Features

From inspiring science days for local schools to educational festivals for young people, targeted outreach programmes, the launch of a new online academic enrichment platform, and support for UK-wide access initiatives; across the collegiate University, Oxford is finding new and innovative ways to engage with talented students across the UK from all backgrounds.

Oxford colleges have worked with The Brilliant Club – a UK-wide charity that aims to improve opportunities for students from less advantaged backgrounds to access higher education – for a number of years, hosting ‘graduation’ ceremonies for hundreds of young students completing the Scholars Programme.

Students visit Oxford colleges and learn more about university life. (c) The Brilliant Club

In 2024/25, twelve of Oxford’s colleges formally joined The Brilliant Club’s Scholars Programme, which connects state school pupils, aged 8 to 18, with PhD students who share their subject knowledge and passion for learning.

The scheme enables participants to experience university-style learning through seven in-school tutorials delivered to a small group of pupils by trained PhD tutors, usually based on their own research. The charity has built a community of over 1,200 tutors made up of current PhD students, early career researchers and PhD graduates.

The Scholars Programme introduces pupils to the world of academic research and is designed to help them build confidence, curiosity and a sense of belonging in higher education. It includes a challenging final assignment and for many the experience culminates in their own graduation celebration at one of the University’s colleges.

In 2024/25 more than 1,700 school pupils from Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bristol and London either worked with an Oxford researcher or attended a graduation event at an Oxford college.

Dr Matthew Williams work with school groups in his role as Access Fellow at Jesus College

The scheme, Dr Williams says, is also a valuable experience for Oxford’s PhD students who receive expert training to develop and hone their pedagogical skills, gain sustained teaching experience, develop research communication skills, and have an opportunity to communicate their research to a non-specialist audience.

Five Oxford PhD students took part in the programme in 2024-25, with specialisms ranging from genetics to archaeology and courses covering subjects as diverse as the healthy heart, the evolution of biodiversity, and neuroscience and AI. ‘Increasingly, PhD students are encouraged to think about public engagement and impact, and this helps them develop key communication skills — being able to explain complex ideas to a 15-year-old is a great test of understanding.’

Abby Williams, a PhD student in the Department of Biology, said, ‘During one of my first lessons we were looking at the animal evolutionary tree, and one of my students had a ‘lightbulb moment’ – we were discussing how humans are more closely related to starfish than insects, and the student said, ‘Miss, that’s really cool!’. That moment felt like a massive teaching win for me, and I hope that the student felt inspired to learn more about the natural world.’

Students visited Oriel College and graduated from the programme with a formal ceremony. (c) The Brilliant Club

Dr Williams says the partnership demonstrates how collaboration can deliver genuine impact; ‘Partnering with The Brilliant Club allows Oxford to make a tangible difference in the lives of young people while giving our own researchers meaningful opportunities to share their work. Through initiatives like this, Oxford continues to work with schools, colleges and charities across the UK to inspire the next generation of students to consider Oxford as a place for them.’

Find out more about Oxford University's access programmes - Oxford Access | University of Oxford.

At a time when translators are facing unprecedented challenges in the face of artificial intelligence, a new graduate course will explore and celebrate translation as a creative endeavour in which the role of the human will always remain essential.

From ancient texts and contemporary novels to performance theatre, film and television, translation shapes the way we experience stories from past and present and from around the world.

Oxford’s undergraduates have long studied academic translation within Modern Language degrees, but to-date there has been no provision for graduate students. A new Masters in Creative Translation has been launched to fill this gap, coinciding with an important moment when the translation landscape is shifting and adapting to technological change.

Professor Karen Leeder is Schwarz-Taylor Chair of German Language and Literature

Led by Professor Karen Leeder in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, the course also reflects a growing appreciation for translation as both a field of research and a creative discipline that requires not only linguistic skill, but also imagination, interpretation, and cultural sensitivity. 'It’s increasingly recognised as a literary art form,’ says Professor Leeder, herself a prize-winning translator. ‘We’re seeing a real coming of age for the field.’

