The twentyfifth year - 2024-25
Tuesday 10th September 2024: Dr Hariom Jani - Quantum materials for 21st century computing
Dates for the year
Tuesday 8th October 2024 Dr Emilia Skirmuntt - An endless arms race — the co-evolution of bats and viruses
Tuesday 12th November 2024 Dr Chris Wilson - Remarkable rotifers: new insights about sex and drugs from the bizarre biology of microscopic animals
Tuesday 10th December
Tuesday 14th January 2025
Tuesday 11th February 2025
Tuesday 11th March 2025
Tuesday 8th April 2025
Tuesday 13th May 2025 (Provisional) - postponed talk about the Tiny Forest near Donnington Bridge (possibly with site visit in the afternoon beforehand)
Tuesday 10th June 2025
Tuesday 8th July 2025
We take a break each August and return in September.
The twentyfourth year - 2023-24
Tuesday 12th September 2023: Professor Klaus Ebmeier - Does 'brain self-improvement' really help to stop dementia?
Tuesday 10th October 2023: Dr Robin Wilson - Monitoring the environment from space
Tuesday 14th November 2023: Dr Angharad De Cates and Dr Susannah Murphy - From lows to highs: the trials and triumphs in developing new treatments for depression
Tuesday 12th December: Dr Stephen Sandler - The effect of female hormones on the rest of the body
Tuesday 9th January 2024: Dr Guida Ruas - Breakthroughs in Alzheimer's treatment - a path to hope and progress
Tuesday 13th February 2024: Dr Tundi Agardy - Restoring ocean health is a key to our own recovery
Tuesday 12th March 2024: Professor John Guillebaud - On a finite planet, demography is destiny - an update
Tuesday 9th April 2024: Dr Anna Guttesen - Unravelling sleep and memory - two intertwined mechanisms
Tuesday 7th May 2024 (note different week from usual date) : Professor John Sutton - Collaborative recall: what happens when we remember the past together?
Tuesday 11th June 2024: Professor Dan Remenyi - GenAI - the seven key issues
Tuesday 9th July 2024: - cancelled due to sudden speaker withdrawal after organisational staffing shortages
We take a break each August and return in September.
The twentythird year - 2022-23
Tuesday 11th July 2023: Dr Annika Moslein of Quantum Dice
- An update on quantum technologies and applications
Tuesday 13th June 2023: Dr David Hughes - Food, foresight and the future of farming: do we need to revolutionize our food system?
Tuesday 9th May: Dr Etienne Raimondeau of Oxford Nanopore Technologies - Rapid DNA and RNA sequencing
Tuesday 11th April 2023: Professor Dan Remenyi - Making sense of new technology - What will the AI-chatbot really do for us?
Tuesday 14th March 2023: Dr Cathie Wells - Tracking the sustainability of long-haul flights
Tuesday 14th February 2023: Professor Brian Rogers - Human visual perception
Tuesday 10th January 2023: Dr Nick Smith and Asma Alamoudi - Computed Cardiopulmonography: A new approach to lung function
Tuesday 13th December 2022: Dr John Parrington - Mind Shift: how culture transformed the human brain
Twentysecond and twentyfirst year information will be added here soon
The twentieth year - 2019-2020
Tuesday 14th April 2020 - CHANGE OF TALK: Dr Rachel Quarrell - Repurposing old drugs against new targets: science's flurry of activity against CoVid-19 (Zoom)
Tuesday 10th March 2020: Professor Chris Pugh - Oxygen-sensing in health and disease (speaker collaborates with Nobel-Prize-winning Prof Peter Ratcliffe)
Tuesday 11th February 2020: CHANGE OF TALK Ian Adsley - Remediating contaminated land at the site of the London 2012 Olympics
Tuesday 14th January 2020: Ian Firth - How we build bridges: an engineer's view
Tuesday 10th December 2019: Dr Vicky Neale - The magic of prime numbers
Tuesday 12th November 2019: Nick Molden - Engine emissions and what they do to our world
Tuesday 8th October 2019: Dr Clara Mancini - A canine-centered communication system to support the work of bio-detection dogs
Tuesday 10th September 2019: Steven Cutts - Apollo 11: the legacy
The nineteenth year - 2018-2019
Tuesday 9th July 2019: Sam Hatfield - The quiet revolution of numerical weather prediction
Tuesday 11th June 2019: Dr Matthew Tompkins - Genuine fake miracles: the psyschology of illusion
Tuesday 14th May 2019: Professor Andrew Johnson - Gender-bending chemicals in the water
Tuesday 9th April 2019: Professor Ken Suslick - Smell-seeing: Olfaction and artificial olfaction
Tuesday 12th March 2019: Isabel Warwick - Discovering targets for treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy
Tuesday 12th February 2019: Jasleen Jolly - Turning research into treatment: visual outcomes in genetic eye disease
Tuesday 8th January 2019: Hugh Warwick - Hedgehogs and ecology: why physics is for lightweights
Wednesday 12th December 2018 (unusual day): Professor Myles Allen - Climate change: the good news
Tuesday 13th November 2018: Dr Richard Metcalfe - Storing carbon underground to combat climate change
Tuesday 9th October 2018: Dr Tom Crawford - Where does water go when it enters the ocean?
