Simeon Hatzopoulos

Contrails, Not Chemtrails: The Overlooked Climate Impact of Aviation

Where would we be without air travel? Every day, around 100,000 flights take off worldwide, emitting vast amounts of CO₂. Yet the greatest climate impact of aviation is often overlooked: contrails.

Contrails form behind aircraft engines when aerosols in the exhaust freeze in the cold upper atmosphere, creating ice crystals. They can spread into cirrus clouds that trap outgoing radiation from the Earth, leading to additional warming. Recent estimates suggest that contrails are responsible for ~66% of aviation’s contribution to global warming.

So why are there still no regulations to limit their formation? The answer is uncertainty. Our understanding of contrails is still incomplete, making it difficult to design effective mitigation strategies. Current estimates of their effective radiative forcing carry uncertainties of ±70%. One promising way to speed up progress is through simulation. By improving how we model contrail formation and evolution, we can reduce uncertainty and move closer to practical, climate-friendly solutions for aviation.e Union. I position these trials as political acts that redefined conceptions of loyalty and speech during a time of disunity and war.

Elina Paivinen

Risk, perception, and the history of nuclear power in post-1945 Britain

Certain perceptions nuclear technologies (particularly those surrounding risk and potential) have long shaped not only safety practices and ethical and regulatory frameworks in the nuclear power industry, but also the overall trajectory of British energy.

Arising from research into the ways in which various expert institutions have assessed and mitigated radiological risk, produced knowledge in the face of scientific uncertainty, and anticipated, reacted to and participated in the production of nuclear exceptionalism, this presentation gives an overview of the history of the ‘acceptability’ of nuclear power in post-1945 Britain.

Lea Weimann

Nature in the Courtroom: Rights of Nature and Ecocentric Legal Innovation

Historically, environmental law has sought to protect the natural world indirectly, as an object rather than a subject of rights, through considerations such as property rights, public health and economic use. Over the past decade, there has been an increasing global recognition of nature as a legal subject, with it being represented and defended in judicial proceedings.

This presentation examines how Rights of Nature function as a form of ecocentric legal innovation, focusing on the role of courts in translating ecocentric ideas into legal reasoning and remedies. Drawing on selected judicial developments, it explores what changes, and what remains contested, when ecosystems appear in court not merely as objects of regulation, but as rights-bearing entities. It reflects on the meaning of 'ecocentric laws' and the potential shift in environmental protection. The talk concludes with a reflection on the potential and limitations of ecocentric adjudication for the future of environmental law.

Ben Pollard

Politics at Play: Civilians, Disloyal Speech, and the Military Commissions in the American Civil War

Throughout the American Civil War, the government used military commissions in an unprecedented fashion to prosecute civilians on charges of disloyal speech. By comparing cases of disloyal speech in which the defendant resided in loyal states with those in which the defendant came from seceded Southern states, I argue that civilians within the Union were essentially treated the same as Confederates.

By using the same legal system to try civilians from loyal states as was used in disloyal states, the Lincoln administration blurred the lines of assumed loyalty and disloyalty, thus equating Union civilians with secessionists. That stigma was made obvious in those instances in which those found guilty were expelled from the Union. I position these trials as political acts that redefined conceptions of loyalty and speech during a time of disunity and war.

Lina Mooren

The effect of digitalisation in publishing

The book publishing industry is one of the oldest media industries in the world. Over the last two decades, digitalisation--and specifically the introduction of the ebook format--has transformed the industry. Despite initial skepticism, the ebook has gained significant market share with over 40% of U.S. adults reporting that they have read at least one digital book in the last year (Perrin, 2022). This talk is going to take a look at the effects that digitalisation has had on this space and what we expect to see going forward.

Joshua Yen

The distinction between theoretical and pastoral problems of evil

The distinction between theoretical and pastoral problems of evil is often invoked in the problem of evil to maintain objectivity. Despite its importance, there is no consensus on how the distinction should be characterised, impeding philosophical progress.

This paper addresses this lack of consensus by examining these varying characterisations to provide a suggestion for how philosophers can engage with evil going forward. The first characterisation suggests that all theoretical debates are situated on a social and political praxis such that any intellectual position impacts one’s pastoral disposition. The second characterisation distinguishes between third person approaches characteristic of analytic philosophy and first person approaches found in the continental and anti-theodical traditions. The third distinction arises from differing success conditions with the theoretical problem based on the possibility of God’s co-existence with evil and the pastoral on how one copes with evil.

Through an examination of these characterisations, I argue that the perspectival distinction is most conductive for philosophical development by promoting fruitful discussion and opening new avenues for how the problem of evil can be framed. While the first distinction rightly notes that theoretical engagement may have pastoral effects, it doesn’t follow from this that theoretical discussions are morally untenable. It is also superior to the fourth distinction as any attempt to address the success conditions of pastoral coping would seem, by definition, to devalue truth. Thus, this paper not only helps clarify an often equivocated distinction in the problem of evil, but aids in developing productive meta-philosophical structure to engage with the broader theme of evil.

