News

Christ Church undergraduate Neha Jamal has been awarded the 2024 Reaktion Book Prize. Each year independent non-fiction publisher Reaktion bestows the prize on the author of the best extended essay submitted in the first year of the University of Oxford’s History of Art Degree.

The Physiological Society has awarded the 2024 Undergraduate Prize for Physiology to Christ Church medical student Thomas Angell for research completed in the final year of his BA in Medical Sciences. Thomas was nominated for the prize by University of Oxford examiners who identified his third-year research project as the best in his cohort. 

The University of Oxford has awarded prizes to Christ Church’s Joshua Omolegan and Owen Agnel for their impressive performance in their four-year Computer Science integrated masters degrees. Joshua received the Gibbs Prize for having produced the best final-year Computer Science project, while Owen secured the Hoare Prize for the highest overall performance in the Computer Science and Philosophy course. We contacted the two high-achievers to learn more about their research and future plans.

Christ Church’s Jonah Diomede has been awarded the 2024 Elizabeth Anscombe Prize by the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Philosophy, received for having written the best undergraduate thesis at Finals. This is the second year running that a Christ Church student has won the Prize. 

AI systems have shown remarkable advances in recent years, but an article published today in Nature highlights a potential stumbling block on the horizon for them. The paper’s authors, who include Christ Church’s Dr Ilia Shumailov and Professor Yarin Gal, set out how the ‘indiscriminate’ training of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT and Gemini on model-generated data ‘causes irreversible defects in the resulting models’ – giving rise to a phenomenon the researchers term ‘model collapse’. 

Christ Church has acquired a rare book from the collection of its former Librarian, the influential scholar Robert Burton (1577–1640), author of The Anatomy of Melancholy. With the help of a generous grant from the Friends of the National Libraries, Christ Church has been able to purchase Burton’s copy of Michael Scot’s 1603 Mensa Philosophica. 

Today’s College Librarian Gabriel Sewell tells us more about Burton and Christ Church’s exciting new acquisition. 

For scientists investigating how plants have evolved and responded to a changing climate and environmental stresses of the past, such as ongoing global warming, the study of isotopic signals is a powerful tool. In a new paper published in leading journal Science Advances, Christ Church’s Dr Marc-André Cormier and his co-authors from Zurich deliver fresh insights into the drivers of hydrogen isotope ratios in plant compounds – insights that reveal how plants react to climatic change and which may improve our picture of the environmental conditions of the distant past. We asked Dr Cormier to tell us more. 

Matthew Rosseinsky and Dudley Shallcross were contemporaries at Christ Church – and both have since become professors of chemistry. But this is not all that the two academics have in common: earlier this month, it was revealed that they would be awarded OBEs in the 2024 King’s Birthday Honours List. 

Something you might have missed on your latest trip to Blenheim Palace is the rich tapestry of lichens that covers the building’s façades and stone features. What implications do these organisms have for the palace as a World Heritage Site and for its conservation? This is the subject of recent research by Dr Nicholas Carter, Lecturer in Physical Geography at Christ Church, and answered in a new report commissioned by the palace.

An article by Professor Yarin Gal, Tutor in Computer Science at Christ Church, and members of his Oxford Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning Group (OATML) has been published today in Nature. The research of Professor Gal, Dr Sebastian Farquhar, Jannik Kossen and Lorenz Kuhn proposes a means of predicting when large language model (LLM) systems such as ChatGPT and Gemini are likely to ‘hallucinate’ – that is, invent intuitively plausible but wholly imaginary facts. 

Christ Church Lecturer in Engineering Dr Chenying Liu has received two national awards for her outstanding science communication and research. The British Science Association (BSA) has chosen Dr Liu as this year’s British Science Festival Award Lecturer for Engineering, Technology and Industry, and BIG – the UK’s foremost network of STEM communicators – has presented her with the Josh Award for Science and Showmanship. 

Christ Church graduate student Oscar Jelley has been announced as this year's winner of the prestigious Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism. The annual competition aims to discover and spotlight emerging talent in critical writing in the arts. 

On Sunday 5 May British–Zimbabwean painter and photographer Siphiwe Mnguni was welcomed to the Christ Church Art Room where she delivered the first instalment in our new art workshop series, Sessions. The series aims to connect the Christ Church community to artists, musicians, creative thinkers and practitioners who will contribute to expanding our community’s knowledge, skills and appreciation of the creative arts.

Christ Church alumnus and University of Oxford academic Dr Jacob Downs (Music, 2012) has been announced as one of this year’s New Generation Thinkers selected by the BBC and UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). 

Since 1958, the Oxford University Modern Pentathlon Association has tested the athletic abilities of generations of Oxford students, and each year teams representing Oxford colleges compete in the Cuppers to see who can fence, swim, run and shoot their way to victory.

Each year the Vice-Chancellor’s Awards are held to recognise the research and teaching excellence, innovation and achievements of the University of Oxford’s academics. Among the recipients of this year’s awards was Professor Simon Dadson, Tutor in Geography at Christ Church, whose team was celebrated for its engagement with those outside the University to improve global water security.

One exciting development in the world of STEM last term was the launch of the inaugural Oxford Physics Summit. The event – the first of its kind in the UK – united hundreds of physics enthusiasts, delegates from seven British universities, and such distinguished guests as Oxford’s Professor Alexander Lvovsky and Nobel Laureate Sir Roger Penrose. 

On 14 November 2023, an interdisciplinary team of 41 Oxford academics met at Christ Church for a workshop exploring means of building resilient communities in sub-Saharan Africa and the opportunities for research collaboration with respect to this vitally important topic. 

Christ Church astrophysicist Professor Stephen Smartt has been revealed as one of the two 'world-class scientists' to be awarded a prestigious Royal Society Research Professorship this year. 

On Saturday 27 January the Christ Church Access team joined forces with the Outreach team from St Anne’s College to launch the 2024 Aim for Oxford programme. 

On 4 December 2023 representatives from international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), other third-sector organisations and academia gathered at Christ Church’s Research Centre to share their perspectives and experience in the field of neonatal and paediatric health. The event, ‘Learning from Evaluations of Projects and Programmes in Newborn and Child Health’, was convened by Professor Mike English, Senior Associate Research Fellow at Christ Church.