Tuesday 4th September 2018 (unusual date): Andy Green - One Body, One Life - How not to screw it up
The eighteenth year - 2017-2018
Tuesday 10th October 2017: Dr Maria Patricio - Blindness and treatments for eye defects
Tuesday 14th November 2017: Kirill Titov - How does one design and make nano-materials - NOTE - THIS IS IN MOMA NOT IN THE MUSEUM
THURSDAY 14th December 2017: Dr Ron Colyer - Renewable energy for the UK
Tuesday 9th January 2018: Professor Fritz Vollrath - Silks in Medicine
Tuesday 13th February 2018: Dr Aseem Malhotra - Is sugar really the new tobacco?
Tuesday 13th March 2018: Dr Sophie Scott - Elephant Conservation (provisional)
Tuesday 10th April 2018: Professor Philip Moriarty - Can we hear two atoms bond?
Tuesday 8th May 2018: Professor Marcus Munafo - Free to choose? How companies shape our behaviour
Tuesday 10th April 2018: Professor Graham MacGregor - Salt: the forgotten killer
Tuesday 10th April 2018: Professor Laurence Harwood - Turning nuclear power green
The seventeenth year - 2016-2017
Tuesday 13th September 2016: Dr Beth Mortimer - Spider webs and silks
Tuesday 11th October 2016: Dr John Parrington - Genome editing
Tuesday 8th November 2016: Dr Alan Costley - Faster fusion: fact or fantasy?
WEDNESDAY 14th December 2016: Dr John O'Hagan - Optical radiation - the benefits and risks of UV, visual and infra-red radiation
Tuesday 10th January 2017: Dr Jess Webb - Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction - measuring myocardial stiffness for early detection
Tuesday 14th February 2017: Andrew Honey - Science and the love of the book - paper, parchment and bindings this will be held in the cafe of the Weston Library on Broad Street, along with exhibits. See home page of this site for full details.
Tuesday 14th March 2017: Professor Sir Muir Gray - The threat of "lifestyle diseases"
Tuesday 11th April 2017: LATE CHANGE - Prof John Guillebaud - The future of contraception - and what became of the Male Pill?
Tuesday 9th May 2017: Dr Jennifer Whitfield - Genomics and the 100,000 Genomes Project
Tuesday 13th June 2017: Dr Mike Bowl - How deafness arises
Tuesday 11th July 2017: Professor Dorothy Bishop - Sex chromosomes, language, autism and the brain: unravelling the mystery
The sixteenth year - 2015-2016
Tuesday 8th September 2015: Jonny Brooks-Bartlett - The wonders of X-ray crystallography
Tuesday 13th October 2015: Dr Malcolm Kendrick - The Great Cholesterol Con
Tuesday 10th November 2015: Dr Jeremy Howick - Why placebos are ethical in clinical practice (aka, "placebos work even when people know what they are"....)
