Durham First issue 30

Issue 30 Spring/Summer 2011

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ON FIRE! International City of Light MY IOWA CHILDHOOD Bill Bryson’s farewell

AFTER THE WALL Private equity in Eastern Europe

PLANET DURHAM Are you on the map?

CHINA’S RICH LIST From the man who makes it

THE FIRST BA IN AFRICA? The Durham college in Sierra Leone Durham First – the magazine for alumni and friends of Durham University

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My Iowa Childhood Bill Bryson says farewell as Durham’s Chancellor

Image supplied by Andrew Heptinstall

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When I was a boy growing up in the pleasant but homogenized middle of America in the 1950s, one of my most agreeable chores was to go weekly to our neighborhood shoe repair shop, which was run by a small, irrepressibly cheerful Italian named Jimmy, to inquire after my mother’s brown and white pumps.

The reason Jimmy didn’t get any shoes finished was that he spent his whole life talking with his customers – about politics, baseball, the stock market, weather, anything at all. Whatever the topic, Jimmy treated it as a whole-body experience, gesticulating wildly, clutching his hair or heart, staggering backwards as if shot, turning every passing thought into melodrama – and all of it expressed with passion and urgency in a rich and musical accent that he seemed to have borrowed whole from Chico Marx. I don’t believe I have ever been more transfixed by another human being. I could have watched him for hours. Often I did.

The pumps had been in there for years, since long before I was born, in fact.

Jimmy’s shop was full of shoes that he hadn’t got round to repairing yet, all stowed in pigeon-hole shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling and ran the length of his shop.

Until I was fully grown, Jimmy was the only foreigner I knew. Nobody in Iowa was from anywhere but Iowa, except Jimmy, so everyone else in my world, and for hundreds of miles beyond, sounded just like me. Then I grew up and went to England, and found myself in a place where no one at all sounded like me, and where foreign accents weren’t uncommon, and now, nearly 40 years later, I find that that still dazzles me.

Every time anyone came in and asked after footwear, Jimmy would apologize profusely, fluttering his stained fingers helplessly, and say they would be ready real soon. Sometimes he would show the customer how the shoes had advanced to a nearer pigeon hole since his last visit, but as far as I know none ever reached the workbench.

Nothing more improves a circumstance, in my view, than to fill it with lots of different types of people – people with different voices, viewpoints, aspirations and experiences. Humans, after all, are the most gloriously diverse creation in the universe. What a shame it would be not to tap into that richness.

Durham University has been internationally minded for a very long time, but the fact that it is redoubling that commitment – as this issue of Durham First so inspiringly attests – positively makes my heart swell.

I fear we are living in a world in which governments everywhere seem determined to make it hard for young people to experience life in other countries. I really cannot think of a more misguided or shortsighted policy. It fills me with horror to think that if I were young now and as resplendently unpromising as I was in 1972, I almost certainly wouldn’t be allowed into the country. I cannot imagine how different my life would have been without Britain at the heart of it, but I do know that it would have been a much less interesting and rewarding one.

I appreciate, of course, that every society has to limit the number of people it takes in, but I do worry that in a burst of antiimmigrant zeal you end up turning away people that you would really like to have here – creative people like Clive James, say, or academics like Durham’s own Carlos Frenck or even the hopeful and not very promising young man who was once me.

In my view, welcoming people from abroad not only often gives them richer lives, but allows them to enrich our lives in turn. More than this, it also promotes understanding across cultures, and the importance of that can hardly be overstated. For all the variety humans evince in terms of language, national history, skin tone and the like, we are all still patently a single species living on a small, vulnerable planet, with the most serious risks to our future shared equally among us. The sooner we learn to embrace that commonality, the better the prospects for us all, and one place where we can do that most effectively is at world-class universities like Durham.

So celebrating diversity is a matter that has my warmest blessing.

I very much regret to say that this is the last you will be hearing from me in this space. By the time of the next issue, I will have stepped down as Chancellor. At the time of writing, however, that is still some months off, and it would seem odd for me now to start gushing out farewells.

However, I would like to express here a particular thanks to the alumni of Durham.

A great many of you have written to me over the years, and have always made me feel extremely welcome in your very special world. I really cannot thank you enough for that. Being Chancellor of Durham has been the greatest pleasure and privilege of my life, and I will miss you all very much. Thank you.

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VCQs Vice-Chancellor’s Questions Q:You often refer to Durham as a “World University”. What does this mean?

Q:Why as a World University is Durham not in the Russell Group?

A: Durham believes that being part of a diverse educational community of staff and students from around the world best prepares our students for success in whatever they want to do wherever in the world they wish to do it. We have a long and proud history of giving educational opportunities to those who might otherwise not have had access to a university like Durham. This started with overseas campuses in Africa and the West Indies over 100 years before other universities reinvented the idea. The Ruth First Trust which was established to bring students from southern Africa to Durham, or the Afghan women’s scholarships to which over 2,700 individuals contributed, are but two examples of the generosity of spirit of our alumni, staff and students. Durham people are working on every continent to help governments, communities and individuals through the outcomes of their research. Durham is also the UK member of the Matariki network of world universities bringing together the leading ‘smaller’ university from each member country.

A: The Russell Group was established as the group of large universities with medical schools just after Durham’s medical school had become the independent University of Newcastle. It is only the press which sometimes refers to the Russell Group, wrongly, as ‘the leading universities’.

In fact, if one looks at UK league table positions the Russell Group is a very mixed bag with Durham consistently ranked above all but two or three of them. Durham is a leading member of the alternative group of research-intensive universities, the 1994 Group, which prides itself, rightly, on ensuring research is combined with a strong student experience. It is quite appropriate, given its history of innovation that Durham is a leader of this ‘alternative’ grouping which now has far more influence behind the scenes with Government than the Russell Group as a whole.

From the Editor Welcome to the global edition of Durham First – the issue in which we celebrate Durham’s impact across the world. Almost a quarter of our students are international, as are a third of our academic staff, and this makes Durham a place of rich diversity – the meeting place of great minds and personalities.

Durham has the world’s most interesting alumni – we know it, you know it – and in this issue you will find stories about the man who compiles China’s Rich List, a woman

who was one of the first financiers into Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and an ex-Durham college that we believe created the first BA in Africa. You will also find Bill Bryson’s final note as Chancellor. By the time the next edition comes along Bill will be introducing his replacement, so I would like to thank him personally for everything he has given to Durham and to the alumni community.

What’s more, having a writer of his calibre in Durham First has meant far less editing!

Which brings me to some of the changes you might notice we have made to the magazine.

We’re calling it DF and have jazzed up other aspects of design in order to mark a big change in direction. One of the key findings from the last reader survey is that many of you looked to Durham First for ideas and new knowledge, so we have sought out stories that tell you something you might not know – about the development of that most

Q:What is your strategy for improving Durham’s position in the various world rankings?

A: Durham last year was one of the fastest movers upward in the world rankings, as was Durham Business School in its rankings. However, people at Durham have generally just got on with doing things well, rather than spending time shouting about it. It is true that we are not nearly as widely known around the world as we should be, even though many of our individual scholars are, but that is changing. As world rankings depend on opinion as much as fact, and as we all (I hope) believe Bill Bryson in his statement that there ‘is nowhere more infinite and intimate at the same time’, it is really up to all of us – alumni, staff and students – to espouse the virtues of our University and community wherever in the world we go.

If you have a tough question you would like to put to the V-C, please email durham.editor@durham.ac.uk

mysterious of financial alchemies, the private equity industry, about the world of crystallography and how it leads to the creation of new materials, and some new facts and figures about the global community of Durham alumni to which you belong. But most of all we have sought to tell Durham’s story through people – our academics and our alumni who paint the picture for us. As well, we have put much more of an emphasis on the way we use images, making them richer and more telling, as I hope the fabulous photographs of the Lumiere event will demonstrate. I hope you enjoy the new look.

I have one eye on the Editor’s inbox awaiting your comments.

Astrid Alvarez – Editor durham.editor@durham.ac.uk

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THE GLOBAL EDITION FEATURES

REGULARS

02 My Iowa Childhood

14 Planet Durham

04 VCQs

Bill Bryson’s farewell

Are you on the alumni map?

