News

After nearly five years of intensive collaboration, a major international research project investigating how to improve the quality of care for sick newborns in Kenyan hospitals has reached its conclusion.

The Christ Church community is saddened to report the death of William Thomas, Tutor in History at the House from 1967 until his retirement in 2003. Obituary by his colleague and friend, Professor Brian Young.

Richard Stengel – former Under Secretary of State in the Obama administration and former Managing Editor of TIME – delivered a stark warning about the global decline of democracy at Christ Church’s final 500th Anniversary Lecture in New York last week. 

A new book, Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery, by Christ Church alumna Dr Miranda Kaufmann (2001, History), exposes how, for almost two centuries, generations of women – some with family links to Christ Church – became enslavers and plantation owners in their own right, and brought huge fortunes back to Britain.

Dr Clare Rees-Zimmerman, a Junior Research Fellow in Chemistry at Christ Church, has been awarded a prize for her oral presentation at the prestigious European Colloids and Interface Society (ECIS) annual conference, held this year in Bristol from 7 to 12 September. The event was jointly organised with the UK Colloids Conference and brought together hundreds of researchers from across Europe and beyond.

Three Christ Church academics – Alexander Vasudevan, Yarin Gal and Yuji Nakatsukasa – have each received a Recognition of Distinction from the University of Oxford. Through the annual award, the University confers the title of full professor on researchers who are making an exceptional ongoing contribution to their fields of study, teaching and academic service.

This year, Christ Church had the honour of hosting the annual Sports Day against our sibling college, Trinity College, Cambridge. The friendly competition brings staff from both colleges together in a spirited contest to win the coveted Sports Day trophy. With last year’s victory still fresh in mind, could the House hold on to the cup? Christ Church’s Jackie Billington reports.

Two final-year Philosophy students at Christ Church ­– Keya Bergeron-Verma and Oliver Walsh – have received prizes for their impressive performance in their undergraduate degrees.

A team of artificial intelligence experts including Christ Church’s Professor Yarin Gal has reported a major advance in safeguarding open-weight language models. By filtering out potentially harmful knowledge during training, the researchers from the University of Oxford, EleutherAI and the UK AI Security Institute have been able to build models that resist subsequent malicious updates – especially valuable in sensitive domains such as biothreat research. The findings have been published as a preprint on arXiv.

A new report written by Christ Church DPhil student Megan Bowler brings to light the dramatic decline in formal language learning in UK schools. Garnering attention from the press, the publication from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) and sponsored by the language-learning app Duolingo makes the case for revitalising language education and sets out how this can be done.

Late last month, the UK government announced the launch of a new Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion tasked with investigating how we might foster a more united multicultural multi-faith democracy. Among the 19 eminent commissioners appointed was The Revd Professor Luke Bretherton, who joined Christ Church last year as our new Regius Professor of Divinity.

Last Sunday, local families were welcomed to Christ Church’s first-ever Tudor Fayre: a charity event held in celebration of the 500th Anniversary of our College’s foundation by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in 1525. Attendees were treated to an exciting array of demonstrations and activities, from sword-fighting, music and dancing to tile-making, metalwork and weaving.

The Christ Church community would like to extend its condolences to the family of Ian Blair, The Lord Blair of Boughton QPM, who has died at the age of 72. Lord Blair, an alumnus and Honorary Student (fellow) of Christ Church, served as the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 2005 to 2008.

A new study by an international team of researchers including Christ Church’s Simon Dadson, Professor in Physical Geography at the University of Oxford, exposes the stark reality of the impact of rising global temperatures on the size and severity of droughts across the globe. Published in Nature, the paper lays bare the extent to which climate change is increasing the frequency, duration and coverage of droughts by driving up atmospheric thirst.

On Wednesday 25 June, Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, Senior Associate Research Fellow at Christ Church and Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Oxford’s Pandemic Sciences Institute, was the first of three expert speakers convened at Oxford’s Town Hall for the public event ‘Preparation and pandemics: confronting new threats’. The second in a series of lectures taking place across the globe to mark the 500th Anniversary of the founding of Christ Church, Professor Gilbert was joined by the Director of Oxford’s Pandemic Sciences Institute Professor Sir Peter Horby and DPhil candidate in Clinical Medicine Md Zakiul Hassan for a wide-ranging discussion of the power of university–industry collaborations in the battle to beat Nipah virus, the wider global threat of infectious diseases, and the need for pandemic preparedness. The event was chaired by Christ Church alumnus and BBC News Health Editor Hugh Pym (PPE, 1978).

The first feature film made by University of Oxford students was 1982’s Privileged, and launched the careers of Hugh Grant and Rachel Portman. When 40 years later Christ Church’s Max Morgan and his fellow Oxford English undergraduate Jemima Chen met the film's director and producer at an anniversary screening, their conversation sparked an idea. Three years on and we have Breakwater. Directed by Max and produced by Jemima, Oxford’s second student feature is up for more awards than any other nominee at this year’s Raindance – the UK’s premier independent film festival that concludes tomorrow.

At a ceremony in Kingston, Jamaica on 31 May, 43 young Jamaicans were recognised for their exceptional achievements in an array of fields – from academia, innovation and entrepreneurship to journalism, sport and environmental protection. They received the Caribbean nation’s highest accolade for under-30s: the Prime Minister’s National Youth Awards for Excellence. Among those honoured was Christ Church graduate student Nahjae Nunes.

During the Easter vacation, Christ Church DPhil candidate and GCR President Jagyoseni Mandal travelled to India’s historic University of Calcutta. She had been invited to deliver the first lecture following the inauguration of the Centre for Translation and Literary Geography – an institute established ‘to initiate a dialogue between geography, culture, and the concept of space, with the long-standing tradition of translation in India.’

Through its annual Junior Chef of the Year competition, the City of Oxford Guild of Chefs celebrates excellence exhibited by early-career chefs across the Oxfordshire area, showcasing their talent and providing them with recognition within their industry. Among the winners this year was Christ Church Commis Chef Gretel Nava, who took the prize for the best plant-based canapé. 

Three years ago, over a Thai takeaway, a group of students met in Christ Church’s Graduate Common Room. They had not met because of shared perspectives or beliefs – indeed, they were there precisely because of their competing worldviews. Though they were not like-minded, they were like-hearted, each having a desire to listen to and understand others more deeply.

A project led by the Oxford Nuffield Department of Medicine’s Centre for Global Health Research (CGHR) and the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KMRI) has been celebrated at the 2025 Vice-Chancellor’s Awards. Represented by Christ Church’s Professor Mike English, the international team received the Vice-Chancellor’s Research Engagement Award at a ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre on 15 May.

Koushikk Ayyappan, a fourth-year student of Clinical Medicine at Christ Church, has received the 2025 John Potter Essay Prize for his paper ‘Measuring glymphatic function: assessing the toolkit’. The annual prize is open to clinical students at the University of Oxford who are preparing for their second Bachelor of Medicine examinations, and is awarded for an essay on a neurosurgical, neurological, or neuropathological topic.