Tuesday 8th December 2015: Becky Smethurst - Galaxy Zoo - from the lab to your living room
Tuesday 12th January 2016: Dr Philip Pogge von Strandmann - Why is the Earth habitable? The biogeochemistry of temperature, carbon and the atmosphere, and what the past tells us about the future
Tuesday 9th February 2016: Dr Claire Blesing - Developments in oncology treatment and radiotherapy
Tuesday 8th March 2016: Dr Bronwyn Tarr - Dance, movement and its effects on the brain
Tuesday 12th April 2016: Dr Erica Hendy - The fascinating world of coral reefs
Tuesday 10th May 2016: Professor Fredrik Karpe - Obesity and the deposit of fat around our bodies
Tuesday 14th June 2016: Professor Simon Kroll Meningitis vaccines
Tuesday 12th July 2016: Dr Malick Gibani - The challenge of typhoid fever
The fifteenth year - 2014-2015
Tuesday 9th September 2014: Dr Simon Boxall - Oil spills - are they the environmental disasters they are cracked up to be?
Tuesday 14th October 2014: Dr Jason Nurse - Social media: the use of your online information for the good, the bad and the ugly.
Tuesday 11th November 2014: Professor Mark Weller - The glowing, colour-changing rocks of Greenland which safeguard the banknotes in your pocket.
Tuesday 9th December 2014: cancelled
Tuesday 13th January 2015: Professor David Wallace - Are there parallel universes?
Tuesday 10th February 2015: Professor Charles Spence - The Perfect Meal
Tuesday 10th March 2015: Steven Cutts - The medical implications of space flight
Tuesday 14th April 2015: Phil Hadland - Folkestone's fabulous fossils
Tuesday 12th May 2015: Dr Tonya Lander - Using drones to investigate pollination and land use
Tuesday 9th June 2015: Dr John Parrington - The deeper genome
Tuesday 14th July 2015: Dr Jan Francis-Smythe - Time personality, temporal intelligence and time management
The fourteenth year - 2013-2014
Tuesday 10th September 2013: Dr Georgina Humphreys - Antimalarial clinical drug trials: the long and winding road
Tuesday 8th October 2013: Nick Cooper - What does the brain get up to when we read?
Tuesday 12th November 2013: Professor John Finney - The extraordinary properties of water
(Confirmed date) Wednesday 11th December 2013: Dr Barbara Gabrys - The science behind meditation and the concept of mindfulness
Tuesday 14th January 2014: Penny Garner - A different way of coping with Alzheimer's and other dementias
Tuesday 11th February 2014: Dr Giles Budge - So what is killing our honeybees?
Tuesday 11th March 2014: Professor Dermot O'Hare - The new chemistry of capturing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere
Tuesday 8th April 2014: Joe Banks - Rorschach Audio - debunking the myths of 'electronic voice phenomena' and other audio illusions
Tuesday 13th May 2014: Professor Paul Bolam - The shaking palsy (Parkinson's disease) - its past, present and future
Tuesday 10th June 2014: Professor Tara Holm - A tour of topology
Tuesday 8th July 2014: Dr Carol Hall - The differences between horse and human vision: implications for equine management and training
The thirteenth year - 2012-2013
11th September 2012: Is sex the most dangerous human activity? - Professor John Guillebaud, University College London.
2nd October 2012: The Higgs boson - problem or solution? - Professor Brian Foster, University of Oxford, University of Hamburg and CERN.
13th November 2012: What's the problem with Maths? - Dr David Acheson, University of Oxford.
11th December 2012: Firework displays: explosive entertainment - Dr Tom Smith, Davas Ltd.
8th January 2013: The spark of life - how the sperm activates the egg to become an embryo and what happens when things go wrong - Dr John Parrington, University of Oxford.
12th February 2013: Dr Peter Oliver - Have I got snooze for you: the science of sleep
12th March 2013: Synaesthesia - Professor Charles Spence - in collaboration with the Affecting Perception art and science project
9th April 2013: Graphene - Dr Jamie Warner of Balliol College, University of Oxford.
14th May 2013: Colin Tudge - Good food for everyone for ever
11th June 2013: Professor Don Mottram - Acrylamide - is cooked food dangerous?
9th July 2013: Professor Philip Hutchinson - Inputs into climate change: CO2, villain or not?.
The twelfth year - 2011-2012
13th September 2011
Exploring astrophysics at the extreme - Dr Andrew Levan, University of Warwick.
11th October 2011
The difference between bacteria and viruses - Dr Edward Hutchinson, University of Oxford.
8th November 2011
Cryobiology - Professor John Armitage, University of Bristol.
13th December 2011
The brain's social networks - Dr Jerome Sallet, University of Oxford.