The course will be based in the University’s new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, which brings many of Oxford’s internationally recognised Humanities faculties together under one roof, with new spaces for teaching, performance, and film. ‘There is a considerable creative reservoir and appetite for this course at Oxford. This is an exciting opportunity for students who will be joining a hub of creative activity,’ says Professor Leeder.

Distinct from academic translation, creative translation explores the history, theory and methodologies of translation and interprets not just meaning but voice, considering tone, rhythm, and emotion. In recent years, campaigns such as #NameTheTranslator have sought to credit translators alongside authors on book covers and prize lists, helping to foreground their role as artists and creative interpreters.

We hope this course will...serve as a reminder that the ability to imagine, interpret, and connect across languages and cultures remains a distinctly human endeavour.

Professor Karen Leeder

As well as developing their own practice as a translator, students on the Creative Translation course will be introduced to a range of materials, from the earliest translations of ancient texts to the dilemmas of AI, examine how translations differ, and explore areas such as translation for performance, adaptation, early modern translation, translating the untranslatable, multilingualism, as well as focussing on specific languages, genres, and periods. The course will include a programme of regular industry sessions with visiting creatives and experts.

The timing of the course is not coincidental. In the UK there is a growing demand for skilled translators to support thriving creative industries. It also comes at a time when the human role in translation is more important than ever, says Professor Leeder.

The course will be based at the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities

Professor Leeder is pragmatic. ‘All art forms are under threat from AI,’ she says, ‘but AI is used in translation, and we must find ways to work productively with it.’ The course will encourage students to critically engage with these technologies while also recognising their limits and learning to identify what makes for ‘good’ translation.

She points to some foreign language television series which have gained global followings in recent years, but in which mistranslating (or machine translating) in subtitling is a common issue. This has led to ‘lost in translation’ moments caused by words being incorrectly translated, paraphrasing, a lack of understanding of cultural context, nuance around characters being lost, and a failure to successfully deal with humour.

Human translators, Professor Leeder explains, will always bring something that machines cannot replicate. ‘AI can’t deal with metaphor, idiom, or the stresses of word order and how this can change meaning. This is where the value of human translation lies.’ 

‘There needs to be a re-evaluation of the role of the human translator,’ she goes on. ‘It’s so important to champion their role in the future of publishing when authorship itself is under threat.

‘We hope this course will not only prepare graduates to make a real impact in our creative industries, supporting a new generation of translators as creative thinkers, collaborators, and innovators, but will serve as a reminder that the ability to imagine, interpret, and connect across languages and cultures remains a distinctly human endeavour.’

Oxford University physicists are simulating the strange, probabilistic world of quantum mechanics, opening the door to new innovations for superconductors, materials science, and quantum technologies.

It turns out that when you chill atoms to near absolute zero and suspend them in magnetic fields, the usual rules of matter no longer apply. Instead, the bizarre logic of quantum mechanics - where particles behave like waves and probabilities replace certainties- rule the day. But here at Oxford, researchers are not merely observing these strange phenomena, but engineering and controlling it with pioneering precision.

The ability to trap atoms and separate them into two distinct layers using radio frequencies is something Oxford specialises in. It has taken years of development in our group to reach this point, but it is now yielding extraordinary new insights.

Erik Rydow, DPhil student (Department of Physics)

‘It’s a bit like building a wind tunnel for quantum physics,’ explains Erik Rydow, DPhil student in Oxford’s Ultracold Quantum Matter Lab. ‘You can simulate how an aircraft wing behaves on a computer, but to really understand it, you need a controlled experiment. We’ve built the quantum equivalent of that wind tunnel.’

