr Donald Buchanan MacDonald
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Fellowship in Order of Seniority
as at 1 October 2007
Title A
Title B
Title C
Title D
=
=
=
=
Professorial
Research
Official (University or College post holders)
Extraordinary
Sir Lawrence Collins (D) Lord Justice of Appeal
Dr Marie Lovatt (C) Tutor, Wolfson College
Mr Edward Johnson (D) Linguistics Research, Prolingua Limited
Professor Anthony Minson (A) Professor of Virology, Dept of Pathology
Dr Marguerite Dupree (D) Senior Research Fellow, Wellcome Unit for the History of
Medicine, Glasgow
Professor John Hughes (D) formerly Director, Parke-Davis Neuroscience Research Centre
Professor William Blakemore (A) Professor of Neuropathology, Dept of Clinical Veterinary
Medicine
Professor Brian Moore (A) Professor of Auditory Perception, Dept of Experimental
Psychology
Dr Joan Whitehead (C) University Lecturer, Faculty of Education
Dr Sheelagh Lloyd (C) University Lecturer, Dept of Clinical Veterinary Medicine
Professor Nicholas de Lange (A) Professor of Hebrew & Jewish Studies, Faculty of Divinity
Professor John Henderson (D) Professor of Italian Renaissance History and Wellcome
Trust University Award Holder in History of Medicine, Birkbeck College, University of
London
Mr Duncan McCallum (C) Deputy Academic Secretary, Academic Division
Dr John Seagrave (D) formerly Bursar, Wolfson College
Dr Peter Beaumont (C) Reader in Materials Engineering, Dept of Engineering
Dr John Brackenbury (C) University Lecturer in Veterinary Anatomy, Dept of Anatomy
Dr Ivor Day (B) Rolls-Royce Research Fellow, Whittle Laboratory, Dept of Engineering
Professor Malcolm Burrows (A) Professor of Zoology, Head of Dept of Zoology
Professor John Naughton (D) Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology, Open
University and Director, Wolfson College Press Fellowship Programme
Professor Peter Weissberg (D) Medical Director, British Heart Foundation
Miss Patricia Hyndman (D) Consultant, International Human Rights Law
Professor Ian Goodyer (A) Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Dept of Psychiatry
Dr Donald MacDonald (C) University Senior Lecturer & Director of Medical & Veterinary
Education in Faculty of Biology, Genetics Dept and Vice-President Wolfson College
Dr Ian Cross (C) Reader, Faculty of Music
Professor Geoffrey Khan (A), Professor, Faculty of Oriental Studies
Dr Norbert Peabody (B) Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology, Wolfson College
Dr Jennifer Davis (C) College Lecturer in Law, Wolfson College
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
141
Dr Richard Barker (C) University Senior Lecturer and Director of the MBA Course, Judge
Business School
Dr John Flowerdew (C) University Lecturer, Dept of Zoology
Dr Timothy Mead (D) formerly Registrary, University of Cambridge
Dr Nadia Stelmashenko (C) Technical Officer, Dept of Materials Science & Metallurgy
Professor Duncan Maskell (A) M&S Professor of Farm Animal Health, Food Science &
Food Safety, Centre for Veterinary Science, Dept of Clinical Veterinary Medicine
Professor Koen Steemers (A) Professor of Sustainable Design, Dept of Architecture
Mr Thomas Ridgman (C) University Lecturer, Dept of Engineering
Dr Sally Church (C) Tutor, Wolfson College, Substitute Lecturer, Faculty of Oriental Studies
Dr Peter Sewell (C) University Senior Lecturer, Computer Laboratory
Dr Steven Hand (C) University Senior Lecturer, Computer Laboratory
Professor John Sinclair (A) Professor of Molecular Virology, Dept of Medicine
Dr Raymond Bujdoso (C) University Lecturer in Molecular Immunology, Dept of Clinical
Veterinary Medicine
Dr Jeremy Mynott (D) formerly Chief Executive, Cambridge University Press
Mr Michael Bienias (C) Director, Estate Management & Building Service
Dr Charles Jones (C) Reader/Director, Centre of International Studies/Centre of LatinAmerican Studies
Mrs Susan Bowring (C) University Draftsman (Senior Assistant Registrary)
Dr William Paterson (C) Senior Lecturer, Dept of Chemical Engineering
Ms Christine Counsell (C) Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education
Mr David Hall (D) Formerly Deputy Librarian, University Library
Mr Graham Allen (C) Academic Secretary, Academic Division
Ms Anne Murray (C) Deputy Librarian, University Library
Dr Peter D’Eath (C) University Lecturer, Dept of Applied Mathematics & Theoretical
Physics
Professor George Salmond (A) Professor of Molecular Biology, Dept of Biochemistry
Professor Stephen Brooks (A) Professor of Statistics, Dept of Pure Mathematics &
Mathematical Statistics
Professor William Marslen-Wilson (B) Director, MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit,
Cambridge
Dr Sijbren Otto (B) Royal Society University Research Fellow, Chemical Laboratory
Dr John Clark (C) Graduate Course Supervisor, Graduate Course in Medicine and
Consultant Physician, The Nuffield Hospital, Bury St Edmunds
Mrs Karen Pearce (C) Physical Education Officer, Sports Syndicate
Professor Andrew Pollard (D) Director, ESRC’s Teaching & Learning Research
Programme, Institute of Education, University of London
Professor Simon Thompson (B) Director, MRC Biostatistics Unit
Dr John Firth (C) Consultant Physician & Nephrologist, Addenbrooke’s NHS Trust
Dr David Frost (C) University Senior Lecturer in Education, Faculty of Education
Dr Andrew Herbert (D) Distinguished Engineer & Managing Director, Microsoft Research
Laboratory, Cambridge
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Dr Ann Copestake (C) Reader in Computational Linguistics, Computer Laboratory
Dr Marcus Kuhn (C) University Lecturer, Computer Laboratory
Professor John Bradley (A) Professor of Surgery & Head of Department, Dept of Surgery
Mr Tim Winter (C) University Lecturer in Islamic Studies, Faculty of Divinity
Dr Nigel Kettley (C) Tutor, Wolfson College
Ms Lynette Alcántara (C) Director of Music, Wolfson College and member of BBC Singers
Professor Edward Bullmore (A) Professor of Psychiatry (1999), Dept of Psychiatry
Mr Andrew Reid (C) Director of Finance, Finance Division
Dr Jin Zhang (C) University Lecturer in Management Studies, Judge Business School
Dr Thomas D’Andrea (B) Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy
Dr Thomas Grant (B), Research Fellow, Lauterpacht Centre for International Law
Dr Margaret Dauncey (D) Senior Research Scientist, Babraham Institute
Dr Adrian Kent (C) Reader in Quantum Physics, Dept of Applied Mathematics &
Theoretical Physics
Dr Susan Oosthuizen (C) Senior Lecturer, Institute of Continuing Education
Dr Nicholas Wareham (C) Director, MRC Epidemiology Unit