Tough questions to the Vice-Chancellor

06 After the Wall

16 The First BA in Africa?

04 From the Editor

The story of Joanna Barker, one of the first financiers into Eastern Europe

The Durham college in Sierra Leone

Welcome to the global edition of Durham First

17 First Person

24 Research Highlights

09 Momentum

Zoe Brogden, from Middlesbrough to New York

Research projects that will soon make an impact

18 China’s Rich List

25 Team Durham

The remarkable achievement of alumnus Rupert Hoogewerf

Student achievement in sport

20 On Fire!

Alumni stories from around the world

The Lumiere festival, a photo essay and alumni invitation

Back Cover – Alumni Events Calendar

The shifting balance of power in the Middle East

10 How the World sees Durham Views from our international partners; what internationalisation means to Durham

12 Crystal Clear The illuminating Judith Howard

26 News in Brief

Palatinate Christmas Ball

EDITOR Astrid Alvarez Alumni Relations Manager MANAGING EDITOR David Williams DEPUTY EDITOR Victoria Ridley Alumni Relations Officer

IMAGES Andrew Heptinstall (Bill Bryson, Joanna Barker, Judith Howard) www.andrewheptinstall.com DESIGN Crombie www.crombiecreative.com PRINT Linneyprint www.linney.com

CONTACT US Alumni enquiries/Letters to the Editor Alumni Relations Team Durham University, University Office Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP T: +44 (0) 191 334 6305 F: +44 (0) 191 334 6073 E: alumni.office@durham.ac.uk durham.editor@durham.ac.uk W: www.durham.ac.uk/alumni www.dunelm.org.uk © Durham University 2011

Opinions expressed are those of individual writers. Requests for reproducing material should be made to the Alumni Relations Office, where permission will usually be given.

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After the Wall – Private Equity, Private Life The story of alumna Joanna Barker Our life, said Pythagoras, resembles the great teeming crowd at the Olympic Games. On the one side are those who exercise their bodies in a quest for glory, on the other are those who sell goods for a profit. There are others (and they are not the worst) who have no aim but to observe how and why things are done, and to be spectators of the lives of others in order to judge and regulate their own.

Michel de Montaigne On Educating Children (Joanna Barker’s translation)

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The strip lights above the elevator are hung vertically. The walls are black and grey marble. The security is tight. And, once inside her offices, the décor is all modern corporate calm, nothing showy, no branding, just an atmosphere of careful control and the rational allocation of resources. The place hums with it, and with money.

For a while, a year or so before the financial downturn, private equity was under pressure from critics who claimed that it added no value to companies, accusing it of opacity and of over-leveraging and laying off workers.

Calls for greater regulation followed, and, even though it was widely admitted that the sector played no part in the systemic risks which caused the financial crash, the criticism has remained in the memory.

But Joanna was there at the very beginning and can tell the whole story. She graduated from Durham in 1981, a student of French literature from Collingwood College. Searching around for something to do, she found an advert for the Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation, applied, and became the only female graduate recruit, the only one from outside Oxbridge, and the only one without an economics degree. “Perhaps it was the HR Director’s idea of a joke,” she muses.

The Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation (ICFC) had been set up in 1945.

Its purpose was to provide capital to growing independent businesses who found it difficult to borrow from the banks but who were too small to raise money on the public markets.

until ten years later, and it wasn’t an aspirational career. But two things happened to change that.”

The first big change was the 1980s recession. As heavy-industry firms began to fail, small groups of managers realised that, although the whole business might be uneconomic, some of the constituent enterprises had a future. And it was ICFC that provided the finance.

“This was the genesis of the buy-out business,” says the former Controller. “My first buy-out investment was £200,000 into a steel foundry in Fife. It was very exciting because we were making it up as we went along.”

The second big change was the creation of a tax break which allowed individuals to obtain tax relief on investments in unquoted companies. The City realised that if groups of private individuals clubbed together they could create an investment fund. And the perfect people to run such a fund were at ICFC. So the elements came together – private funds, mezzanine finance, unlisted companies and expert management teams – creating the industry we have today. ICFC was renamed Investors in Industry and under the name 3i was to become one of the most famous private equity firms in the world.

“When one of the teams wants to say something important I can put on my important suit and go to the important meeting and say the important thing.”

She does have authority. Sometimes her sentences will clip off into an unsettling silence that could leave an interlocutor struggling, a technique she may have learned debating in the Durham Union Society where she was President.

So her shrinking from the public eye is nothing personal. “This is private equity,” she emphasises. “We never thought we needed to do PR, and our industry was completely unprepared for the criticism when it came, while our opponents were very clever at getting their ideas on to the radar. But, fundamentally, what they were saying was an outrageous slur. There are no doubt examples in the world where asset stripping has happened, but it isn’t what I do for a living.”

The reason she engages with publicity comes down to her sister and her mother, both of whom died of ovarian cancer within six weeks of each other in the summer of 2005. She wants exposure for the charity she formed as a result – Target Ovarian Cancer – and she wants it to outlive her.

“I am a very impatient person,” she says, But the privacy of private equity is much more “and I had the resources to get going than a financial descriptor. You get the sense straight away. So I hired people to set up that it defines much of this world, from the the office, build the website and we began criticism of its opacity, to the unbranded to let people know what we could do. But neutrality of the offices, to a certain lack I don’t run it. I set it up in the way I knew, following the rules of private equity. Hire “What we did would today be called mezzanine of comfort Joanna has in being interviewed. the best possible management team, agree finance,” she says. “We gave expensive loans, This latter is surprising, because this is someone with a formidable public presence. a business plan with long-term goals that with equity options attached, to businesses are ambitious but achievable, make sure such as small hotels in the Scottish Borders.

“I have authority,” she says at one point, there are the resources available, monitor I was called a ‘Controller’ – where they got results rigorously, but don’t interfere. that from I have no idea. It wasn’t even called naming one of the three things she says she is good for today, the other two being private equity then, the term didn’t originate experience and credibility with her investors.

Image supplied by Andrew Heptinstall

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Michel de Montaigne

“I am not interested only in doing good; I am interested in changing the world.

My sister was forty when she died, that’s why I have to do this, and because nobody is doing it to the extent or in the way that I want them to. Which isn’t to say that what other charities are doing isn’t credible, it’s just that resources are spread so thinly. GPs told us that the one thing they didn’t want was leaflets being sent to surgeries, so, with input from the British Medical Journal, we developed a training module. In the first two months, 2,500 GPs took part.”

Joanna’s story would be incomplete without mentioning her work in the place she made her name: Eastern Europe. The year the Berlin Wall fell she was singing in the Royal Choral Society’s Christmas concert at the Royal Albert Hall. That year the conductor was Hungarian and so he taught the choir a Hungarian carol. On the night of the performance, he turned to the audience and dedicated the carol to the people of Eastern Europe. “It brought the house down,” Joanna remembers, “and I knew I had to go there. Nobody could understand it at the time. I went to see a head hunter and, when I mentioned I was keen to work in the Eastern bloc, I could see it dawn on her that here was a chance to fill a post that had been vacant for months. She practically went through the rubbish bin, but it turned out to be the job I have now.

“They welcomed me with open arms, because here was someone who really wanted to do this. We started with four people in London, formed partnerships with the few individuals who were clubbing together to raise funds, and went to work. Now we have dedicated offices in the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Turkey and the Ukraine.

“It was a risk, it might not have worked, but when I give career advice to young women, I say specialise in something that not everyone wants to do. I was a big fish in a small pool, but the pool got bigger.”

Botton introduced many non-specialists to Montaigne in his popularizing books of philosophy and accompanying TV series.

“He’s a very immediate writer because he is writing about himself,” she says, explaining Montaigne’s attraction. “Everyone who reads him feels he is creating a relationship with them. I’m like that! I’m like you! That’s my motivation, that this is fantastic. I like reading this so I would like other people to like reading this too.”

She works on the translation in her “copious spare time” and is about halfway through the selection of essays she has chosen for what will become her first book. For Joanna, there is a gap in the market. The biographies and translations that are available are either philosophy-lite, self-help books or overly scholarly works filled with footnotes and a frantic faithfulness to the sentence structures of the original. She wants to create something freer and truer in spirit to Montaigne’s lively tone: a general translation of some of his more famous essays for the general reader.