Quantum systems can be notoriously hard to simulate because they don’t behave like the physical systems we experience day to day. In the classical world, if the starting conditions of a system are precisely the same each time, then the final result will be the same. But in quantum mechanics, particles can exist in more than one state at once. This means that simulating a quantum system in general does not give you a definite outcome: instead, it gives you a spread of probabilities for the different things that may happen.

‘You can think of it like rolling a dice,’ adds Erik. ‘In the classical world, if the starting conditions are exactly the same each time, then the dice will land in the same place. But in the quantum world, even if the starting state is exactly the same between rolls, the dice can land on different sides. This means you can’t say for certain what outcome will happen; you can only give a probability.’

The researchers use lasers and radiofrequency signals to trap and cool atoms. Credit: Caroline Wood.

This capability rests on decades of innovations to trap and cool atoms. Using finely-tuned lasers and magnetic fields, a gas of rubidium atoms is chilled to near absolute zero; cold enough that tens of thousands of atoms all occupy the same quantum state. At such a low temperature, the behaviour of the atoms is determined by their quantum wavelike nature, and the different outcomes for identical particles can reveal the probabilities predicted by quantum mechanics. This creates an extraordinary laboratory for probing quantum effects that, until recently, were purely theoretical.

A hallmark of Oxford’s expertise is precision control. By manipulating atoms with radio frequencies, the team can separate them into ultrathin layers only a few microns apart with an exactness that is challenging to achieve with more standard protocols that use lasers. Uniquely to Oxford’s apparatus, these atoms can be precisely engineered into not just a single layer, but two. This enables researchers to capture extraordinary quantum ‘tunnelling’ effects, where atoms can be present in both layers at once, or flickering between them in ways that defy classical physics.

‘The ability to trap atoms and separate them into two distinct layers using radio frequencies is something Oxford specialises in,’ adds Erik. ‘It has taken years of development in our group to reach this point, but it is now yielding extraordinary new insights.’

Left: Erik Rydow working on the Ultracold Quantum Matter group’s experiment. Right: Vacuum system and cold atom source in the Ultracold Quantum Matter group’s experiment. At the center of the round aperture, atoms of rubidium gas are cooled and pushed into the experiment using laser light. Credit for both images: Caroline Wood.

Creating new phases of matter

As well as exploring exotic physics, understanding these quantum effects could help unlock a pivotal goal: next-generation superconducting materials that enable frictionless flow of electrons at higher temperatures.

Layered quantum systems are at the heart of many next-generation materials, from superconductors to quantum devices. By recreating and tuning such systems from the ground up, physicists are testing longstanding theories and exploring new phases of matter with unprecedented control.

Dr Shinichi Sunami (Department of Physics)

In a recent study published in Nature Communications, the Oxford team were able to map out, for the first time, how their double-layer system changes under different conditions - a kind of ‘phase diagram’ for this new quantum material. What they saw was striking: when the two layers were brought close enough, quantum tunnelling between them helped the particles flow without friction, even at higher temperatures than expected for a single layer.

Normally, tiny whirlpools (known as vortices) would appear and disrupt this frictionless flow. However, the tunnelling between the layers effectively suppressed those disturbances, preserving the smooth, resistance-free movement.

‘While actual tunnelling of particles is not very frequent, the consequences are dramatic: it binds the layers into a single state with shared coherence, enabling frictionless flow across both layers. It effectively becomes a new phase of matter,’ says Dr Shinichi Sunami, a postdoctoral researcher of the group who supervised the project. Oxford’s state-of-the-art quantum simulator apparatus enables researchers to precisely control the separation and therefore quantum tunnelling rate between the layers, allowing them to investigate precisely how these phenomena invoke new properties.

Two layers of ultracold gas in the group's experiment. Credit: Ultracold Quantum Matter group.

A platform for discovery

Here at Oxford, this is just the beginning. The same apparatus that allows researchers to validate theories can also explore uncharted territory: How do quantum systems evolve when cooled suddenly? How do entirely new phases of matter emerge in real time?