Harry Chevassut (speaker from the Whiston Society)

A Perfect Match: Marrying chemotherapeutics to proteins for the targeted therapy of cancers

All of the matter around us is (to an extent) chemical. Some chemical things are also biological, and this interface has exciting implications for modern medicine. Proteins are a particularly interesting biological chemical; constructed from a finite set of building blocks, and yet the diversity of possible structures is immense! One example of a class of proteins is antibodies, which are produced by the immune system to target disease causing cells. Harnessing the selectivity of these molecules opens up a plethora of medicinal possibilities for the treatment of cancers, which have traditionally been treated using small molecule chemotherapeutic drugs (which have devastating side effects associated with them).

In this talk, I will take a bottom-up approach to this fascinating area of research, beginning by introducing small organic molecules as drug candidates, before discussing proteins and their chemistry, and finally arriving at our "perfect match" of an Antibody-Drug Conjugate.

Zoe Bannister

Amino acid sensing via the ubiquitin-proteasome system

Amino acids serve as both building blocks for protein synthesis and critical signalling metabolites. Therefore, cells have evolved complex nutrient-sensing pathways to detect amino acid abundance. Canonical amino acid sensing is achieved through mTOR signalling and the GCN2 pathway, but the precise molecular mechanisms that communicate the abundance of individual amino acids to the cellular machinery remains largely incomplete. In particular, the Ubiquitin-Proteasome System (UPS) is emerging as a central regulator of metabolic adaptation, suggesting that E3 ubiquitin ligases may have currently uncharacterised roles as amino acid sensors.

The goal of my project is to leverage global genetic and proteomic approaches to identify novel sensors of specific amino acids.

Marta Zaccaria

A map of pancreatic cancer cells and their neighbours

Pancreatic cancer is a lethal disease with no effective therapies. A potentially surprising feature of pancreatic cancer is that cancer cells only comprise up to 10% of the tumour. In fact, most of the tumour is comprised of non-cancerous cells, which contribute to disease progression and alter response to treatment. Pancreatic cancer cells have a range of alterations in their DNA called ‘mutations’, which drive cancer growth. These mutations occur in tracts of the DNA called ‘genes’ and can help cancer cells to grow or prevent them from dying.

Emerging research shows that different pancreatic cancer cell mutations change the behaviour of both pancreatic cancer cells and of their surrounding non-cancerous cells. Consequently, this can alter response to therapies. My project aims to understand how mutations in the gene called TGFBR2 alter the pancreatic cancer cells, the non-cancerous neighbouring cells and the communication between cancer and non-cancerous cells.

Ludwig Maximilian Hanauske

Materials Science & Metrology - Hidden Heroes of Sustainability

Materials science - the intersection of physics, chemistry, and engineering - underpins modern society in countless ways, from A like airplanes to Z like zips. As materials become increasingly specialised, traditional trial-and-error approaches in research struggle to deliver the speed, scalability, and reliability required by industry while minimising waste and energy use during a material’s life cycle.

Materials 4.0 describes a new paradigm in materials research that integrates automation, digital tools, and data-driven workflows to accelerate sustainably materials development. Central to this transition is metrology - the science of measurement - which enables reliable, comparable, and scalable characterisation across laboratories and manufacturing environments.

Within this framework, this PhD project focuses on two-dimensional materials, such as WS₂ and MoS₂, which offer strong potential for energy-efficient electronic and aims to develop a holistic, high-throughput metrology framework for their quality assessment.

Arsham Nejad Kourki

The role of body size in the evolution of tissues and organs

The evolution of tissues and organs is often discussed in terms of division of labour or transitions in individuality, yet why core biological functions come to be performed at higher organisational levels remains poorly understood. We test the hypothesis that increases in body size impose physical constraints that render ancestral cellular mechanisms for function performance ineffective, favouring the reorganisation of functions at tissue- or organ-level scales.

Using a large comparative dataset spanning unicellular organisms to large metazoans, we analyse body-size distributions associated with different organisational modes of locomotion, circulation, and digestion. Across all three domains, higher-level implementations—such as muscular propulsion, closed and centralised circulatory systems, and extracellular digestion with specialised glands—are associated with significantly larger characteristic body sizes. Exceptions, such as sponges, illuminate how alternative architectural solutions can relax size constraints without tissue-level integration.

These results support a view of organisational evolution as the preservation of biological functions across changing size regimes, linking biophysics, comparative biology, and the origin of complex anatomical organisation.