If it wasn’t for her husband and fellow Durham University alumnus Graham’s long involvement in organising alumni events in Her mind seems to have turned, not against London, it is difficult to say that Durham would loom large in Joanna’s life. She picked private equity, but towards posterity. up her public-speaking skills from the Union, “I have had the fun pioneering days when a and the job advert from the careers service, group of us were in a room trying to work out but her father’s motto was “you can never what to do from first principles. Now we have go back”, and it wasn’t until a year ago that what she studied at Durham began to reassert a vast amount of back office staff and policies and compliance and maybe it is not so much itself. She began to translate Montaigne. fun anymore. So I am going back to the point I became a graduate trainee, not because Rational, sceptical, stoical, yet also free I want to leave the industry, but to see if I flowing, anecdotal and often strikingly am capable of doing something different. modern, at times even post-modern, Montaigne was a sixteenth-century French philosopher and writer. Bruised by the death “To write a book and get it published,”she says, “wouldn’t that be an exciting thing to do?” of a friend, he sequestered himself in his castle tower and began to compose the first real essays. His work has been undergoing For more information about ovarian cancer, a resurgence in the last few years. A new please go to www.targetovarian.org.uk biography has just come out, and Alain de

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Momentum

The shifting balance of power in the Middle East Professor Anoush Ehteshami is Dean of Internationalisation and Professor of International Relations in the School of Government and International Affairs Power in the Middle East has been a shifting and indeed a trade-able commodity since the emergence of regional states. In fact, even before the emergence of the nation state we can point to power struggles such as the one between the Hashemites of Transjordan and the al-Sauds in the Arabian Peninsula for the control of Hejaz and the premier holy sites of Islam in the early twentieth century. Competition in the Middle East therefore is a function of the embedded strategic rivalries that shape this region.

by others. Intervention though, even if it occurs, is often low key and indirect, which merely ends up feeding suspicion between the larger states. The strategic picture is further complicated by the growing role of the hitherto marginal Arab states. There is a group of small states – Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates – who these days punch well above their weight, and, in trying to act as honest intermediaries in the region, inadvertently end up sapping the influence of the large regional actors.

The result is that their (often financially

“We can for the first time anticipate a very different balance of power struggle taking shape in the region – that between the state and society.”

From the inception of the state system, and in particular the rise of pan-Arabism in the 1950s, to the present day, relations between the Arab states themselves, and also those between these states and the region’s non-Arab actors, has been in a constant state of flux. For the rest of the world, the intense rivalry between the Middle East states inhibits efforts to build confidence in the region and stymies the attempts to stabilise it. Access to its energy resources, its trillions of petrodollars and the impact of insecurities emanating from the region because of proliferation, terrorism or trafficking, all keep the attention of the international system and global powers firmly on the Middle East.

The region is further defined by the very uneven distribution of power between its states. Amongst a number of actual or potential regional power brokers (which certainly include the Middle East’s three non-Arab actors, Iran, Israel and Turkey), one finds a series of weak or fragile states; Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, Yemen; whose predicament invites intervention

supported) diplomatic interventions have tended to intensify the rivalry of the large states for influence.

Thus the Middle East region is best defined as complex layers of relationships amongst a group of unevenly resourced state powers and non-state forces. The interactions of these states and actors can best be characterised as fluid, contradictory and dialectical in nature. Furthermore, the fate of its multitude of actors is intensely interlinked, and the dialectics of their power relationships have meant that assumptions about the regional balance of power and zero-sum calculations about their relative positions tend to determine the course of diplomacy. As a consequence, what we have ended up with in the twentyfirst century is the most complex and unstable regional system in the world, which, by the virtue of its geopolitical, economic and strategic assets, continues to play a central part in determining the course of history in the vast terrains of Asia, Africa and beyond.

Middle East regional relations today are being driven by a number of uncertainties, chief amongst which one can mention the following: the so-called Arab Spring, which is the result of rising tensions between top-heavy states and increasingly young populations; al-Qaeda activities on the Arabian Peninsula, a new war over Iran’s nuclear program, renewed tensions in Lebanon and Gaza, new conflict arising from the fragmentation of Sudan, Iraq’s stability after the US troop-withdrawal, stabilisation of Afghanistan, rising tensions between top-heavy states and increasingly young populations such as in Libya.

As things stand, no state can see its way through these uncertainties with any clarity, and, despite the influx of oil revenues, the medium-term prospects for the region’s stability seem gloomier today than at any time since the Madrid peace conference in October 1991.

Yet, as we leave the first decade of the twenty-first century behind, we can for the first time anticipate a very different balance of power struggle taking shape in the region – that between the state and society. The former has had an iron grip on societies across the region for too long, and, thanks to popular uprisings in a number of countries in early 2011, the balance of power between state and society could be said to be tipping in favour of the latter.

The consequences of open societies and accountable governments in charge will be electrifying and hopefully usher in a new era of ‘democratic peace’ and dialogue.

The gloom is potentially giving way to optimism and the struggle of the region’s myriad democratic forces for a better future will keep the Middle East dynamic and on the tips of our tongues for at least another generation.

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How the World sees Durham

Professor Veronica Razumovskaya

Professor Ramesh K. Goyal

Professor Lindsay Whaley

Head of the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Institute of Philology and Language Communication

Vice Chancellor

Associate Dean for International and Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of Classics and Linguistics

The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda

Siberian Federal University Krasnoyarsk RUSSIA

For me, Durham is a city of thrilling antiquity and striking youth. It has the perfect combination of breathtaking landscape and architecture; marvelous conditions for studying, teaching and research and friendly professors and students. You can walk everywhere!

Krasnoyarsk and Durham differ greatly in geographical position, climate, landscape, origin, history, population, traditions, cuisine and culture. But they have in common two very important things – the students and the Universities. Durham and Krasnoyarsk students are very similar: young, energetic, interested, challenging, and hoping for a better future. The Universities are very similar and very different at the same time. But they have similar endeavors and their collaboration can be very fruitful and important for both.

Dartmouth College

INDIA

The relationship with Durham University has greatly added to the reputation of Maharaja Sayajirao University. Although our University has signed many memoranda of understanding with other institutions, the kind of projects being undertaken with Durham University are unique and longlasting. I expect a boost to research and cultural innovation projects. I was highly impressed with Durham for a number of reasons. Its old legacy is something we have in common – the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda started as Baroda College in 1881. There are similar areas of interest with expertise in both the Universities in archaeology, culture, biotechnology, and the arts. I am impressed by the collaborative vision of Vice-Chancellor Professor Christopher Higgins and for the work he did to create a Durham-MSU Baroda Scholarship scheme.

USA

Durham has that alluring sense of tradition and history mixed with the vibrancy of innovation. I experienced that first-hand on my first visit when I had the chance to hold some volumes from the rare books collection and to look at some holographs in the Centre for Electronic Systems.

I’m quite taken with the setting of the University (it is not often that one gets to eat in a castle), the quality of the faculty, and the range of academic programs.

Because of the similarities to Dartmouth, there is a certain familiarity about Durham, but there is also a uniqueness to the place that complements what Dartmouth has to offer. In this partnership, Dartmouth opens up a new set of opportunities for its students, staff and faculty, whether in research collaborations, student exchanges, athletic competition or the sharing of best practices.

“Durham is a city of thrilling antiquity and striking youth.”

What Internationalisation means to Durham PROFESSOR TOM MCLEISH Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) There’s a message I give to every new PhD student at Durham: that from this moment on they become members of an international family of people brought together not by nation, descent, language or faith, but by a mutual fascination in the research questions they share. This group will read each other’s results, meet and talk at conferences,

sometimes visit and work extensively with each other over years. The search for new knowledge and understanding is one of the truly global enterprises, and all university researchers will come to cherish their Asian, African, European and American colleagues over a career in which they share the development of a field.