Dr Cyrus Chothia (B) Group Leader, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Professor Jonathan Crowcroft (A) Professor of Communications Systems, Computer
Laboratory
Professor Gillian Murphy (A) Professor of Cancer Cell Biology, Dept of Oncology and
Deputy Head, Cambridge Institute of Medical Research
Dr Peter Bennett (B) Senior Research Associate, Schofield Centre, Dept of Engineering
Dr Aldo Faisal (B) Post Doctoral Research Associate, Wellcome Trust Program, Dept of
Engineering
Dr Friedemann Pulvermüller (B) Senior Scientist, MRC Cognition & Brain Science Unit
Professor Peter Jones (A) Professor of Psychiatry, Dept of Psychiatry
Professor Robert Dewar Jr (B) Affiliated Lecturer, Faculty of Archaeology & Anthropology
Dr Ingo Greger (B) Royal Society University Research Fellow, Laboratory of Molecular
Biology
Dr Rebeccca Empson (B) Leverhulme Research Associate, Dept of Social Anthropology
Professor Philip Arestis (B) Director of Research, Centre for Economic & Public Policy,
Dept of Land Economy
Professor Vassilis Koronakis (A) Professor, Dept of Pathology
Dr David Jarvis (C) Dean & Senior Tutor, Wolfson College
Dr David Adams (B) Junior Research Fellow in History
Rev Dr Chad Van Dixhoorn (B) Associate Minister, Cambridge Presbyterian Church
Professor Robin Alexander (B) Director, The Primary Review, Faculty of Education
Professor Richard Taylor (A) Director of Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning,
Institute of Continuing Education
Dr Lesley MacVinish (C) Tutor, Wolfson College and Senior Teaching Associate, Dept of
Pharmacology
Dr Kriti Kapila (B) British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept of Social Anthropology
Mr El’vis Beytullayev (B) Junior Research Fellow in History/International Relations
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
143
Miss Zerrin Biner (B) Junior Research Fellow in Social Anthropology
Dr Nicholas Clemons (B) Junior Research Fellow in Cancer Biology
Dr Marie Ericsson (B) Junior Research Fellow in Quantum Computation
Dr Felipe Garcia (B) Junior Research Fellow in Inorganic Chemistry
Dr Sarah Hodge (B) Junior Research Fellow in Zoology, Department of Zoology
Dr Derek Ingham (B) Journalist, Gemini News Service
Dr Zhi-Yong Li (B) Junior Research Fellow in Medical Engineering
Dr Max Lieberman (B) Junior Research Fellow in Medieval History
Dr Tun Lin (B) Junior Research Fellow in Economics
Dr Roberto Polito (B) Junior Research Fellow in Classics
Dr Christopher Town (B) Junior Research Fellow in Computer Science
Dr Christina Granroth (C) Tutor, Wolfson College
Dr Carolina Armenteros (B) British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in History
Dr Nicholas Luscombe (B) Group Leader, EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute
Dr Jonathan Oppenheim (B) Research Fellow, Dept of Applied Mathematics &
Theoretical Physics
Dr David Baguley (C) Consultant Clinical Scientist, Head of Audiology, Addenbrooke’s
NHS Trust
Ms Emma Cavell (B) Junior Research Fellow in Medieval British History
Dr Claudia Fritz (B) Junior Research Fellow in Music, Faculty of Music
Dr Berry Groisman (B) Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dept of Applied Mathematics &
Theoretical Physics
Dr Emil Israel (B) Post Doctoral Researcher, Dept of Materials Science
Dr Jin-Chong Tan (B) Junior Research Fellow in Materials Science, Dept of Materials
Science & Metallurgy
Dr Oksana Trushkevych (B) Junior Research Fellow in Engineering
Mr Julien Vincent (B) Junior Research Fellow in History
Dr George Vogiatzis (B) Junior Research Fellow in Engineering
Dr Kevin Greenbank (C) Archivist and Administrator, Centre of South Asian Studies
Dr Wolfgang Huber (B) Research Group Leader, EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute
Dr Jeremy Webb (C) Assistant Director of Cambridge GCM and GP
Dr Richard Fenner (C) University Senior Lecturer & Course Director, Dept of Engineering
Professor Nicholas Jeffery (A) Professor of Veterinary Clinical Studies, Dept of Clinical
Veterinary Medicine
Dr Christophe Erismann (B) British Academy Post Doctoral Fellow, CRASSH
Mr Simon Pattinson (C) Industrial Tutor, Industrial Systems, Dept of Engineering
Professor Dr F Lösel (A) Professor of Psychology, Director Institute of Criminology and
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
Mr Christopher Lawrence (C) Bursar, Wolfson College
Mrs Margaret Greeves (C) Assistant Director, Fitzwilliam Museum
Professor Andrew Simester (D) Professor of Law, National University of Singapore
Dr David Barrowclough (B) Post Doctoral Research Assistant, McDonald Institute for
Archaeological Research, Dept of Archaeology
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Dr Richard Bourgon (B) Post Doctoral Research Fellow, European Bioinformatics
Institute
Dr Luis Briseño-Roa (B) Post Doctoral Researcher, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Dr Elena Chebankova (B) Faculty of Social & Political Science
Dr Christian Füllgrabe (B) Research Associate, Dept of Experimental Psychology
Miss Victoria Harris (B) Junior Research Fellow in History
Dr Shang-Te Danny Hsu (B) Junior Research Fellow in Chemistry
Dr Meena Murthy (B) Junior Research Fellow in Clinical Pharmacology
Dr Daniela Sahlender (B) Junior Research Fellow in Cell Biology
Ms Rebecca Simmons (B) Junior Research Fellow in Epidemiology
Dr Gagan Sood (B) Junior Research Fellow in History
Dr Andrew Troup (B) Junior Research Fellow in Physics
Mr Juan Vaquerizas (B) Junior Research Fellow in Genomics and Bioinformatics
Mr Matthew Woolhouse (B) Junior Research Fellow in Musicology
Miss Felicia Yap (B) Junior Research Fellow in History
Professor John Sender (B) Lecturer, Development Studies, Malaysian Commonwealth
Studies Centre
Fortieth Anniversary. Painting by Peter Mennim (2005)
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
145
Honorary Fellowship in Order of Seniority
as at 1 October 2007
Lord Wolfson of Marylebone
Professor Owen Chadwick
Lord Richardson of Duntisbourne
Dr Lee Seng Tee
Sir John Sparrow
Lord Bridge of Harwich
Sir Christopher Benson
Sir Hans Kornberg
Judge Malcolm Wilkey
Professor Hugh Bevan
Revd Dr Ernest Nicholson
Professor Sir David Williams
Professor Mary Hesse
Professor Leslie Zines
Sir Michael Hardie Boys
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Dame Kiri Te Kanawa
Baroness Scotland of Asthal
Professor Suzanne Cory
Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington
Professor William Brown
The Rt Revd Dr Anthony Russell
Sir Leszek K Borysiewicz
Professor Andrew von Hirsch
Professor Alison Richard
Sir Michael Jackson
Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior
Professor David Crystal
Professor Neil Gorman
Dr David Grant
Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam
Emeritus Fellowship in Order of Seniority
as at 1 October 2007
Dr Ralph Henry Joseph Brown
Mr Frederick Maurice Algate
Professor Mary Brenda Hesse
Dr Alan Burgess
Dr David Franks
Mr Graham John Pollard
Dr Bridget Allchin
Dr Arthur Ramsden Jennings
Dr Peter David Storie-Pugh
Dr Chu Hsiau-Pin
Mr William Patrick Kirkman
Mr Richard Vaughan Nicholls
Mr Terence Patrick Waldron
Mr James Vincent Kinnier Wilson
Dr Donald Victor Wilson
Mr William John Ridgman
Professor Paul Heywood Hirst
Dr Henry Woolliscroft West
Dr Peter Whittlestone
Mr Arthur Roger Akester
Dr Cecil Stanley Treip
Dr David Briggs
Dr Owen Morris Edwards
Lord (Ernest Jackson Lawson) Soulsby
Dr Henry Timothy Tribe
Air Vice-Marshal Peter Turner
Dr Ronald Stuart McGregor
Dr Eric Lewis Miller
Dr Thomas John Linden Alexander
Dr John Cathie
Mr Stephen Lawrence Bragg
Mr John Michael Sharman
Dr Rudolph Hanka
Dr Iain Michael Stewart Wilkinson
Mr James Patton Garlick
Dr Roger Michael Connan
Mr Witold Florian Tulasiewicz
Dr Vincent Roy Switzur
Dr David Eric Bostock
Mr John Graham Snaith
Mr Colin Grenville Gill
Dr David Clode
Mac Dowdy
Dr Malcolm Warner
Dr Stephen Stoker Large
Dr Rex Ashley Walford
Professor Michael Logan Gonne Redhead
Professor David Harold Hargreaves
Dr Alexander Dickson Tait
Dr John Kempton Harold Rees
Dr Abraham Karpas
Professor Barry John Kemp
Dr Janet West
Mr Michael Elliot Richardson
Dr John William Maunder
Dr Margaret Shepherd
Mr Anthony Keith Wilson
Dr Norma Emerton
Dr Ernest Lee
Dr Sidney Tyrell Smith
Dr Brian Donald Cox
Dr Thomas Whitney Davies
Dr Evelyn Ann Lord
Professor Martin Bobrow
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
147
Senior Members
as at 1 October 2007
Our resident senior members contribute to the College in many ways. The list comprises
those who are post-doctoral researchers in Faculties and Departments, holders of
University offices, Wolfson graduates who continue to live and work in and around
Cambridge, and, in a long-standing Wolfson tradition, distinguished non-academic
members of the local community who have been invited to join the College as senior
members.
Mrs Elizabeth Abrams
Mr Peter Agar
Dr Ismael Al-Amoudi
Dr Martin Allen
Dr Dimitris Angelakis
Dr Alvaro Angeris
Dr Dawn Arda
Dr Jonathan Ashley-Smith
Dr Padmanabhan Badrinath
Mr Adrian Barlow
Mr Richard Barlow-Poole
Dr Nick Baylis
Mr Jonathan Beart
Dr Laura Beers
Dr James Bendall
Mr Ronald Bennett
Mrs Doreen Bennett
Dr Sumit Bhattacharyya
Professor William Block
Dr Cameron Boyd-Taylor
Mrs Kay Bridge
Mrs Doreen Burgin
Mr Nicholas Butler
Dr Diana Carrió-Invernizzi
Dr Alessio Ciulli
Dr Jennifer Clark
Mr Andrew Clarke
Ms Alix-Aurélia Cohen
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Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Mr Richard Collet-Fenson
Dr Lorenzo Corti
Mrs Johanna Crighton
Dr Pamela Davis
Ms Penelope Davison
Dr John Dawson
Mrs Barbara de Smith
Mr Peter Deer
Dr Maria Laura Di Domenico
Mrs Lesley Dingle
Mr Peter Donovan
Mr Adrian du Plessis
Mr Archibald Duberly
Dr Timothy Duff
Mr Anthony Dye
Professor John Edwards
Mrs Susan Eltringham
Mrs Sonia Falaschi-Ray
Miss Elizabeth Falconer
Mr Jan Filochowski
Mr Richard Fisher
Sir Ronnie Flanagan
Dr Derek Ford
Dr Anne Forde
Dr Matthew Forrest
Mr Aidan Foster
Dr John Fowler
Mrs Briege Gardner
Dr Andreas Georgiou
Ms Janet Gibson
Dr Carrie Gillespie
Dr Jane Goodall
Dr Richard Gordon
Dr Philip Goyal
Ms Lesley Gray
Mr Colin Greenhalgh
Dr Emmanouela Grypeou
Dr Conrad Guettler
Revd Canon Margaret Guite
Mr Dennis Gunn
Dr Hannelore Hägele
Mrs Carol Handley
Mr David Harris
Dr Catherine Harter
Dr Jürgen Harter
Mr Gregory Hayman
Lord Hemingford
The Revd Christian Heycocks
Mrs Lynn Hieatt
Dr Suzanne Hoelgaard
Dr Mark Hogarth
Dr Martin Hohenadler
Dr Theodore Hong
Dr Günter Houdek
Mrs Beverley Housden
Professor James Hughes
Mr Roland Huntford
Dr Stacey Hynd
Ms Mary Jennings
Dr Christopher Johnson
Mrs Faith Johnson
Mrs Anna Jones
Dr Robert (Roy) Jones
Mr John (Ieuan) Jones
Professor Brian Josephson
Dr Nikiforos Karamanis
Dr Elizabeth Keeler
Mrs Ruth King
Dr Wendy Kneissl
Dr Julia Krivoruchko
Mallam Abba Kyari
Dr Ulrich Lang
Dr Sandra Leaton Gray
Ms Dawn Leeder
Mr Chris Lewis
Mrs Pamela Lister
Dr Janet Littlewood
Dr Yinglin Liu
Mrs Judy Lowe
Mrs Angela Lucas
Professor Peter Lucas
Dr Carlos Ludlow-Palafox
Dr Sebastian Macmillan
Dr Isobel Maddison
Dr Anil Madhavapeddy
Mr Paul Malpas
Miss Ferial Mansour
Dr Francesca Marchetti
Mr Michael Marshall
Mr Louis McCagg
Mr Richard Meade
Dr Anthea Messent
Dr Arnaud Miege
Mr Adrian Miller
Miss Josephine Miller
Mr Steven Miller
Dr Sarah Monk
Dr Francesco Montomoli
Dr Raquel Morales
Mr Roger Morgan
Mrs Alexandra Morris
Mr Gordon Morrison
Dr Sebastian Mosbach
Mr Matthew Moss
Mrs Marilyn Motley
Mr John Mott
Mrs Lesley Murdin
Dr Paul Murdin
Dr Dmitry Nerukh
Mrs Linda Newbold
Dr Christine Nicoll
Dr Richard Nixon
Dr Claire O’Brien
Lady Oliver
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
149
Mrs Beryl O’May
Dr Ian O’Neill
Professor Christine Oppong
Mr Ray Palmer
Dr Elinor Payne
Mrs Hilary Pennington
Dr Fabien Petitcolas
Dr William Pickering
Dr Anthony Podberscek
Dr Julia Poole
Mr Ian Purdy
Mrs Ruth Quadling
Mrs Gwyneth Rees Evans
Dr Alan Rickard
Mr Matthew Riddle
Revd Keith Riglin
Lady Joan Riley
Dr Leendert Rookmaaker
Dr Jennifer Sambrook
Dr Robert Sansom
Dr Alexander Schekochihin
Dr Jochen Schenk
Mrs Margaret Shaw
Miss Rachel Shaw
Mrs Jacqueline Sheldon
Mr Richard Shervington
Dr Yury Shtyrov
Dr Neville Silverston
Mrs Francoise Simmons
Mr Michael Simmons
Mr James Smith
Dr Laurence Smith
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Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Dr Anna Snowdon
Professor Rosanna Sornicola
Dr Clifford Squire
Dr Thomas Stainsby
Dr Alison Stephen
Mr Thomas Stevens
Mr Richard Synge
Dr Charles Tahan
Dr Daniel Tari
Mr Donald Taylor
Mr Nicholas Tippler
Dr Tri Tuladhar
Ms Rachael Tuley
Mrs Rosemary Turner
Professor Alberto Varvaro
Dr Martin Vestergaard
Dr Maria-Elena Villamil
Dr Philip Ward
Miss Ruth Webb
Dr Peter Webster
Dr Margaret Whichelow
Dr Frank Whitford
Ms Rebecca Whittingham-Boothe
Dr Olwen Williams
Lady Williams
Mrs Sue Wiseman
Dr James Wood
Professor Toshiki Yamamoto
Dr Kevin Xiao Yu Yang
Dr Giles See How Yeo
Dr Elie Zahar
Visitors 2006–2007
VF
VS
SAV
PF
VV
=
=
=
=
=
Visiting Fellow
Visiting Scholar
Senior Academic Visitor
Press Fellow
Vacation Visitor
Dr Gertrude Abbink
VF
Cmdr Jamel Abd Rahman
VF
Dato’ Zulkifli Bin Abdullah
Dr Hugh Adlington
Professor Konstantin Anokhin
VF
VF