Valentine (speaker from the
Dilettante Society)

Engineered Languages

Since the 19th century, people have been creating artificial languages (Volapük, Esperanto, Latino Sine Flexione, Lojban, Toki Pona), often with the goals of either better international communication, or more "ideal" communication. In the light of the limited adoption of most of these, one might ask what goals such a project can hope to achieve. Most constructed languages see little adoption, and few (if any) speakers, with Esperanto as an important exception.

In this talk I will ask what is required for engineered languages to see large adoption. Most importantly: can these languages only succeed if they draw on existing lexicons and grammars? I will also give a broad survey of the topic, both in previous centuries and in modern day, in this case particularly online communities for these languages.

Hannah Brown

Erotica and the Birth of Censorship

Humans have engaged with erotic and pornographic content for millennia- but when did it begin to be identified as a problem and how could this problem be tackled? While rich, educated men had always accessed this content the rise of literacy in women and the lower class, coupled with a decline in print costs created a perfect storm during the restoration period for an explosion in the proliferation of pornographic material. Material that often contained political messaging. Fears of the moral consequences of this movement inspired the creation of novel censorship laws. But how could these be defined and enforced when there was no precedent?

Jessica Folwell

Gender and promiscuity: who can we trust?

Research into how promiscuity affects attitudes towards men and women has provided consistently inconsistent results, showing a need for an overhaul of methodology and theory. This research explores the impact of promiscuity by using economic games to assess the degree of altruism and trust shown towards simulated men and women. 501 participants were recruited made to believe that they were playing a real person.

Participants were found to be less altruistic (p < 0.001) and less trusting (p = 0.00164) towards promiscuous stooges in general, and this negative effect was found to be greater for man stooges than for woman stooges (p = 0.031, p = 0.089 respectively) in some contexts. This evidence does not support the existence of the traditional sexual double standard but instead shows support for the existence of egalitarian attitudes or for a greater negative impact of promiscuity on men than women.

I address the pressing implications of this for evolutionary theory and expand the theory to consider the importance of male provisioning for female fitness. I also discuss the role of power in the perception of male promiscuity, broadening the sociological explanations for differences in how promiscuity impacts men and women.

Sophia Stellato

Dying as a womanly trait: examining depictions of heroines' deaths in the operas of Lully and Rameau

This paper investigates the relationship between gender and depictions of women’s deaths in the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau, focusing on the heroines Psyché, Mérope, and Phèdre. Building on scholarship such as Catherine Clément’s analysis of nineteenth-century opera, the study addresses a gap in research on gender norms and musical performances in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French opera.

The analysis situates operatic representations within the context of the Querelle des Femmes debate and prevailing Catholic doctrines, examining how expectations of female behaviour shaped both character arcs and modes of death. Through close readings of libretti and musical scores, the paper demonstrates that heroines who conform to social ideals of obedience and emotional restraint are rewarded or absolved, while those who embody jealousy, hysteria, or sexual transgression meet violent or shameful ends, including suicide.

Ultimately, the study reveals how these operatic narratives both reflect and reinforce early modern patriarchal values.d survey of the topic, both in previous centuries and in modern day, in this case particularly online communities for these languages.

Noah Grodzinski

What Survives When You Zoom Out? An Introduction to Renormalisation in Statistical Physics

I will provide a non-technical introduction to the renormalisation group, one of the most powerful ideas to emerge from 20th century statistical physics. I will explain how this framework can be used to understand the emergence of order and disorder in large random systems, and connect briefly with my own research.

Cosmin Patrascu

Institutions and the Economy

When people think of economics they often think of investment bankers and financial markets (stonks). However, financial economics is but a small segment of what economics has to offer. Indeed economics is the study of decision making. For me, given this the field of political economy and institutions is of paramount importance.

Institutions can be loosely defined as the ‘rules of the game’, so they set out the environment for individuals. I will show how political institutions have evolved and coexisted with economic institutions throughout history shaping economic environments. I will explain what it means to have inclusive and extractive institutions and how they affect the decision making of individuals. Finally, I will present some evidence based on research I have previously conducted that attempts to quantify the impact that institutions have on the economy.

Jona Nägerl

Applause as Analogue Computer

The talk starts from a simple observation: when people clap in an audience, their rhythm sometimes becomes synchronized without any explicit coordination. This behavior can be captured by modeling each participant as a weakly coupled oscillator interacting through auditory feedback. From this minimal description, collective rhythmic patterns emerge, persist, and occasionally collapse. These dynamics are a computational resource. The synchronized states and their transitions are interpreted as collective modes that can be deliberately exploited. In this way, the clapping audience serves as an intuitive example of how coupled dynamical systems can be leveraged as an analog computer.