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Views from our international partners

Professor Christopher Brown

Professor Yang Huang

Professor Cláudio Finkelstein

Founding Director of the International College

Director, Centre for Classical Studies

Zayed University

Peking University

Professor Doctor of the Post-Graduate program in the Law of International Economic Relations

One could rhapsodize about the historic buildings, the publication record of the faculty, the success of the students. One could contrast the quaint “college town” feel with the situation of Zayed University in a bustling capital city. One could speak of a buzzing energy at every turn, with intellectual discourse spilling off park benches and wafting through cafés and pubs. But I prefer to reflect on the totality as the key strength: it all seems to work together seamlessly.

The place and the people have rallied behind a mission and an organizational structure; as a package it is truly mighty.

While I had visited Durham University for conferences over the years, my first administrative visit occurred in January 2011.

During that trip, I started to understand more fully how successful and impressive the institution really is. In a phrase, Durham is characterized by an institutional confidence that arises from the depth of its excellence.

As I circulated through more than a dozen meetings with senior administrators, professors and unit heads, I came to realize that everyone seemed to have internalized a shared vision. Faculty, staff, and students all seemed certain, without any blatant arrogance, that they were doing remarkable things.

Pontificia Universidade Catolica de Sao Paulo

CHINA

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

I immediately fell in love with it. While visiting Durham University in October last year, I discovered that it is located in a beautiful place and that the people are truly friendly and warm. I instantly decided that Durham is the partner we are looking for. My association began more than a year ago when we started building a new programme of Classical Studies in Peking University. As Classics as a subject was (and still is) new to a Chinese university, we needed the support and collaboration of universities with good Classics programmes in our endeavour. Durham University came to our attention not only because it had a good and vigorous Classics programme, but also because we found that it was internationally orientated and that it had a strong will to build ties with universities all over the world. I myself look forward to more opportunities of association with Durham. To me it is a university with tradition which is open to the world.

BRAZIL

Durham is a ‘must-know.’ Being there is wonderful. There is no such place that combines academic excellence with scenery and landscape such as Durham’s. The people are fantastic, open and helpful at all times, making us feel the warmth when the weather was really cold! It has shown itself to be a centre of excellence, where care and attention to every single aspect of school life has been attended to. It really shows that the University is a result of centuries of past and present experiences. I think that a relationship between us and Durham would only enrich our mutual learning and teaching efforts.

“Durham is a ‘must-know.’”

SHARNE PROCTER Director, International Office When I first started working in universities in the late 80s and early 90s the focus was very much on the recruitment of international students to the UK. In the last few years, thankfully, we have taken a more holistic and enlightened view of internationalisation. Today, Durham’s International Office is involved in a much broader range of international activity

including the development of long-term global partnerships and networks, increasing opportunities for international study and work for all students and staff, leveraging scholarship funding to assist the best students to study from developing countries and much more.

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Crystal Clear The illuminating Judith Howard The machine in the basement is unique. It freezes matter. Makes it as cold as cold can be, and then, when it has done its work, it reveals how matter is made. There is no other like it in the world.

But it isn’t only the machines that she builds in the basement of the Chemistry Department that makes Professor Howard interesting; nor is it simply the profound nature of her fundamental research that the machines facilitate; and it is not just that she has combined this with high administrative achievement – she was the first female chair at Durham, the first at a research-led chemistry department in the UK; nor is it her broad range of interests – active in the Royal Society, a collector of contemporary art, a keen photographer. What’s interesting about her is the contrast between her resolute pragmatism and the investigations she conducts at the edge of the known world.

Because there is often a certain – what shall we say? – other-worldliness to people who work in the places where, what most people understand as reality, breaks down. She has none of that.

“We might discover a whole new branch of physics,” she says, as she explains one of her experiments.

Now some scientists might have said this boastfully, as if they were eager to impress.

Others might avoid saying it entirely, terrified of over-promising and betraying their excitement and so imagining the possibility away. But Professor Howard says it matterof-factly, adding, “or it could just be an odd artefact of the experiment. Until we can gather the data, we simply don’t know.”

Her pursuit of ever colder temperatures against which to investigate the properties of matter goes back to her days as a DPhil student at Oxford working at the Atomic Energy Research Authority at Harwell. It was there that she built her first machine. And, as she says, once you realise you can build your own instrumentation and find out things nobody else can, it kind of becomes a habit.

Back in the early Seventies however, in Professor Howard’s line of work, temperatures

could only be taken down to the point where liquid nitrogen would freeze (–210°C). Her new machine can conduct experiments at –271°C, that is just two degrees above absolute zero, the point at which all molecular motion ceases.

But it’s not the coldness that really matters.

It’s the data you can get from these conditions that motivates her. “The reason I build my own instrumentation is because you can’t buy machines off the shelf that will do the physics or chemistry I want to do,” she explains. “It’s exciting knowing that, if you get it right, you will be able to collect data that no one has been able to have before.

By freezing molecules to this ultra-low temperature, we can slow the motion of their constituent atoms to the point where the distances between them can be measured with extraordinary accuracy.”

This is crystallography and it is Professor Howard’s specialism. No one has yet found a way to “see” the atomic structure of molecules. Visible light has the wrong properties for the job, and there is no such thing as an X-ray photograph that shows an individual molecule, although there are electron microscopes that can outline atoms, given the right material. However, because crystals repeat their structure, it is possible to shine X-rays and neutron beams through their myriad layers of molecules and analyse what comes out the other side. And the results are magical.

As the beams pass through a crystal they diffract, creating complex patterns like the ripples from a handful of pebbles scattered into still water. Analyse the way the patterns combine and you find out something about the atomic structure of the molecules inside.

the diffraction of individual atoms has combined. We then do the maths and work out what this tells us about the molecular structure.”

But it is not only the relationships between atoms that can be illuminated with the machine in the basement, it also shines light on the bits between the atoms – at what is known as the electron density. At these low temperatures, some materials alter the way they behave, changing from insulators to semiconductors or even superconductors, going from being resistant to the through-flow of electrons, to actually speeding them on their way. If these changes can be understood, they can, potentially, be made to happen at ambient temperatures and so create a whole new class of magnetic or pressure switches with which engineers and technicians will one day change the world.

Professor Howard’s work is at the interface where the distinction between chemistry and physics also breaks down.

“I always wanted to do physics,” she says, “but I was ill-advised when I chose my A-levels and only took one maths subject, when to do physics then I needed to have taken two.”

You suspect you would not want to be that ill-advisor. Luckily for him, and for her, crystallography is an interdisciplinary subject and it has allowed her to work in physics, maths, engineering, and, through the study of protein structure, even biology.

She started her academic life at Bristol and then did DPhil work with Dorothy Hodgkin at Oxford who had just won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of Vitamin B12. The two of them were supposed to be examining insulin using neutron diffraction, “Basically we take an electronic photograph but, in the three years she was with Dorothy, of the crystal from many different angles and record the intensity of the diffraction patterns,” her crystals didn’t grow large enough.

Instead, she spent her time doing theoretical she explains. “This process can create as computational work with her co-supervisor. many as 100,000 spots on the image where

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“When I started, we literally produced photographic plates on which the diffraction patterns appeared as dark spots, and we estimated their intensity by eye, labelling them as strong, medium or weak. If you were lucky, you would be able to complete three crystal structures in the time it took to do a PhD.” Today they have the software to do three structures in a morning. Indeed, the most modern version of the software was developed

by Professor Howard’s team in Durham and now sells all over the world.

So she has her new machine and she has the software, and the only thing now holding Professor Howard back is her own time. This however is about to change as she is going to retire from managerial responsibility at the end of this year. She spent three years as Head of Department – “It was Buggin’s turn” – and is now coming to the end of a two-year stint in charge of Durham’s Biophysical Sciences Institute. “You do these jobs out of a sense of duty, and make the best job of it you possibly can.” Active in the Royal Society, she promotes, among other things, more graduates and more women into science.

What then will she do when she becomes an emeritus professor? Spend more time on her photography and collecting the art she loves?

“I want to go back into science and research and play with the machine I have built,” she says. “Do some exciting new science is the short answer.”

Professor Judith Howard is organising the Chemistry Department’s 50th birthday celebrations to be held on 23rd–24th September 2011. If you are interested in attending, please see www.durham.ac.uk/chemistry Image supplied by Andrew Heptinstall

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Planet Durham Are you on the map?