SAV
Professor Richard Arena
Professor Yuko Asaka
VF
VS
Dr Kadriye Bakirci
The Hon. Sir Ian Barker
VS
SAV
Dr Sandrine Baume
Dr Deborah Baumgold
Professor Michael Belgrave
VF
VF
VF
Dr David Berry
Dr Malaika Bianchi
VF
VS
Dr Roland Bleiker
Dr Eric Block
Mr De-Valera Botchway
Dr Alex Boussioutas
SAV
VF
VF
VF
Mr Stephen Braunias
Professor Luigino Bruni
Dr Fiona Burns
PF
VS
VF
Dr Mikhail Burtsev
Professor Li Cao
Mr Richard Castle
Professor Yong Chen
Dr Sudhir Chopra
SAV
VF
VS
VF
VS
Academic Medical Centre,
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Royal Malaysian Navy Leadership
Centre, Lumut, Malaysia
Royal Malaysia Police, Kelantan, Malaysia
King’s College, London
Russian Academy of Medical Sciences,
Russia
University of Nice, France
Kawamura Gakuen Womens’ University,
Japan
Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
Bankside Chambers, Auckland, New
Zealand
IEPI, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
University of Oregon, USA
Massey University, School of Social and
Cultural Studies, New Zealand
Faculty of Law, University of the West Indies
Department of Law, University of Parma,
Italy
University of Queensland, Australia
University of Albany, USA
University of Cape Coast, Ghana
University of Melbourne/Western Hospital,
Australia
Sunday Star-Times, New Zealand
Università di Milano-Bicocca, Italy
University of Sydney, Faculty of Law,
Australia
Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
Tsinghua University, Beijing, PR China
Cambridge City Council, UK
Sichuan University, PR China
Belgium
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
151
Professor Noel Cox
VF
Dr Purnamita Dasgupta
VF
Mr Prithviraj Dass
Professor William Dove
Dr Jinyan Fan
Ms Liesel George
Dr Stacy Gillis
Professor John Gillroy
Miss Harumi Goto (Kudo)
VS
SAV
VF
VS
VF
VF
VS
Dr Junhua Guo
Mr Michael Hands
VS
VF
Mr Chikara Hirai
Professor Thomas Hodgson
Professor Misao Iida
VS
SAV
VS
Dr Toru Inui
Professor Khalid Ismael
Dr Yutaka Iwami
Ms Leila Iyldyz
Mr Yi Jian
VS
VS
VV
VS
VF
Ms Jaquelina Jimena
Dr Andrew Kanter
PF
VF
Dr Norman Katter
VS
Dr William Kautt
VS
Dr Peter Kjærgaard
Mr Kye-Hyun Ko
VF
VS
Dr Koung Suk Kwak
The Hon. Justice Bruce Lander
Dr Carlos Leone
Dr Qi Liu
VS
VF
VS
VF
Professor Antonia Logue
Mr Mzimtsha Maku
Dr Justin Malbon
VF
VS
VF
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Auckland University of Technology, New
Zealand
Indian Council for Research, New Delhi,
India
University of Cape Town, South Africa
University of Wisconsin, USA
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, PR China
South Africa
University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Lehigh University, USA
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science,
Japan
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, PR China
Dept of Geography, University of
Cambridge, UK
Railway Technical Institute, Tokyo, Japan
North Carolina State University, USA
Graduate School of Integrated Arts and
Sciences, Hiroshima University, Japan
Kyoto University, Japan
University of Mosul, Iraq
Kokushikan University, Tokyo, Japan
British Embassy, Astana, Kazakhstan
Independent Film Maker, Photographer
and Writer, Beijing, PR China
Freelance Journalist, Argentina
Millennium Villages Project, Earth Institute,
Columbia University, USA
Queensland University of Technology,
Australia
US Army Command and General Staff
College, USA
University of Aarhus, Denmark
Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice,
South Korea
Kyungwoon University, Seoul, South Korea
Federal Court of Australia
Paco d’Arcos, Portugal
School of Electrical Engineering &
Information, Sichuan University, PR China
France, USA, Ireland, Oxford UK
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Law School, Griffith University, Australia
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Professor Yasushi Mano
VS
Dr Jessie Maritz
Professor Michael McKenzie
VF
VS
Colonel Affendy Mohd bin Abdullah
Professor Dr Eduard Mühle
VF
VF
Professor Dr Ulfrid Neumann
SAV
Dr Ming Yan Ngan
Mr Shasa Nulliah
Professor Takashi Okuhara
Revd Dr Michael Okyerefo
VS
VS
VS
VF
Dr Jennifer Oldstone-Moore
VS
Professor Shunji Ouchi
Dr Michele Panzavolta
Professor Sophie Papaefthymiou
Dr José Penalva
Ms Sylvie Pignot
VS
VS
VS
VS
VV
Dr Cyriac Pullapilly
Professor William Quinn
SAV
VF
Dr Massimo Ragnedda
Dr Ajewumi Raji
VS
VF
Professor Bo Reimer
Dr Peter Roberts
Professor Margaret Robertson
VF
VF
VF
Mr William Robinson
Dr Hannes Rösler
VF
VF
Dr Giesela Rühl
VF
Professor Dushka Saiyid
VF
Professor Kazuyoshi Sato
VS
Department of English and American
Literature, Gakushuin University, Tokyo,
Japan
University of Zimbabwe
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology,
Australia
Ministry of Defence, Malaysia
Dept of History of Eastern and East Central
Europe,
Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany
Law Faculty, University of Frankfurt,
Germany
Honk Kong Institute of Education
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Senshu University, Japan
Department of Sociology, University of
Ghana
Dept of Religion and East Asian Studies,
Wittenberg University, USA
Shimonoseki City University, Japan
Faculty of Law, University of Bologna, Italy
Institut d’Études Politiques de Lyon, France
University of Murcia, Spain
University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne),
France
Saint Mary’s College, Indiana
Department of English, University of
Arkansas
University of Sassari, Italy
Dramatic Arts, Obafemi Awolowo University,
Nigeria
Malmö University, Sweden
University of Kent, UK
La Trobe University, Faculty of Education,
Australia
Times Higher Education Supplement
Max Planck Institute, Law, Hamburg,
Germany
Max Planck Institute, Law, Hamburg,
Germany
Department of History, Quaid-i-Azam
University, Islamabad, Pakistan
Rissho University
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
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Mr Tatsuro Sato
Mr Björn Scheuermann
Dr Cornelia Schoeck
Ms Mary Schollum
Professor Jack Shepherd
Dr Falak Sher
Professor Andrew Simester
Dr Roger Spegele
Mr Neville Spykerman
Professor Amrit Srinivasan
Professor Peter Stansky
Dr Gregory Sutton
Mr Iannis Symplis
Mr David Tait
Dr Anthony Tarr
Dr Badri Tiwari
Professor Shigeki Tomo
Professor Tomihisa Tsuji
Professor Sook Young Wang
Dr Farooq Wasil
Professor Howard Wolf
Dr Qijing Yang
Dr Hai-Tao Zhang
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VS
Department of English, Japan Women’s
University, Tokyo, Japan
VS
Computer Science Institute, Germany
VF
CRASSH
VS
New Zealand Police
APF Dartmouth College, USA
VS
