Fellows’ and Lecturers’ Activities Biochemistry Professor Elena Seiradake has published two major research articles. For this one: https://www.some.ox.ac. uk/news/how-to-build-a-brain/ her lab led the research, collaborating with labs in Germany and France. Her second article reveals that mutations in the gene NTNG2, which codes for netrin-G2, cause neurodevelopmental disorders, a collaborative project with an extensive list of international collaborators https://linkinghub. elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S00029297(19)30386-6
Biology Michelle Jackson moved to Somerville and the Department of Zoology from Imperial College London in September 2019. She spent her first year learning the ropes, applying for funding to build her first research team, and teaching tutorials to Somerville’s Biology students. She also continues her research investigating the effects that humans have on the plants and animals that live in rivers, lakes, and the ocean. With colleagues from South Africa, she has recently published a paper which shows how the increasing temperatures associated with climate change cause predator loss in streams (Jackson et al. 2020, ‘Food web properties vary with climate and land use in South African streams’. Functional Ecology, 34(8)). She has also spent some time in the laboratory over the last year, processing samples and data collected in the Arctic and Antarctic – here, she is investigating how temperature alters the diversity of everything from microbes to fish. Because of the pandemic, this is the first time in more than ten years that she has not gone on fieldwork over the summer, either to the Arctic or to South Africa! Timothy Walker reports: ‘I have written a book on Pollination aimed at first year undergraduates and interested gardeners. It is being published by Princeton University Press. I don’t know when it will hit the bookshops.
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‘Tutorials via Teams were not as good as face to face BUT it was interesting to have the first one at 9am with a student in China, at 10.30 with a student in the UK, at 2pm with one in Portugal and finishing at 3.30 with one in Massachusetts. It was therefore possible to get very up to date reports on the COVID-19 situation in different countries and different views. For reasons that no one has yet explained, tutorials take longer when delivered via Teams and so do lectures. The majority of students prefer to have lectures recorded because they can slow them down and go over the tricky bits again and again until it makes sense. ‘We have also discovered that some succulent house plants can survive sixteen weeks without watering.’
Engineering Professor Steve Roberts continues to work to bring scalable machine learning to science, industry and commerce. He is involved in several new projects in economics and finance as well as starting a large study, with colleagues from the Department of Zoology, on mosquito detection. The latter is funded via a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Professor Richard Stone reports that Engineering at Somerville flourishes with three 1st class degrees in Finals and three 2.1s. Success has not just been in exams as this cohort have also been playing for the England Ladies’ Lacrosse Team, being Vice-Captain of the University Basketball Team, and playing Bridge for England. With the arrival of Noa Zilberman we are now back to full strength with two Tutorial Fellows. There has also been a departure as Martin Walker (Mary Ewart JRF) has been appointed as a Lecturer at Surrey University. He made significant contributions to the teaching of Statics, Dynamics and Structures. Lockdown is still at the front of Richard Stone’s mind as he and his colleagues are yet to return to their labs. Teaching
last term has been remote with various use of webcams and slates in Teams. This has been mostly for the First Years as their lectures continued. They have remained very well engaged with their work despite having had their exams cancelled, and responded well to past papers and mock exams. Fortunately Richard’s research was in steady-state with no active experiments at the start of lockdown. His team has had plenty to do with analysing data, writing papers and designing a Stirling engine. Despite conferences being cancelled this summer Richard will be busy as there have been revisions made to the Year 2 Thermodynamics module and he wants to record most of his lectures before the start of the academic year. Professor Noa Zilberman joined Somerville College in January as a Tutorial Fellow and as an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Science. Her research is concerned with designing computing infrastructure that is scalable, sustainable and resilient. Of particular interest is how we can improve computing infrastructure in the face of global warming and its effects. In-networking computing is one emerging solution, where applications are offloaded to run within the network, as data is sent from users to the cloud. In a recent publication since joining Oxford, Zilberman and her collaborators have demonstrated x10,000 performance improvement in distributed services, following previous work where they have demonstrated x1,000 power saving. This means that hundreds of computers can be replaced with a single in-network computing device, and each device will save 1GWh/year. Computing infrastructure also has societal effects, and another recent publication considered aspects of trustworthy AI development. Additional publications since joining Somerville considered trading latency for computing with the network, and reproducibility in networked-systems research.