Dunelm Society is a global family, a world-wide alumni support network which transcends cultures and continents. We know we have over 135,000 graduates, and yet we only have records for 97,185.

Do you know of Durham alumni in your country who do not receive Durham First? Can you help us find any missing alumni and friends to strengthen our community?

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Keeping in touch with you is so important!

Please keep your contact details up-to-date so we can stay in touch with you wherever in the world you go.

We will send you information about relevant alumni associations and events in your area, along with news and updates from the University and your fellow alumni. Please email us at alumni.office@durham.ac.uk

Afghanistan (4) Albania (4) Algeria (11) Andorra (2) Angola (4) Anguilla (3) Antigua & Barbuda (1) Antilles (2) Argentina (26) Armenia (2) Australia (591) Austria (66) Azerbaijan (2) Bahamas (16) Bahrain (58) Bangladesh (44) Barbados (81) Belarus (3) Belgium (170)

Belize (2) Benin (5) Bermuda (19) Bolivia (3) Bosnia and Herzegovina (6) Botswana (12) Brazil (59) British Virgin Islands (4) Brunei (34) Bulgaria (22) Cambodia (1) Cameroon (7) Canada (500) Cayman Islands (12) Central African Republic (3) Chad (2) Chile (5) China (1,846)

China – Hong Kong (917) Colombia (15) Comoros (1) Costa Rica (3) Croatia (5) Cyprus (103) Czech Republic (81) Democratic Republic of Congo (5) Denmark (55) Dominican Republic (1) Ecuador (1) Egypt (67) El Salvador (1) Estonia (7) Ethiopia (7) Falkland Islands (1) Fiji (3) Finland (43)

France (774) French Polynesia (1) Gabon (1) Gambia (8) Georgia (4) Germany (920) Ghana (44) Gibraltar (111) Greece (598) Grenada (2) Guatemala (2) Guinea (3) Guyana (2) Honduras (4) Hungary (60) Iceland (26) India (273) Indonesia (25) Iran (46)

Iraq (14) Ireland (341) Israel (28) Italy (391) Ivory Coast (5) Jamaica (14) Japan (432) Jordan (129) Kazakhstan (34) Kenya (151) Korea (99) Kuwait (26) Kyrgyzstan (2) Laos (1) Latvia (8) Lebanon (13) Lesotho (6) Libya (33) Liechtenstein (1)

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YOU WERE HERE

751 442 2449

52

1646 3739 520

161

830

201 911 353 22 3 8

757

215

Based on DF mailing Summer 2010 of contactable alumni Map regions based on the UN classification of continental sub-regions Cartographer – Chris Orton

Lithuania (9) Luxembourg (44) Macau (15) Macedonia (1) Madagascar (1) Madeira (1) Malawi (18) Malaysia (350) Maldive Islands (1) Malta (30) Martinique (1) Mauritius (35) Mexico (47) Monaco (3) Mongolia (5) Montserrat (1) Morocco (14) Mozambique (1) Myanmar (3)

Namibia (10) Nepal (2) Netherlands (228) New Caledonia (1) New Zealand (166) Niger (3) Nigeria (107) Norway (153) Oman (42) Pakistan (83) Palestine (22) Panama (1) Papua New Guinea (4) Peru (11) Philippines (19) Poland (110) Portugal (81) Puerto Rico (1) Qatar (66)

Republic of Moldova (1) Republic of Singapore (276) Reunion (2) Romania (47) Russia (99) Rwanda (2) Samoa (1) Saudi Arabia (117) Senegal (2) Serbia (4) Seychelles (4) Sierra Leone (23) Slovakia (6) Slovenia (4) South Africa (177) Spain (404) Sri Lanka (67) St Kitts-Nevis (2) St Lucia (25)

St Vincent & the Grenadines (6) Sudan (35) Swaziland (10) Sweden (109) Switzerland (243) Syria (13) Taiwan (425) Tajikistan (7) Tanzania (37) Thailand (183) Togo (1) Tonga (1) Trinidad and Tobago (14) Tunisia (1) Turkey (82) Turkmenistan (1) Uganda (38) Ukraine (13)

United Arab Emirates (99) Uruguay (2) USA (1,837) Uzbekistan (8) Venezuela (10) Vietnam (19) Yemen (10) Yugoslavia (4) Zambia (16) Zimbabwe (40) United Kingdom (81,388)

TOTAL 97,185

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The Durham College in

Sierra Leone

Can you help us prove we created the first BA in Africa?

He was called N.S. Davis. That’s all we know at the time of going to print. But in 1878, he graduated from Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone to become “the first African to gain a Bachelor of Arts on his native soil.”

Fourah Bay College “Surrounded by palms, cotton and eucalyptus trees, on a headland washed on both sides by the sea, its rafters were made from the masts of condemned slave ships.”

Not many Durham alumni will have heard of Fourah Bay College, but it was an affiliate college of the University between 1876 and 1967. Founded by Anglican missionaries in 1827 on the site of an older educational institution, the College benefited from a rich linguistic environment as many of the local population were either rescued slaves

or their descendents. This led to it developing a reputation as the literary and linguistic workshop of West Africa, and it was at Fourah Bay that grammars, dictionaries and translations were begun for Yoruba, Hausa, Foula, Ibo, Mende and

Kanuri. Languages like Latin, Arabic and Hebrew were also taught and the College became known as the Athens of Africa.

After negotiations with several other universities, Fourah Bay was affiliated to Durham University on the 16th May 1876.

Durham’s decision was severely criticised in the racist press of the time, but, according to C.E. Whiting in his 1932 history The University of Durham, the College went on to produce “four bishops, eight archdeacons, nine members of the College staff, and over three hundred clergy and ministers.

Some students have proceeded to England and taken the medical degrees of Durham and other universities. Others have gone to the Inns of Court and been called to the bar. Some have prospered in business, and some have become government officials. Thirteen have taken the Bachelor of Civil Law degree and two the Bachelor of Divinity degree at Durham.”

It is Whiting who makes the claim that N.S. Davis was the first person ever to graduate in Africa. But is this true?

The University of Capetown in South Africa would appear to be Durham’s nearest rival, but investigations there suggest that it didn’t start awarding degrees until 1918.

So, if you can help, please get in touch.

Confirming that Durham created Africa’s first graduate would be a great result for the global edition of Durham First. durham.editor@durham.ac.uk

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First Person

From Middlesbrough to New York Zoë Brogden, BA (Hons) European Studies and German, St Cuthbert’s Society, 2000–2004 Reflecting on my time in Durham from a geographic distance, there are three qualities this truly student city gave me: nurture, flexibility and the true meaning of integrity of thought. Nurture from the support of staff and faculty, which was coupled with a flexibility which allowed me and my peers the intellectual space to develop. Integrity shone from the quality of the faculty surrounding us, a trait which I hope I take forward into my professional life.

From a personal standpoint, as my hometown is the much-maligned Middlesbrough, a town in north-east England which I continue to be fiercely proud of, I was intrigued by those who dedicated years of their lives to work and study in such an area of social and economic challenge, yet one with outstanding natural beauty and heritage.

“The benefit of an international body of staff was eye-opening and helped show me the full potential of international networking.”

In this respect, perhaps the most tangible immersion Durham gave me was access to international higher education. From never having lived away from home, I moved to Germany to complete my ERASMUS year at the University of Passau, a city not that dissimilar to Durham in size and charm.

The exposure such an exchange gives a mind at the BA stage is truly invaluable, and an experience which compounded my belief in the value of quality exposure to international higher education, not just for individuals able to take these opportunities, but also

for the societies which host them and those to which they subsequently return with fresh, critical eyes, ripe with innovative enthusiasm and ideas for development.

When I consider my strong regional identity and international outlook on life, both personally and professionally, Durham provided durable foundations. After all, academic quality, a truly international student community and faculty, and the nurture of the university environment can be nothing but a springboard for a rich, global life.

Zoë Brogden works at the Open Society Scholarship Programs of the Open Society Foundations, New York.

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China’s Rich List The remarkable achievement of alumnus Rupert Hoogewerf China has a million millionaires. Almost. There are currently 960,000 people with personal wealth of more than 10 million Yuan (or just under £1 million) and there are 60,000 super-rich who have more than 100 million Yuan.

