Launching the events programme for Reuben students

We’re delighted to announce our preliminary programme of Reuben College events, which will be an integral part of the student experience at the college, encouraging all of our graduate students to think about the broader context of their work and stimulating them to interact with students and Fellows from other disciplines.

We will launch our programme with the College’s Inaugural Lecture on the inside story of the development of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, to be given by Reuben Fellow Professor Teresa (Tess) Lambe, the co-designer of the vaccine, on Wednesday 13th October. On the following Wednesdays, we will host informal skills development discussions, held in the Reuben Common Room in Linacre College before “formal hall”. These sessions will help promote the exchange of skills in such areas as public engagement with research, learning about mindfulness or adjusting to graduate studies. The Wednesday evening programme will also include interactive sessions with Fellows on the college’s digital strategy and an introduction to AI and its applications.

Thursday evenings bring our “Dining with Dinosaurs” events for students, which combine a series of themed short talk seminars with a dinner hosted in the Natural History Museum. These interactive events will form a core part of both the academic and social experience for our students, and the talks in our first term (Michaelmas Term 2021) will be on the theme of Environmental Change, with a focus on COP26. Our Official Fellows will provide insights into their research, which include exploring Oxford’s Net Zero Initiative, artificial intelligence to optimise the use of water pumps in Africa, the impact of climate change on water resources or food supplies and molecular engineering of plants. For the next term (Hilary Term 2022), the focus will switch to “living with pandemics – how medical research impacts all of our lives”, led by our Cellular Life Fellows, and we will finish in Trinity Term 2022 with our AI & Machine Learning Fellows explaining how AI can be a force for good in society. Throughout each term, our Ethics & Values Fellows will challenge the speakers and students with ethical questions arising from the research, which should prompt lively discussions over dinner with the dinosaurs.

We are keen that, wherever possible, students may bring guests to these College occasions, and we will be record some of the talks so that wider audiences can access them via our YouTube channel. This also applies to the Reuben-GLAM seminar series, which brings together Reuben Fellows with librarians, curators, and artists to highlight the research and engagement potential of the University’s collections. This series is being piloted this term (“Immortal Visualisations” on 21st May, and “The sense of nature” in the Botanical Gardens on 23rd June), and video recordings will be made to allow anyone, anywhere in the world to enjoy the talks and the experience of the conversations generated. 

More informal occasions supplementing graduate student life will be a regular Sunday brunch at Farndon Court, our graduate accommodation centre, a “Walk and Talk” with our Fellows, and other events arranged by the Graduate Common Room. 
All our events and occasions are designed to enrich the student experience, with planning arranged as far as possible to accommodate the many different demands on graduate students’ lives.

Our hope is to run all our events as ‘normal’, but they will of course be subjected to any COVID-19 restrictions in place at the time, depending on University and government guidance.

See also:

Further information for students

Events listing

More about College life