PIEAS, Islamabad, Pakistan
VF
National University of Singapore
SAV Department of Politics, Monash University,
Australia
PF
New Straits Times, Malaysia
VF
Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India
SAV Stanford University, USA
VF
Case Western Reserve University, USA
VS
The Council of State, Supreme
Administrative Court of Greece
VS
Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, South Africa
VF
University of the South Pacific, Fiji
VF
G.B. Pant Social Science Institute,
Allahabad, and CU Smuts Visiting Fellow,
India
VS
Kyoto Sangyo University, Japan
VS
Kokushikan University, Japan
VF
Inha University, South Korea
VS
Asian School GEMS, United Arab Emirates
SAV State University of New York at Buffalo, USA
VF
Renmin University of China, PR China
VS
Dept. of Control Science & Engineering
(HUST), Wuhan, PR China
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Obituaries
Graeme William John Rennie Fellow and Emeritus Fellow since 1983
Born 3 June 1939 – Died 3 November 2006
Gordon Johnson
Graeme Rennie, who died on 3 November 2006, was a quite exceptional University
administrator who played a key role in developments in Cambridge for nearly 30 years.
He hailed from Aberdeen, where he was born on 3 June 1939. He went to Aberdeen
Grammar School and left when he was 16 to train as a journalist with the Kemsley
Newspaper Group. This was followed by a five-year stint in the Aberdeen and District
Milk Marketing Board where he was responsible for planning and implementing the
Board’s public relations campaigns.
In 1965, having taken ‘A’ levels in Economics and Economic History from evening
classes, he returned to full-time study, gaining higher level passes in the Scottish
Certificate of Education in English, French, Biology and History. This encouraged him to
enter the University of Aberdeen to read history, and he graduated with an MA in 1970.
For the next two years he researched, and taught the social history of Scotland in the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
It was as an Administrative Assistant, however, that Graeme came to Cambridge in
1972 and where he spent the rest of his career. His acute intelligence, and his
unconventional background, made him an ideal person to work within a rapidly
changing Old Schools system. In the early 1970s, the University’s corps of central
administrative officers was tiny, and many Faculties were still administered by University
lecturers with modest secretarial support. Graeme’s first major task was to combine work
for the General Board itself with the administration of two major Faculties – English and
History – both newly located as physical entities on the Sidgwick site. This Graeme did
with consummate skill: not only was he an outstanding administrator who rapidly
acquired a formidable understanding of Cambridge and stock of knowledge about
Cambridge affairs, but he was an unassuming and adept politician, able to guide a
committee without its members feeling the tug on the reins, or to circumvent the follies
of one academic prima donna or another without anyone really noticing what had
happened.
The role of the central bodies in Faculty affairs has always had some tensions
associated with it, and it is to Graeme’s credit that, whatever the outcome of any
particular skirmish, colleagues at both ends knew he had done the best possible job and
respected his professional expertise and integrity. Ten years or more with English and
History was rewarded with promotion, and with responsibility for major General Board
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
155
Committees. He was also seen as something of a trouble shooter – or the trusted
administrator to be sent off to deal with a particular difficult problem: thus he stood
forth as the Secretary of the Faculty of Economics, and then again as Secretary of the
Natural Sciences Committee – the latter a position requiring grasp of the most complex
detail imaginable.
He was incredibly hard-working, and was brilliant at providing relevant information
for the Committees he served, as well as being a careful guide to the chairmen of the
Committees he serviced (he taught me so much in the periods I chaired the General
Board’s General Purposes (now Education) Committee and the Library Committee). He
was also friendly and open, and we enjoyed his company at Selwyn (he became a
member in 1974) where he was particularly helpful with the historians. In 1983 he was
elected to a Fellowship at Wolfson College, where he served on a number of potentially
contentious committees (Gardens and Bursarial come to mind), bringing a certain canny
Scottish wisdom to the resolution of matters on their agenda. For many years, this
somewhat shy and self-deprecating man presided over Burns Night – giving full dramatic
rendition to the words of the poet, and plunging his dirk in the haggis with real fervour.
He was knowledgeable about many whiskies and appreciated a fine malt.
He retired in 1999, and looked forward to spending time with Audrey, his wife, who
had seen less of him than might have been thought reasonable as he kept the
University’s affairs in order. They had two daughters, and it was a particular pleasure for
him to enjoy the company of his five grandchildren.
Kurt Lipstein Honorary Fellow since 1999
Born 19 March 1909 – Died 2 December 2006
Andrew von Hirsch
Kurt Lipstein, one of Cambridge’s most
distinguished legal scholars and a well-known and
much-admired figure here, died in his 98th year,
December 2006. He had remained extraordinarily
active in teaching and scholarship until the end,
and attended his last public function at the Law
Faculty only a fortnight before his death, on the
occasion of the 70th anniversary of his obtaining
his PhD in Cambridge.
Professor Lipstein was born in Frankfurt am
Main in 1909, of a privileged local family, and was
raised in Frankfurt. He completed his law studies
at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in
1931. With the accession of the Nazis to power in
1933, he emigrated to England, and obtained a
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place at Trinity College to pursue his doctoral studies. He defended his Cambridge PhD
in 1936, and then began a career of teaching and research at Cambridge – one that
continued for the next seven decades. He obtained a University lectureship in law in
1946, became Reader in Conflict of Laws in 1962, and was appointed Professor of
Comparative Law in 1973. He joined Clare College as a Fellow in 1956, and more recently
was elected an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College.