Of the million millionaires, 55 percent derive their wealth from their private businesses, 20 percent are property speculators, 15 percent have made their money on the stock market, while the remaining ten percent are high-earning salaried executives. The average Chinese millionaire was born in 1972 and is, at 39 years of age, a full 15 years younger than his or her Western counterpart. Thirty percent of the millionaires are female.

We know this because wafting through the new Chinese world of mirror-glass skyscrapers and tinted-window Mercedes is an archetypal English gentleman who has made it his business to find out. Tall, slender and self-effacing, Rupert Hoogewerf is the same age as the millionaires he investigates and he has been compiling his Chinese rich list since 1999. The annual list is now an institution and has become the centrepiece of a publishing business aimed at the same entrepreneurial class it documents.

Apart from the Hurun Report, a monthly magazine which takes its title from his Chinese name, Rupert also publishes a biannual Wings and Water magazine that caters to demand for planes and yachts, a Hurun Art List for those who want to invest their wealth more tastefully, a series of country-specific Guides to International Education – as four out of five wealthy Chinese seek to educate their children abroad – and even a Horse and Polo magazine, that lushest of pursuits being the latest craze in so-called concrete China.

But it is the China Rich List that made his name. Its creation has been described by China Entrepreneur Magazine as one of the ten most important business events in the

last twenty years. Another magazine Global Entrepreneur, named Rupert among the 100 Top Influencers in China’s Globalization, while Dragon TV called him one of the 30 most influential people in China since the end of the Cultural Revolution. In a one-party state in which other political viewpoints are banned and in which religious, press and artistic freedoms of expression are carefully overseen, Rupert Hoogewerf has done more than simply catalogue the wealthy. He has found a way to describe and envision modern China.

“Imagine someone creating a North Korean rich list today,” he suggests, by way of a comparison. “It would be met with a stunned silence, but that’s how it was when we did the first rich list in China. People assumed that the only rich people were cronies of the government and that there were no real entrepreneurs, only nepotistic relatives of the elite. The China Rich List has proven that there are real, highly capable entrepreneurs in China and shown the world who they are.”

And this is who they are. There is 65-year old Zong Qinghou, founder of the Wahaha drinks business, who topped the list in 2010 with a personal fortune of US$12 billion. In second place, there is Li Li and his family, the owners of Hepalink, a pharmaceutical company whose main product is a blood thinner purified from pig intestines which is used to prevent blood clots. In third place, there is the “Paper Queen” Zhang Yin whose recycling business has made her the richest woman in China and the richest self-made woman in the world. And on and on it goes for over a thousand places, the biggest published rich-list in the world.

The day Durham First meets him, Rupert Hoogewerf is having lunch with Lord Wei, David Cameron’s advisor on social entrepreneurship. The venue is fitting.

The former residence of the British consul in Shanghai and now a restaurant, it is a colonial villa with a cool, shaded terrace and an overgrown courtyard garden filled with bamboo, mature willows and the thick undulating limbs of a huge Southern Magnolia tree.

Rupert’s tale as he tells it is founded in simple curiosity and serendipity. So much so that there is an intriguing mismatch between the scale of his achievement and his self-effacement. Ex-Eton, ex-Durham, ex-Arthur Anderson, he protests that he never intended to make China his home or even to create his own business. It was, as he calls it, happenstance. He chose to read Chinese with Japanese at Durham’s St Cuthbert’s Society “out of academic interest” and then qualified as an accountant. Coming to Shanghai on secondment in 1997, it all started when he asked his Chinese conversation tutor to prepare a topic on the most successful business people in China.

“She came back the next week and could tell me nothing,” he says. “It was bizarre. How could you not know? Surely you could find out who the Chinese equivalent of Bill Gates was?”

Rupert went back and asked his colleagues at Arthur Anderson. “It was the number one agency in China at the time, the closest people to the wealthy. In London, if you had asked the same question of a top accountancy firm, they would have had an inkling that it might be, say, Richard Branson, but they had no idea. And I thought, if these people don’t know, no one knows.”

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And so he did his own research. Working only with publicly available, credible and verifiable information, and while still at Arthur Anderson, he created the first-ever Chinese rich list and put the Vice-President of China in the number one spot.

But you don’t build an information business in China using only self-effacement, and there is a story he tells that shows something more steely beneath the modesty. He had a knock on the door late at night, and five men, one in sunglasses, pushed their way into his home to tell him to leave someone off the list.

“No Chinese person would ever have done this,” Rupert says, “because he or she might have been arrested. And this gave the list an “What are you suggesting would happe n independence that was very credible. Plus if I put him on the list?” he asked. having an accountancy background meant that I was considered to be more professional “You shouldn’t put him on the list.” in assessing wealth than a non-accountant “Is this a threat?” might be.”

For the first couple of years his list was published by Forbes, but, finding that the freelance fees hardly covered his research expenses, he decided to go it alone. “I was really forced into creating a media platform to make ends meet,” he says. “But I was 29, I was unattached, I had a professional qualification to fall back on, and, if you are going to get up and do something, that’s the perfect time. Though it was certainly tough at the beginning.”

“No, it is not a threat. But you shouldn’t put him on the list. We know where you live.”

But Rupert put him on the list anyway.

If he wanted to, he could use this anecdote as part of another story: one in which he stars as an emerging media tycoon who saw the opportunity, took it away from Forbes and who stood up to the bully boys when the moment came. But he seems to want to give the impression that, in the endlessly

expanding land of opportunity that is modern China, his achievement and status are not a result of his genius but something that could have happened to more or less anyone.

So Rupert does not act with the grandeur that his status might allow. Lord Wei wants to meet him certainly, and the accompanying bods from the British Embassy are pleased to know him; but he has the old Etonian’s trick of never giving anyone the impression that he considers himself a cut above them.

After the lunch, he takes a call on his everringing mobile and skips on to a low wall to talk, sauntering along it in the shade of the Southern Magnolia tree. An insouciant act in the elegantly dilapidated former garden of the British consul by a Durham alumnus who has made a name for himself cataloguing the rich in China.

For more information please see www.hurun.net/hurun/richlisten.aspx

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On Fire!

International City of Light

“Durham was made to be lit up. Dark here by about five, deep dark.

A mist comes off the Wear and floats, clogging the dells, snaking high up through the cobbles, darkening the world further. Then, gradually, on come the lights, so many clever lights, in the biggest show England has known, and it is a triumph.�

The Observer on Lumiere 2009

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Durham First is thrilled to announce that Lumiere will return to Durham during 17th–20th November 2011.

The programme has yet to be revealed, but to give you a sense of the magic to come we have put together this photo montage of the original Lumiere in 2009.

I have vivid memories of my first encounter with Lumiere. I had returned from London on the train, and, whereas I never tire of the majestic view from the viaduct, this time it was truly magical. In to view came a huge bright star perched on top of the Castle and I could see the Cathedral was illuminated with colourful images of the Lindisfarne Gospels. I dawdled through the cobbled streets of this wonderland, amazed and delighted to be surrounded by so many clever light installations.

Just to give you some background, Lumiere is being produced by Artichoke, one of the country’s leading creative companies and a registered charity funded by Arts Council England. Other famous productions have included Royal de Luxe’s The Sultan’s Elephant, which filled the streets of London

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for four days in 2006; La Machine’s 50-foot high mechanical spider for Liverpool’s Capital of Culture celebrations in 2008; and Antony Gormley’s 100-day-long invasion of the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in London.

It will be a fantastic few nights which will help put Durham City on the map as a cultural destination with an international reputation. We hope you can come.

Astrid Alvarez Alumni Relations Manager To renew old acquaintances and spend time in the company of your fellow alumnus and Vice-Chancellor Professor Chris Higgins, we would be delighted to see you at a very special event.

The Alumni Relations team will be hosting an informal alumni gettogether in Durham Castle on Friday 18th November from 6–8pm.

“Light” refreshments will be provided!

Please reserve a place at www.dunelm.org.uk/events as spaces are limited.

For more information about Lumiere, please see www.lumieredurham.co.uk

Lumiere, Durham 2009. All images ©Matthew Andrews.