‘These are questions theory alone struggles to answer,’ says Erik. ‘But with our simulators, we can perform the experiment and watch events at the quantum level unfold. I feel extraordinarily lucky to be working on this for my DPhil research. There are so many other interesting phenomena we can explore with this unique apparatus.’

On World Mosquito Day, Dr Lucy Harrison, postdoctoral researcher at Oxford’s Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO) at the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, reflects on the global impact of the mosquito and her research into malaria drug resistance.

A small insect, a global impact

Dr Lucy Harrison. Credit: James Harrison.

Every year on 20 August, World Mosquito Day marks the extraordinary role of one tiny insect in shaping human health. Mosquitoes are responsible for transmitting some of the world’s most devastating diseases, including malaria, dengue, Zika, and yellow fever.

Malaria alone causes more than 260 million cases and nearly 600,000 deaths annually. Around 95% of this burden is borne by people in Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite investments of over USD 4 billion in malaria control efforts in 2023, global funding still falls short of what is needed to meet the World Health Organization's Global Technical Strategy.

The relationship between humans and malaria is ancient. Evidence suggests the disease afflicted populations from the time of the Egyptians and may even have been described by Hippocrates.

From discovery to mathematics

World Mosquito Day commemorates the discovery by Sir Ronald Ross, on 20 August 1897, that female Anopheles mosquitoes transmit malaria. Ross also pioneered the first mathematical model of vector-borne disease, showing how infected mosquitoes create infected people and vice versa.

His insights laid the foundation for malaria control strategies: if mosquito numbers are reduced, the opportunities for transmission fall. George Macdonald later refined this work, introducing the concept of the ‘reproduction number’ or 'R number' — a measure familiar today from its use during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fighting back

Mosquito-borne diseases can be tackled by controlling mosquito populations, reducing human exposure, and treating infections. Approaches include removing stagnant water, spraying insecticides, releasing genetically modified mosquitoes that reduce reproduction, using repellents and bed nets, and deploying effective medicines.

Several key malaria drugs come from natural sources. Quinine, derived from the bark of the cinchona tree, was used for centuries and even gave rise to tonic water. More recently, artemisinin, discovered in 1972 from sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua), revolutionised malaria treatment. Its discovery earned Chinese pharmacologist, Tu Youyou, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015.

But widespread drug use also fuels drug resistance. Artemisinin-resistant parasites were first documented in 2008, and are linked to specific mutations in the parasite’s genes. To preserve treatment effectiveness, the WHO now recommends combining artemisinin with a partner drug to slow the evolution of resistance.

Mapping resistance

At Oxford, my work focuses on mapping the spread of genetic mutations in malaria parasites across Sub-Saharan Africa. These mutations are linked to resistance against frontline drugs such as artemisinin.

With the power of modelling, my maps use the data that is available to predict what proportion of malaria parasites may have mutations linked to drug resistance in locations where we don’t have any data.

In many regions where malaria transmission is most intense, there is little or no genetic data. Running clinical trials to test drug effectiveness is costly and resource-intensive. To overcome this, we use geospatial models that can predict the likely distribution of resistance even in areas without data.

These models combine available genetic data with information on the distance and time between data collections, and environmental conditions such as malaria prevalence. By doing so, we can predict the prevalence of resistant parasites in areas where we don’t have any data.

The maps produced at the University of Oxford will be made freely available through the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory’s Artemisinin Molecular Surveyor. The Surveyor is a living systematic review which can be used by researchers and policy-makers to visualise the current state of global drug resistance in the malaria parasite.

A screenshot of the Infectious Disease Data Observatory’s Artemisinin Molecular Surveyor, which visualises published genetic data of the malaria parasite.

This World Mosquito Day reminds us that mosquitoes remain one of humanity’s most persistent threats. At Oxford, researchers are combining field data, genetics, and advanced modelling to provide the evidence needed to guide global health decisions, helping to ensure that life-saving drugs remain effective for the communities that need them most.