Research

Research in the Department of Chemistry into the action of natural enzymes is finding a commercial application in the global flavours and fragrances market.

Dr Ladan Baghai-Ravary is developing a fully automatic system to record and analyse speech, using existing telephone lines. This could lead to dramatic changes in the treatment of patients with speech disorders around the world, especially where smartphones might not be affordable or convenient.

The report finds that many news brands are struggling to cut through on mobile with access to content increasingly mediated by third-parties such as Facebook, Apple and Google.

The research was carried out by an international team working on the Sociogenome project, led by the University of Oxford and funded by the European Research Council.

It finds that changes by central government to immigration and welfare benefits under the ‘no recourse to public funds’ policy have left local authorities with a duty of care to safeguard children when their parents are precluded from working or accessing benefits.

Stepping into Professor Alison Etheridge’s office in the Peter Medawar Building at the east end of South Parks Road, you might be surprised to hear that the focus of her work is randomness. Neat piles of paper sit on the table; tidy rows of books line the shelves. Everything seems very well ordered indeed.

This series grew out of The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) conference ‘Randomness and Order’, at which academics in the fields of quantum physics, music, probability

What does randomness and order mean in a historical context?In the Randomness and Order conference, I interpreted the randomness question in terms of the historical past and how you turn it into history by ordering it.  

What does randomness and order mean in quantum physics?

Professor Robert MacLaren, from the Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, gives us an insight into his life as an entrepreneurial academic surgeon – a busy life, and one that gave rise to a gene therapy for an inherited form of progressive blindness called choroideremia.

Mina Bekheet is a 2nd-year DPhil (PhD) student in the Department of Oncology and co-founder and President of Oxford Biotech (OB), a student-led biotech communication and transfer platform. OB aims to get academia, industry and government to talk to each other and share ideas and, in turn, 'translate innovative science into disruptive business'.

A determined group of friends at Oxford University founded Onfido, a successful start-up that has raised $4.5 million in funding to help it grow in new markets (particularly the US). Onfido offers a service that automates background checks on prospective employees before they are accepted for work.

A new study published in The Lancet suggests that taxes on goods and services could potentially increase infant mortality in developing countries because they make it harder for poor families to...

The publication in the journal, Population Studies, by Professor David Coleman and Associate Professor Stuart Basten, provides a more optimistic demographic picture of the future in the West, in contrast to the commonly accepted narrative.

This study, published in the early online edition of the journal, Science, shows that early modern humans adapted to living in the rainforest for long periods of time.

'I would make a distinction between conventions (like tying a tie) and rituals. Rituals are religious but not necessarily in an overtly Christian or traditional way. You might get people who obsessively wash their hands, and underneath that is a fear of pollution, it’s about purification.'

'Rituals are important to us as a species. Our success has, in part, been due to our ability to co-operate in a way that is unusual in the animal kingdom. Rituals provide a kind of gadget for facilitating that co-operation. Rituals are all pervasive in human activity – we adopt them without really realising it.'

'At the dawn of the millennium we had a world in which just over 5% of humanity was connected to the Internet. Only 15 years later, we are approaching a world in which the majority of the population has access. The vast majority of these new connections are in low- and middle-income countries.'

'At the Ruskin School of Art, our research programme includes cross-disciplinary commissions with established and emerging artists. We bring artists to Oxford so that they can work with different faculties across the University.'

Dr Jane Masséglia is a research fellow for AshLI (the Ashmolean Latin Inscription Project) working to encourage general public engagement with translating ancient documents.