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Research Durham Coming soon – the research projects that will make an impact We can’t predict the future quite yet, and it’s never certain what is going to grab the attention of the media. But here Paul Ging, Communications Manager for Durham’s Research Institutes, highlights eight projects that are likely to have a major impact in the coming months.

PROOF THAT SUPERSYMMETRY EXISTS?

EQUIPPING DOCTORS FOR GP COMMISSIONING

The Institute of Particle Physics Phenomenology (IPPP)

Wolfson Research Institute

The IPPP is currently involved in two experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva which could prove the theory of supersymmetry. “In the course of a few years, this will culminate in either confirmation of the theory of supersymmetry – which is what we hope for, of course! – or it will rule it out,” says Professor Valentin Khoze. “But this in itself would be exciting, creating a completely new direction for research in physics beyond what is currently known.”

The Wolfson Research Institute has reacted swiftly to the introduction of GP Commissioning and is aiming to have its range of health-related work in disciplines such as anthropology and geography feeding into the training of GPs. For example, input from the social sciences could allow GPs to gain an even greater understanding of human behaviour and health issues related to social conditions.

REMODELLING THE UNIVERSE Institute of Computational Cosmology (ICC)

BEDE – ENGLAND’S FIRST SCIENTIST? Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (IMRS) Durham’s newest Research Institute will be holding a launch event on June 22nd and 23rd. The event will include the unveiling of a new book by Professor Faith Wallis entitled ‘Bede: On the Nature of Things and On Times’ which focuses on Bede’s scientific writing and his arguable status as England’s first scientist.

REMOTE SUPPORT FOR DISASTER SURVIVORS The Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience (IHRR) One of the IHRR’s most innovative new projects is the Virtual Helpline. Originally conceived to respond to the Christchurch earthquake, it has since been applied to the tsunami in Japan. The Helpline provides an aid resource that uses Skype, email and phone calls so that experts can support survivors remotely without putting further pressure on scarce resources. It allows survivors to talk about their experiences as part of their recovery, without the carers actually being physically present in the disaster area.

This summer, the ICC will analyse the results of the largest ever computer simulation of the universe. By zooming in on a massive cluster of galaxies, the Millennium Extra Extra Large simulation, or MXXL for short, highlights the morphology of the universe’s structure on different scales and with an incredibly detailed dynamic range of visual simulation.

THE BIGGER – AND CLEARER – PICTURE Biophysical Sciences Institute (BSI) An entirely new 3D system has been developed between the BSI and the University of California, Berkeley. Conventional 3D in gaming consoles and cinemas can cause headaches, blurred vision and even nausea.

Berkeley’s Professor Marty Banks, who is spending part of 2011 as a Fellow at Durham University, comments: “As the use of conventional 3D spreads further into video games and into television, the long-term impacts of such visual effects remain uncertain. This new system of 3D compensates for those problems by having a fast switchable lens synchronised to the images so that focus cues are nearly perfect.”

14,000 BUSINESSES AND HOMES IN THE NORTH TO JOIN THE SMART GRID Durham Energy Institute (DEI) DEI recently collaborated in winning a £54 million grant (including a £27 million award

by Ofgem) towards the application of Smart Grid technology in thousands of homes and businesses across the north of England.

It will allow the homes to receive more power from renewable sources and use it more efficiently.

SO WE CAN’T PREDICT THE FUTURE – YET. BUT… Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) The IAS brings together high-profile academics and public figures from around the world to work with Durham’s own experts.

It is unique amongst the Research Institutes in that it has an annual theme. Last year’s theme was Water and some of the products of this have recently been coming to fruition, including the release of Sudheer Gupta’s film ‘Black River Business’. This campaigning documentary contrasted the return of life to the North East of England’s industrial rivers with the continuing poisoning of the River Yamuna in India. Pertinently, given the title of this article, the focus of the IAS this year and indeed the next will be Futures.

For more research news as it’s breaking, please go to www.durham.ac.uk/news/research

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Team Durham Student achievement in sport Quentin Sloper, Assistant Director of Student Sport I don’t think we could have wished for more. The British Universities and Colleges Sports (BUCS) Championships were held in March, and the Palatinates came away with four national titles, were runners up in a further two and semi-finalists in another four. What’s more, all the titles carried some historic consequence. Here’s what happened; and, as this is the Global Edition of Durham First, I have made sure to highlight a few of the contributions made by our international contingent.

WINNERS AND FINALISTS

FURTHER ACHIEVEMENTS

Women’s Lacrosse, who beat Cambridge in a nail-biting final, won the Championship for the first time in over fifteen years, whilst Women’s Tennis, who defeated London Metropolitan in a tie-break shoot-out after five hours of tennis, broke a longer duck, having not won the title since 1960! Iva Saric, our Graduate Assistant Women’s Tennis Coach from Croatia, also had a great season. She remained undefeated throughout the season and was crowned the British University Singles Champion in April, losing just one set along the way!

And so to our semi-finalists: Women’s Hockey could have gone a step further but lost out to Loughborough on penalty flicks. Women’s Fencing finished second in the Northern Premier League, with Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship athlete Kiera Roberts winning the BUCS Sabre Championships. Another great season was had by Men’s Tennis.

The objective of the year was to secure promotion to the BUCS Premier League.

This was achieved with relative ease, but it was not expected that we would defeat both Bath and Stirling, two of the four Lawn Tennis Association scholarship universities, on the way to a semi-final.

Men’s Lacrosse won their second title in succession, making Durham the first university to win two years in a row, whilst the Women’s Lacrosse second team won the National Trophy for the fourth year running, that’s four consecutive seasons without losing a competitive university fixture.

Jess Adam is our new women’s Graduate Coach. From Duke University in the USA, she is with us for two years and could not have had a better first year, coaching both her first and second teams to National Championship glory.

Men’s Hockey also created history by reaching the final, and they are currently battling to reach the Premier League of England Hockey’s National League competition. Men’s Basketball ended up runners-up to Worcester, which is a franchise university for the British Basketball League. The Palatinates won the Northern Premier League and defeated London South Bank, traditionally a mighty force in university basketball, in the semi-final. They too are still competing in the National League and harbour hopes of play-off success.

The primary aim for Women’s Basketball was also to secure promotion to the BUCS Premier League. Again this was achieved with something to spare. The semi-final pitted us against multiple defending champions University of Wales Institute Cardiff (UWIC).

The Palatinates were eleven up going into the final quarter but luck deserted the team as their lead vanished. Ten minutes is a long time in basketball.

Leah Rush, a graduate from Oklahoma University and a former Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) player in the US, has had a tremendous impact upon our British undergraduates and will be sorely missed. She came to Durham to act as playercoach for our women’s basketball team whilst also studying anthropology and has taken British basketball by storm, becoming widely recognized as the outstanding player in the UK. Our Boat Club has, of course, been extremely busy and successful. The BUCS Small and Championship Heads have been and gone,

with Durham crews dominating both events.

The Regatta in early May is a pivotal weekend for us. Men’s Cricket and Women’s Cricket also look likely to have strong seasons. With a little bit of good fortune we will hopefully be able to headline the next edition with news of more victories. If so, it will truly have been a great year.

STOP PRESS: DURHAM WINS! The Men’s Rugby Union team has beaten University of Wales Institute Cardiff (UWIC) in the BUCS final at Twickenham.

The Palatinates briefly led 7–3 after fifteen minutes but then faced attack after attack from UWIC and could only have been delighted to get into the safety of the dressing room at half-time trailing 12–23.

At 15–23 UWIC ran in a try under the posts only to find themselves called back to half way for a knock-on. The second half was littered with injuries, bruising tackles and players on both sides suffering from cramp. With minutes to go, captain and man of the match, Rob Malaney (Cuth’s), found the strength to break free and crash-over under the posts. The following conversion took the scores to 22–23. Six minutes into injury time, the Palatinates were awarded a penalty under the posts.

The score went to 25–23 and the crowd of more than 3,000 supporters simply erupted. UWIC kicked off but were never to see the ball again as the pack ran out time before the ball was finally kicked high into the stands and the whistle blew.

The Mens’s victorious Rugby Union team at Twickenham (above left).

