News

Xiaolan Deng, a second-year student of Computer Science and Philosophy at Christ Church, has been announced as this year’s winner of the Bernard Williams Essay Prize, awarded by the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI. This year, the essay competition’s participants were asked to tackle the complex question: ‘Is AI a threat to human creativity?’

The British Society for Heart Failure has awarded this year’s Early Investigator Award to Christ Church DPhil candidate in Medical Science Dr Sarah Birkhoelzer. Dr Birkhoelzer, who is also a Cardiology Registrar and Clinical Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, has been recognised for her exceptional and innovative research into the crucial, often overlooked role of muscle in cardiovascular health.

On 4 November the University of Oxford’s Department of Chemistry hosted its second-ever Oxford Women in Chemistry (OxWiChem) Day. Among the attendees this year was Christ Church Junior Research Fellow Dr Clare Rees-Zimmerman, who was awarded a prize for the best physical and theoretical chemistry poster.

Alongside his work as Rare Books Librarian at Christ Church, David Stumpp is a committed photographer – so much so that his newly published collection of photographs is the culmination of a decade’s work. The Lunchtime Portraits: Oxford, 2010–2020 offers a 10-year portrait of Oxford through 180 individual photographs of the daily life with which the city teems. 

Ahead of the launch of his book on 20 November, we caught up with David to uncover the story behind this long-term creative project. 

We are delighted to announce the opening of the annual Christopher Tower Poetry Competition, which offers the UK’s most valuable prize for young poets. The competition is free to enter and open to students between 16 and 18 years of age who are educated in the UK. This year, participants are challenged to write a poem on the theme of 'ROOTS'.

What is our new Regius Professor of Divinity, Andrew Davison, doing writing about AI? We caught up with him to find out. 

Last month an intrepid team from Christ Church travelled to the other place for this year’s Sports Day with Trinity College, Cambridge. Held annually, the event sees staff from the sibling colleges go head to head in a friendly bid to claim the Sports Day trophy. After last year’s win, did the House keep the cup? Christ Church teammate Jackie Billington has the story. 

From operating on broken bones and treating malaria to managing childbirth, hospitals in rural Africa provide essential services to their local populations. Yet such services are rarely provided by specialist doctors, and resources are typically scarce. This can have severe consequences for patient safety, with the few reports available suggesting that harm to patients is common. How might this situation be remedied? 

Dr Edward David, a postdoctoral research fellow in Theology and Religion at Christ Church, has received a generous grant in support of his project investigating the religious and spiritual role models of 18- to 27-year-olds. The grant, provided by the John Fell Fund, will facilitate a workshop with young people from across the globe. 

As the House prepares to welcome its next cohort of undergraduates, we are delighted to introduce our new Welfare Manager Adrian Childs. In his new role, Adrian coordinates the Welfare Team and is available to all members of the Christ Church community to discuss any matter in confidence, be it personal or academic. 

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.