Although his earlier work (and his 1936 Cambridge doctorate) concerned Roman law,
his main scholarly interests and reputation related to private and public international
law, especially conflict of laws. On this latter subject, the perspectives that he developed
have become the leading view today among conflict-of-laws scholars. An extraordinary
achievement of his, accomplished late in his career, was the resolution of the so-called
‘Renvoi’ problem in private international law. The principal scholarly body in this area,
the Institut de Droit International, adopted his resolution of the problem in 1998, having
repeatedly tried and failed to come up with solutions. At the time he achieved this, he
was nearly 90 years old.
I met Kurt Lipstein shortly after I arrived in Cambridge in 1993. I received a phone call
at my office in the Institute of Criminology, and a cultivated voice said “My name is
Lipstein. I knew your father. Let’s have lunch.” My father was in Cambridge in the mid
1940s, taking a PhD in history, and it was then that Kurt and he met. They shared a
German background, numerous intellectual interests, and the experience of having been
interned by the British authorities (along with most other German refugees) at the
outbreak of the war. They became fast friends.
My first lunch with Kurt was followed by numerous other meetings, which will remain
among my best memories of being in Cambridge. He was an enormously cultivated,
engaging and witty man, with a great store of anecdotes about Frankfurt in the early
1920s, about coming to England and to Cambridge as a foreigner in the early 30s, and
about the variety of extraordinary (and sometimes odd) personalities he knew and dealt
with during his decades at the University.
One of Kurt’s remarkable characteristics during the time I knew him was his seeming
immunity to the ageing process. In his words: “I don’t do old age”. This was apparent to
anyone who talked with him about any of his wide variety of interests. It was also
apparent to anyone seeing him bicycling at speed on the streets of Cambridge, on an
ancient bicycle that looked as though Kurt had acquired it when he first arrived. From
his manner and energy, I imagined that he would always be with us. I wish he were.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
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Jack King, MBE Founding Fellow since 1965, Honorary and Emeritus Fellow since 1995
Born 19 September 1928 – Died 6 March 2007
Bill Kirkman
Jack King played a crucial role in the development
of Wolfson College into one of Cambridge
University’s largest and most international
colleges.
The College was founded by the University in
1965, as University College. It was not a full college,
but an ‘approved foundation’. King was secretary
to the trustees and soon became bursar, and,
working with the first president, John Morrison,
set about finding benefactors, managing the
building programme and turning the innovative
vision into a reality.
Unlike the Cambridge of the day, where only ten
per cent of the students were women, colleges
were single-sex and the emphasis was on
undergraduates, University College was open from
the beginning to both men and women, and it was for graduate students. (Later it
admitted some ‘mature’ undergraduates.) It had no high table. It welcomed visitors from
outside academe, to what was, from the start, an unstuffy and friendly community.
King knew Cambridge well. (He had been an undergraduate at Emmanuel College just
after the war.) He also had a clear sense of purpose and single-minded efficiency, which,
combined with a formidable and flamboyant personality, made him a force to be
reckoned with.
He developed good relations with the American philanthropist Fairleigh Dickinson,
who was the College’s first significant benefactor, enabling the first residential building to
be built. He then formed an excellent relationship with Sir Isaac and Sir Leonard
Wolfson, as a result of which the Wolfson Foundation made the generous donation for
more buildings. The College changed its name to Wolfson in 1972.
In 1977, the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, Wolfson became a full college. The
Queen performed the opening ceremony, presided over by the Duke of Edinburgh, as
Chancellor of the University and Visitor of the College.
The College, in effect, had come of age, and, having played such a key role in finding
the money and organising the building programme, together with the tasks of day-today management, King retired from the bursarship in 1979, and took up a new post as
director of the Wolfson Course and Programme, which brought together men and
women from industry, commerce and the police, from the UK and overseas. It was a
strong assertion of the College’s belief in bridging the academic and non-academic
divide, and King brought to the role the same energy that he had demonstrated as
bursar. It was no surprise that several chief constables attended his funeral.
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King’s commitment to the ‘new’ Cambridge went alongside a deep love of Cambridge
tradition. He greatly relished his period as Senior Proctor of the University in 1991–92.
King made an important contribution to the life of Wolfson College, and the University
as a whole. He was tough, determined and never afraid to speak his mind. But all who
knew him were often amazed at the huge breadth of his interests. All greatly appreciated
his qualities, his wit and the generosity of his friendship. Being appointed MBE in 2002
was a small recognition for a record of massive achievement.
He had the satisfaction, a few days before his death, of launching his personal
chronicle of the first 40 years of Wolfson College.
King’s first wife, Margaret, died in 1958. He is survived by his wife, Ruth, and his three
daughters and four sons.
(reprinted by kind permission of The Times)
Karen Spärck Jones, FBA Fellow since 2000 and Honorary Fellow
Born 26 August 1935 – Died 4 April 2007
Ann Copestake and Markus Kuhn
Professor Karen Spärck Jones was one of the
pioneers in information retrieval (IR) and natural
language processing (NLP). She worked in these
areas since the late 1950s and made major
contributions to the understanding of information
systems. Her international status as a researcher
was recognised by the most prestigious awards in
her field, the ACM SIGIR Salton Award amongst
many others, as well as by her election as a Fellow
of the British Academy, of the American
Association for Artificial Intelligence, and as a
European AI Fellow.
Karen Spärck Jones started her research career
at the Cambridge Language Research Unit in the
late 1950s, working on the use of thesauri for
language processing. At this time she collaborated
with Roger Needham (Fellow 1966–2003) whom she married in 1958. Her PhD thesis
‘Synonymy and Semantic Classification’ is now recognised as having been far ahead of
its time in its exploration of combined statistical and symbolic techniques in NLP.
In the 1960s, she started working on information retrieval. She introduced IDF term
weighting, a technique which has been adopted as standard in modern systems,
including Web search engines, and has percolated to other language processing
applications. She subsequently collaborated with Stephen Robertson to establish the
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Photo courtesy of Stephen Robertson (from his personal
collection)
Photo courtesy of Stephen Robertson (from his personal collection)
value of relevance weighting for terms, a key step
in the development of a highly successful
probabilistic model of retrieval to which she
continued to contribute. Later she moved back to
research on NLP, although maintaining an interest
in IR. She was instrumental in establishing the
Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems research
area in the UK Alvey programme, which funded
hundreds of projects and provided a huge boost to
AI and language work in the UK in the 1980s. She
also carried out her own research on natural
language front ends to databases and on
heterogeneous information-inquiry systems.
Her more recent work was on document
retrieval, including speech applications, database
query, user
Pundit (18" high including base)
and agent
modelling,
summarising, and information and language
system evaluation. She received funding for
projects on Automatic Summarising, Belief
Revision for Information Retrieval, Video Mail
Retrieval, and Multimedia Document Retrieval,
the last two in collaboration with the Engineering
Department. Karen was a major figure in the
evaluation community and was thus involved in
setting the
standards
Ammonite (14" across, corrugated cardboard
and wire)
for a large
proportion
of the work in NLP in the US and elsewhere.
Apart from her personal work, Karen Spärck
Jones consistently promoted research in her field,
both nationally, as in her Alvey Coordinator role,
and internationally, perhaps most notably as
President of the Association for Computational
Linguistics (ACL) in 1994. Her standing as a senior
woman in computing was marked by her speaking
at the first Grace Hopper Conference, and by
giving the Grace Hopper Lecture at the University
of Pennsylvania.