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News in Brief Honorary Degrees Durham University awards honorary degrees to individuals with a Durham link whose achievements in their chosen fields have been outstanding. Their unique contribution must be both meritorious and highly regarded over time.

This summer Durham is pleased to be awarding five honorary degrees to the following distinguished individuals for their stellar achievements.

Professor Keith Wrightson is an eminent historian of English social and cultural history, so eminent in fact that he was made a Fellow of the British Academy before he was made Professor. He started his career at St Andrew’s University, moving to Cambridge University where he gained his Professorship in 1998. A year later, Keith moved to Yale University where he remains today. He was born and raised in County Durham and has a long and varied involvement with Durham University and the History Department.

Keith was awarded the title of ‘Honorary Professor’ at the request of the Department in 2008.

Mr Donald Poonhuai Liao, as an architect then leading politician, revolutionised the way ordinary people live in Hong Kong.

In 1957, Donald secured a British Council scholarship to study Landscape Design at King’s College, Durham.

His studies at Durham informed some of the defining characteristics of Donald’s future work, helping him become a world-leading figurehead for new concepts in utilitarian housing design. His work modernised living environments for public housing whilst still accommodating traditional aesthetics and values of Chinese community living. Donald improved the quality of life for many, helping to rid the city of its shanty areas and incorporating key amenities including shops, schools and green spaces.

Public housing accounted for over 40 percent of Hong Kong’s population at one stage.

Professor Nicholas Lash is regarded as one of the most influential Roman Catholic philosophical theologians of our time. After six years in the army, he trained for the priesthood, was ordained in 1963, resigning in 1976.

Elected to the Norris-Hulse Chair in 1978, he became the first Catholic to occupy a chair of theology at Cambridge since the Reformation. Nicholas is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall. His wide-ranging theological interests have resulted in some highly influential publications and he has supervised many doctoral students who are now established theologians. Married to Janet Lash, they have one son.

Mrs Carol Carr originally joined Durham University in 1973, but it was on her appointment as College Secretary at the College of St Hild and St Bede in 1987, that she came into her own. She was quickly promoted to the Personal Assistant of the Principal, responsible for the management of the College Office and College Welfare. In recognition of her skills in student support, Carol was made Senior Tutor and became an exemplar of how welfare support can positively affect the student population.

During her time at Durham, Carol, with unstinting support from husband Mike, made an exceptional contribution beyond the requirements of her post.

Rear Admiral Amjad Hussain moved to England when he was three, and began his degree (BSc Engineering and Management) at Collingwood College in 1976. It was during his first term here that he joined the Navy, resulting in a career which has spanned over three decades. As the current Director (Precision Attack) and Controller of the Navy he is now the highest ranking officer from an ethnic minority in the armed forces. Throughout his career he has continually broken new ground, fighting perceived barriers and been a leading light in opening up the armed forces to a more diverse personnel. In 2006 he became the first-ever Muslim to be promoted to a senior level, when he achieved the rank of rear-admiral.

He is a vocal proponent of the need for more diverse armed forces, using his profile to encourage other ethnic minorities to enlist.

New Year Honours for Durham Alumni Congratulations to all those who received OBEs; Dorothy Butt (BA Economic History & Economics, St Aidan’s, 1966–69), John Cuthbert (MBA, 1988–92), John Hamer (BA History, Hatfield, 1959–62), Michael Ipgrave (Theology, 1994–99), Yasmin Waljee (BA Economics & Law, Trevelyan, 1988–91), Andrew Weston (MEng Engineering, Castle, 1996–2000 and Nicholas Wheeler (Geography, Castle, 1963–66). Our best wishes go to Howard Davies (St Cuthbert’s, 1963–66), Sara Thornton (BA Philosophy & Politics, Trevelyan, 1981–84) and Martin Wharton (BA Sociology, Van Mildert, 1966–69) who received CBEs, and Russell Dacre (Natural Sciences, St Aidan’s, 1999) and Philip Woodworth (BSc Physics, Hatfield, 1967–70) who were awarded MBEs.

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Dom Jackman

Durham alumnus aides the ‘great escape’ After five years working in London as a management consultant, alumnus Dom Jackman (Geography, Van Mildert, 2002–05) realised that many of his City contemporaries, like him, longed for more fulfilling roles. They wished to escape the confines of the City and utilise their corporate skills in positions that make a positive impact on the world.

Dom and his co-founder Rob Symington spent most of 2009 developing the idea of the ‘Escape the City’ (Esc) movement.

Their mission is to enable ambitious and talented people to explore exciting career changes, innovative business start-ups and epic adventures. The Esc website was launched in early 2010 and within a year they have gained over 27,000 members and the movement is spreading globally. Esc will open an office in the USA this summer.

Amongst the City escapees is a former financial risk advisor who is now working for a children’s charity in Uganda and a former City banker who has founded a charity that aims to find a cure for paralysis, while others have transferred their corporate skills to small UK startup companies.

Iceland Everest Expedition 2011 Richard Walker (St Aidan’s, Geography, 1998–2001) took part in the Iceland Everest Expedition 2011 during April and May. The Expedition was led by seasoned explorer David HemplemanAdams and planted the Iceland Foods flag on the summit of Everest while raising about £1 million to fund research into early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Richard’s father is the founder and CEO of Iceland. Richard personally tackled Everest’s North Col at 23,031 ft (7,020 m).

For more information please see www.escapethecity.org

For more information, please see www.icelandeverest.org.uk

Correction The caption for image 2 on page 7 Durham First issue 29, should read ‘Brian Field and fellow Chemistry students after their final exam in 1957’.

www.durham.ac.uk/shop The new online shop from Durham University – wear it with pride.

EVENTS CALENDAR For more information please see www.dunelm.org.uk/events

JULY 2011

SEPTEMBER 2011

OCTOBER 2011

FRIDAY 1ST – SUNDAY 3RD

FRIDAY 23RD

Hatfield Association Alumni Weekend Hatfield College, Durham

Hatfield College London Reunion The Alexandra, Clapham, London

TUESDAY 11TH

Van Mildert Association Alumni Weekend Van Mildert College, Durham

Grey Association London Reunion Corney Barrow, Paternoster Square, London

SATURDAY 2ND

FRIDAY 23RD – SATURDAY 24TH

St Chad’s Alumni Decade Dinners (10, 20, 30, 40 & 50 year reunions) St Chad’s College, Durham

College of St Hild & St Bede Association Reunion Weekend College of St Hild & St Bede, Durham

FRIDAY 15TH – SATURDAY 16TH

A weekend of “science and friendship”, celebrating 50 years in the Chemistry building Department of Chemistry, Durham University

St Hild & St Bede Grand Reunion Weekend for the Classes of 1991, 1992 and 1993 College of St Hild & St Bede, Durham

FRIDAY 23RD – SUNDAY 25TH

St Mary’s College Society Alumni Weekend St Mary’s College, Durham Trevelyan College Alumni Weekend Trevelyan College, Durham

THE PALATINATE CHRISTMAS BALL

NOVEMBER 2011 THURSDAY 17TH – SUNDAY 20TH

Lumiere Light Festival Durham

DECEMBER 2011 SATURDAY 3RD

Josephine Butler Alumni Reunion Dinner London SUNDAY 4TH

St Chad’s College Advent Procession in Durham Cathedral and Buffet Durham Cathedral and St Chad’s College, Durham

St Aidan’s College Alumni Weekend St Aidan’s College, Durham

FEBRUARY 2012

SATURDAY 24TH

Josephine Butler Alumni Weekend Josephine Butler College, Durham

School of Engineering & Computer Science Alumni Event London

FRIDAY 16TH DECEMBER

Convocation of Durham University Dunelm Society Annual Dinner One Great George Street, London

FRIDAY 17TH – SATURDAY 18TH

MARCH 2012 FRIDAY 23RD – SUNDAY 25TH

Durham Castle Society Reunion University College, Durham

ROYAL COURTS OF JUSTICE, LONDON Black-tie alumni event Enjoy the company of your fellow alumni at this glittering event, with the opportunity to say farewell to our chancellor, Bill Bryson.

Drinks reception at 7pm, followed by dinner and dancing.

Don’t miss out!

Imagery – Royal Courts of Justice