10th January 2012
Controlling insects to control disease - Professor Luke Alphey of Oxitec and the University of Oxford
14th February 2012
A window to the heart: Echocardiography in the 21st century - Dr Jim Newton, Consultant Cardiologist & Clinical lead for echocardiography, John Radcliffe Hospital
13th March 2012
What happens when we run out of oil? - Professor Chris Rhodes, director of Fresh-lands Environmental Action
10th April 2012
Sprites and weird atmospheric phenomena - Peter McLeish, USA
8th May 2012
Green transport - comparing petrol and diesel vehicles with their electric and hybrid rivals - Dr Peter J Moss, senior lecturer at the Royal Military College
12th June 2012
How the oceans affect the planet - Professor Carl Wunsch
10th July 2012
The science behind that Olympic rowing gold medal - Dr Andrea Dennis
The eleventh year - 2010-2011
12th July 2011
Dr Mark Lynas - The God Species.
14th June 2011
Dr Lisa Walker on the genetic inheritance of disease
10th May 2011
Colin Tudge, author of Good Food For Everyone For Ever
12th April 2011
Dr Henry Snaith - Advances in photovoltaic science
8th March 2011
NO CAFE SCIENTIFIQUE.
8th February 2011
Dr Owen Lewis - The extinction of species.
11th January 2011
Dr Daniel Lunn - Optimal foraging morphologies
14th December 2010
>Dr Rachel Quarrell - Advertising and pseudoscience
9th November 2010
Professor Andrew Hamilton, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University - Recognition in the Molecular World: Pathways to the Treatment of Cancer
12th October 2010
Dr Lisa Ryan - Antioxidants in food
14th September 2010
Steven Cutts - Life on Mars
The tenth year:
13th July 2010
Dr Deborah Gill - Cystic fibrosis
8th June 2010
Dr James Ferryman - CCTV: Who's watching you?
11th May 2010
Philip Ball - Music cognition (with demonstrations)
13th April 2010
Dr Steven Cartwright - Homeopathy - dispelling the myths, establishing the facts
9th March 2010
Dr Myles Allen - "Climate change - the latest
9th February 2010
Dr Chris Atkinson - "More efficient watering strategies for plants" (both in commercial and home agriculture)
12th January 2010
Dr Charlie Simpson, on 'Carbohydrate, sports drinks and exercise'
8th December 2009
Professor Angela McLean - The spread of pandemic infections
10th November 2009
Dr Jan Zalasiewicz - Earth after us - what will the planet look like 100 million years in the future?
13th October 2009
Professor Len Seymour - Stem cells and anti-viral therapies
8th September 2009
Professor Simon Murch - Possible links between autoimmune diseases and unexplained intestinal problems
The ninth year:
14th July 2009 - was cancelled
9th June 2009 - Dr Jean Knox - Psychotherapy
12th May 2009 - Dr Helen Packer and Dr Marcus Gould - Biofilms
14th April 2009 - Professor Steve Roberts - Fusion - materials for building fusion reactors
10th March 2009 - Steve Moxon - Do men dominate women? Why are there sexes?
10th February 2009 - CANCELLED due to the high chance of difficult travelling conditions for speaker/audience/Blackwells staff.
13th January 2009 -
Professor Russell Foster - Rhythms of life - the 24-hour body clocks that rule our lives
9th December 2008 -
Dr David Robinson - Earthquakes, hazards and prediction: Can we ever predict an earthquake?
11th November 2009
Professor Peter Rothwell - Avoiding strokes: why medical research has been failing patients
Friday 17th October 2009
Dr Ben Goldacre - Bad Science
September 2008
Dr Stephen Samuel - Fuel economy and emission levels
The eighth year:
July 2008
Late change - general discussion Cafe
June 2008
Dr Carolyn Willis - Cancer detection in dogs: from anecdote to evidence
May 2008
Professor Peter Atkins - Thermodynamics made easy
April 2008
CANCELLED - our apologies to all audience members
March 2008
Rita Carter - Multiple personalities
February 2008
Brian Clegg - Infinity
January 2008
Roger Ashby - Autism - a parent's viewpoint
December 2007
Dr Chris Blanford - The hydrogen economy and fuel cells
November 2007
Gavin Killip - Turning my house energy-efficient - a personal experience of going low-carbon.
October 2007
Chris Carpenter - Fusion within our grasp.
(Archive available here for details of previous years' speakers)