In Cambridge, she was involved in teaching on
Wall hanging in the main lecture room in the
Microsoft Research Building
the MPhil in Computer Speech and Language
Processing for many years and also taught information retrieval for the Computer
Science Tripos. She had many PhD students, working in remarkably diverse areas of NLP
and IR.
Karen Spärck Jones had a wide range of outside interests, most notably sailing: she
and Roger Needham bought their first boat in 1961 and later sailed an 1872-vintage Itchen
Ferry Cutter. She was an active artist in her own right working in a variety of media as
illustrated in the photographs of her work. She was also an avid collector of woven
baskets from around the world, and her significant collection is now held by the
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Her colleagues at the Computer Laboratory will also remember her very energetic and
outspoken nature, her tireless support of the department, and her light-hearted humour
and generosity, all attributes that not even her final battle with cancer could affect. Both
Karen and her husband Roger Needham were Fellows of Wolfson College and were very
much engaged in College life as well as being generous benefactors. Karen will be sadly
missed.
Professor John Folsom Richards Visiting Fellow Lent and Easter Terms 2001
Born 3 November 1938 – Died on 23 August 2007
Gordon Johnson
Professor John F Richards, Visiting Fellow in the Lent and Easter terms 2001, and a friend
of mine going back to 1971, died on 23 August 2007. He was 68 years old. He was born in
Exeter, New Hampshire, the first of his family to go into higher education. He graduated
Valedictorian of his class in 1961 from the University of New Hampshire, marrying his
childhood sweetheart, Ann Berry, on the same day. After Ann had completed her own
Bachelor’s degree, the couple moved to the West coast where John pursued a doctorate at
the University of California, Berkeley. He took as his subject Mughal rule in south India in
the first part of the eighteenth-century – a topic of considerable importance and one
which required quite remarkable linguistic and technical skills to pursue. The resulting
book, Mughal Administration in Golconda, published by Oxford in 1975, is an
outstanding monograph – a clear analysis of institutional and financial structures (John
always believed the historian well advised to follow the money and work out where
effective power lay) – which had wide implications for our understanding of India in the
eighteenth-century and of the nature of both empire and Islamic rule in the world more
widely. From Berkeley he moved in 1968 to the University of Wisconsin in Madison,
where he proved an effective and stimulating teacher, of both undergraduates and
graduates, a reputation that was to follow him to the end. In 1977 he was lured to a senior
chair in the history department at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina: he was due
to retire in September 2007.
He had a wide range of intellectual interests, contributing to the study not just of the
history of the Mughal Empire but to South Asian economic history, comparative world
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
161
history, ecology and deforestation in South Asia, world environmental history, and
opium production and trade in the British Empire. He was my colleague as co-editor of
the New Cambridge History of India, and out of the thirty-odd volumes planned for that
series nearly half owe their inspiration to him and more than half of those published at
the time of his death bear his imprint. While in Cambridge in 2001, he gave the
University’s Kingsley Martin Memorial Lecture ‘Opium and the British Indian Empire’ –
a lecture the more remarkable for the light it shed on so many aspects of the subject:
political, economic, and cultural. When it was known that he had an incurable cancer,
colleagues assembled in Duke in September 2006 for a conference which celebrated
both the breadth and depth of his work. Papers from that occasion will be published by
Cambridge in 2008.
Besides excellence in research and teaching, John had a strong commitment to public
academic service, never shirking administrative tasks in his department and heavily
involved in organisations at national and international level (most recently with the
American Institute for Afghan Studies, founded in 2003 to support research in the history
and culture of Afghanistan and to promote scholarly ties between the United States and
Afghanistan). He was a trenchant critic, but a valiant supporter of good new work that
was soundly based archivally and did not shrink from mastering difficult disciplines (like
finance and economics) and languages. He was particularly supportive of younger
scholars in fields of global significance that higher education establishments in the West
have persistently ignored and undervalued.
John and Ann greatly enjoyed their sabbatical leave in Wolfson and contributed much
to our social life. Our hope was that, after retirement, they would visit again.
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The College has also been informed of the following deaths:
Francis R H Almond – we were notified by his widow, Margaret Almond, of his very
sudden death on 4 April 2007.
Dr Viviane Baesens – we were notified that she had died on 2 May 2007.
Dr Michael William Bayliss – we were notified by his widow, Janet Bayliss, of his death
at the end of February 2007.
Dr Frank Dawson – we were notified, by Hughes Hall, of his death on 23 July 2007.
Barry Froggatt – we were notified by his widow, Jean Froggatt, of his death on 15 April
2007.
Betty Gleeson-White (widow of Myles Gleeson-White, founding Fellow) – we were
notified of her death but no other details known.
Professor Richard Handscombe – we were notified by his widow, Dr Jean
Handscombe in December 2006, of his death from cancer on 24 December 2005.
Professor Joan Lai-Fook – we were notified in December 2006, by her brother, of her
death on 24 April 2004.
Professor Charles Maechling Jr – we were notified, by Cambridge in America in July
2007, of his death but no other details known.
David McCluney – we were notified, by the University Development Office, of his
death on 31 March 2007.
Professor Sheldon L Messinger – we were notified of his death by the University
Development Office in December 2006,
M Matjaz Poljsak – we were notified of his death, by the University Development
Office in December 2006, but no other details known.
Tryphone Rwechungura – we were notified, by the University Development Office in
December 2006, of his death during 2004.
Erratum: Issue 30 page 142
We were incorrectly advised that Mr William Pallister (JM 91/92) had died. We are very sorry for
this error and apologise for the distress caused to the family by the notice.
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
163
The Lee Library 2006–2007
Anna Jones, Lee Librarian
The Lee Library was busy again during the year in its role as a comfortable work space
for students at various stages of their careers. Work continued to update the collections
in key subject areas and to ensure that copies of core texts on undergraduate and some
taught graduate reading lists are available in College. Particular attention was given in
2006–2007 to the English section, and a reclassification project is currently in progress
which will bring literature and related criticism together in a chronological arrangement.
We are fortunate that many of the electronic resources now integral to academic work
across all disciplines are provided at present by the University on behalf of all its
members. Current staff and students now benefit from a huge range of ejournals, ebooks
and electronic databases accessible at their desktops in Cambridge, and in most cases
beyond, with password control. This means that we can concentrate our resources in the
Lee Library on maintaining the physical book stock, which continues to generate heavy
demand.
Medicine is one of the sections in most need of such maintenance because of the
regular publication of new editions. An appeal was launched among the Emeritus
Fellows in the Michaelmas Term for funds to help with the purchase of medical
textbooks, and we are extremely grateful to the following Emeritus Fellows who
contributed over £1000 in total (after Gift Aid) to the fund. A commemorative bookplate
has been placed in all the books purchased from the fund.
Dr T J L Alexander
Mr S L Bragg
Dr B D Cox
Professor R Hanka
Professor D H Hargreaves
Professor M B Hesse
Mr W P Kirkman
Dr R S McGregor
Dr E L Miller
Mr W J Ridgman
Dr M E Shepherd
Professor M Warner
Dr J West
Dr P Whittlestone
Dr D V Wilson
The College is also grateful to the following resident and non-resident members who
presented books to the Lee Library in 2006–2007, as well as to those who made
donations anonymously.
Miss Niomi Abeywardena
The British School of Archaeology in Iraq
Dr Shalini Chopra
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Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Dr Erik Christiansen
Professor Noel Cox
Dr Thomas D’Andrea
Dr Jennifer Davis
Dr G M Ditchfield
Faculty of Education Library
Dr Saman Fahimi
Mr Christian Fink
Ms Meiling Gao
Mr Tobias Graf
Mr David Hall
Mr David Harris
Dr John Henderson
Miss Meili Huang
Mr Roland Huntford
Mr Akilu M Idris
Dr David Jarvis
Professor Peter Jones
Mr Gil Klein
Professor Paul Latimer
Dr Bernard Karl Linser
Professor W Lubenow
Mr Alexander McCarthy-Best
Dr Donald MacDonald
Dr Eoin Macdonald-Nethercott
Mr Khurram Malik
Ms Rebecca Merry
Professor Franco Mosconi
Professor Hatsuko Niimi
Professor Christine Oppong
Mr Holger Petry
Ms Hélène Pignot
Mr Robert Pilsworth
Mrs Olive Polge
Professor Pier Luigi Porta
Dr Massimo Ragnedda
Miss Debashree Roy
Seeley Historical Library, Faculty of
History
Professor Karen Spärck Jones
Professor Malcolm Warner
Dr Ellis Wasson
Dr Iain Wilkinson
Professor Howard Wolf
Dr Elie Zahar
Professor Paulo Zatti
Mr Zizheng Zhang
The College is very grateful for the support it receives for the Lee Library. Now that the
Library has a mature working collection of books and limited space for expansion
beyond its core purpose, the best way for Members to continue to support its
development is through financial donations rather than the donation of books. This
allows the Librarian, Anna Jones, to match acquisitions to the needs of the current
student population, which are continually evolving. If you are considering making a
donation to the Library, financial or otherwise, please contact Anna Jones on
[email protected].
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
165
Donations to the College during
2006–2007
We are very grateful to the following:
Dr T J L Alexander
Professor R J Alexander
Mrs S B Ali
Mr G P Allen
Mr R O Amundsen
Dr J Ashley-Smith
Professor D L A Barker
Mr J M Beart
Dr P W R Beaumont
Dr S Bieber
Mr M R Bienias
Mrs S Bowring
Mr S L Bragg
Cambridge University Press
Professor C H Carlton
Professor O Chadwick
Professor J D Cherry
Dr C H Chothia
Professor R F Conti
Dr B D Cox
Dr M J Dauncey
Dr T W Davies
Dr J L Dawson
Mrs B L de Smith
Mr M DeFrank
Professor R E Dewar Jr
Dr J Di John
Mrs L M Dingle
Dr G M Ditchfield
Mr P M Down
Mr A du Plessis
Dr M W Dupree
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Dr O M Edwards
Dr H F Elson
Professor D Engels
Fairleigh S Dickinson Foundation
Mr H Farzarneh
Dr J D Firth
Mr D Fisher
Mr R K Fisher
Mr A Foster
Mrs B Gardner
Professor C J Gerbrandt
Ms N Gerrard
Professor F Giarratani
Professor C E Glassick
Dr T D Grant
Mr C A Greenhalgh
Dr C Guettler
Mr B Guttridge
Dr H Hägele
Mr C D Haggard
Professor M O Hall
Mr D J Hall
Mrs C M Handley
Professor R Hanka
Mrs M G Hardiman
Professor D H Hargreaves
Dr P J Heaney
Lord N Hemingford
Professor M B Hesse
Mr J M Hoare
Mr R A Holman
Mr M Howdle
Dr W Huber
Miss P Hyndman
Isaac Newton Trust
Professor L A Jackson
The Jerrehian Foundation
Dr G Johnson
Professor P B Jones
Dr R Jones
Dr N Karamanis
Dr E D Kessler
Mr J V Kinnier Wilson
Mr W P Kirkman
Professor G L Klein
Ms M E Korlas-Martin
Professor M Kosako
Mr G C T Kwan
Dr S S Large
Professor A Lentin
Mr G W Liebmann
Professor G A Lindbeck
Professor G J Lindell
Mrs P Lister
Dr & Mrs D Livesey
Professor F A Lösel
Dr A Lowrie
Mrs A M Lucas
Mr R M Lyford
Mr D G Magill
Mr P M Marcell
Mr J M Marley
Professor T L Marr
Dr R S McGregor
Professor F K McKinney
Dr T J Mead
Mr R C Meade
Microsoft Research Ltd
Dr E L Miller
Mr R I Morgan
Mr A S Morrison
G M Morrison Charitable Trust
Mr S C R Munday
Dr P Murdin
Mrs L C Murdin
Mr G I Murdoch
Dr J Mynott
Professor J J Naughton
Professor S P Ogden
Lady S H E Oliver
Professor S G Olswang
Dr I K O’Neill
Dr P Otterness
Mr R Palmer
Mrs H Pennington
Mr P H Perry
Professor R J Phillips
Professor J H Poivan
Professor A J Pollard
Dr J E Poole
Mr R W Post
Mr A M Reid
Mr W J Ridgman
Mr D C Roberts
Professor R E Robinson
The Sainer Charity
Professor G P C Salmond
Sansom-Eligator Foundation
Mr S Satomi
Professor W A Schaefer
Miss M T Schoofs
Professor M S Shapo
Mrs M Shaw
Dr J S Shepherd
Dr M E Shepherd
Professor R E Shepherd Jr
Mr R A Shervington
Mr H K Siddall
Dr N A Silverston
Professor A P Simester
Mr M P D Simmons
The Hon. R P Smellie CNZM QC
Dr L M V Smith
Dr S T Smith
Mr J Smith
Professor R S Sohal
Lord E J L Soulsby
Sir John Sparrow
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
167
Professor J J Tattersall
Miss J Taylor
Templeton Foundation
Mr D M M Thompson
Mr K A Tibbenham
Mr W F Tulasiewicz
Air Vice-Marshal P Turner
University of Cambridge
Local Examinations Syndicate
Professor T Ushiyama
Reverend Dr C B Van Dixhoorn
Dr F Waldron-Lynch
Dr A S Wallace
Professor M Warner
Dr E A Wasson
168
Wolfson College Magazine 2006– 2007 No . 31
Mrs A M Watkins
Professor P R H Webb
Dr W J S Webb
Dr J West
Dr F P Whitford
Dr P Whittlestone
H.E. Malcolm Wilkey
Dr D V Wilson
Ms K Worrall
Mrs E C Wright
Professor T Yamamoto
Professor N Yoshioka
Dr E G Zahar
Dr J J Zhang
Professor L R Zrudlo
Published in 2007 by Wolfson College Cambridge
Barton Road, Cambridge cb3 9bb
© Wolfson College 2007
Compiled and edited by Conrad Guettler
Front and back cover images of Wolfson College by Edward Hill
www.glartists.com
Designed and printed by
Cambridge University Press
www.cambridge.org/printing
As in previous years this magazine is printed on
environmentally friendly paper
These photosphere pictures of Wolfson College by Edward Hill now hang in the Combination Room. www.glartists.com
Wolfson College
CA M B R I D G E
Magazine 2 0 0 6 – 2 0 07
No . 31
Wolfson College CAMBRIDGE Magazine 2 0 0 6 ‒ 2 0 07 No . 31

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