Vasiliki Carson

What a medieval heiress taught me about modern leadership

When we think of medieval women in power, we often imagine figures constrained by feudal structures and distant from modern leadership realities. This talk challenges that assumption through the life of Elizabeth de Burgh (Elizabeth de Clare)—one of the wealthiest women of 14th-century England and the foundress of Clare College —and reframes her as a case study in enduring, contemporary leadership. Far from a relic of a bygone age, Elizabeth operated as what we might now recognise as a medieval CEO: strategic, financially astute, values-driven, and acutely self-aware.

Drawing unexpected parallels with modern female leaders (and cultural icons such as Taylor Swift rather than Amy Winehouse), the talk explores themes of self-knowledge, loyalty, accountability, long-term thinking, empathy as strategy, and the ethical use of power. It argues that Elizabeth’s leadership style—rooted in stewardship, learning, and purpose—offers powerful lessons for women navigating authority, resilience, and legacy today.

Mr Alan J Lloyd

Dispelling Myth: Correcting falsehoods perpetuated about the history of Clare College

Almost every detail Cambridge tour guides and punt chauffeurs state about Clare College is inaccurate. Here we'll try to separate the fact from the fiction.

Dr Jo Costin

Clare and the First World War

The First World War had a significant impact on community life, including on the Clare community. Nearly every type of war experience can be found through stories of Clare and its members – from conscientious objectors like Hugh Willoughby Bligh, to casualties like Cecil Culme Malpas (who left his name in the brickwork by the River Café). The College itself became an Officer Training Corps, reflecting the loss of undergraduates, and there were even proposals to turn the Fellows’ Garden into a rifle training range. After the war, Memorial Court was constructed as a community response to the College’s losses, built on the site of a temporary war hospital. This talk will explore some of the wider themes of the war through Clare stories.

Dory Johnson

The “Intensely Blue Precipitate”: Reconstructing Woodward’s 1724 Recipe for Prussian Blue

Prussian blue is considered to be the first modern synthetic pigment, having been accidentally discovered in the first decade of the eighteenth-century by a pigment maker and an alchemist. This beautiful blue pigment was immediately popular, as it was less expensive, easier to use, and more permanent than other blue pigments available at the time. The highly-profitable secret of Prussian blue’s recipe was guarded until 1724, when a friend of the pigment’s inventors shared the recipe with another scientist, called Woodward, who published the recipe. This paper documents a recent synthesis of Prussian blue using this recipe, working to understand its sometimes confusing directions, considering its possible chemistry, and examining the resulting pigment.

This process yielded insights into Woodward’s materials and process, pigment samples that will be useful for future analysis, and previously unconsidered questions for future inquiry.

Luke Ng Man Kwong

Entropy in Thermodynamics, Texting, and Quantum Entanglement

Entropy is a fundamental concept that appears across many fields including physics, computer science, and even neuroscience, yet it is often regarded as abstract and mysterious. Since its discovery in the 19th century in an attempt to understand the limits of heat engines, the idea of entropy has developed into a powerful tool for understanding important problems in thermodynamics, information processing, and even quantum entanglement.

This talk will give a brief tour of entropy, discussing its origin and some example problems that demonstrate why it is still important today. No prior knowledge of any of the mentioned areas is required.

Priyanka Beta

Feeling concrete though electrical signals

The world around us is perceived through electrical signals. Among the most remarkable manifestations of this phenomenon are our neural cells, which allow us to sense, analyse, and respond to our surroundings, keeping us safe. Could similar sensing mechanisms exist within the inanimate concrete structures that form a vital part of our lives, particularly during times of adversity?

As concrete materials evolve in response to low-carbon imperatives—much like shifting demographics driven by globalisation—do we still possess the ability to listen more deeply to these materials and maintain seamless connections with the structures that support us? This talk explores current monitoring approaches, identifies key gaps, and proposes a way forward to “feel” concrete through electrical signals.tories.

Prasita Dutta

Demystifying the CO2 reduction mechanism in Carbon Monoxide Dehydrogenase: An inspiration for novel carbon capture technologies

What would your reaction be if I told you that many of the complicated carbon-capture technologies we are trying so hard to design already exist in nature and are operating constantly as we live and breathe?

Carbon monoxide dehydrogenase (CODH) is one of the few naturally occurring enzymes capable of selectively catalyzing the interconversion of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide as part of the energy-conservation pathways of certain bacteria. This remarkable capability makes CODH an especially promising model for clean-energy and industrial applications. Yet, its intricate metallocluster architecture and extremely rapid catalytic turnover have made it challenging to unravel the details of its mechanism.

As part of my project, we are probing CODH under electrochemical conditions in an effort to trap and characterize the transient intermediates formed during catalysis. Gaining a clear structural and mechanistic understanding of this enzyme could ultimately guide the design of novel, nature-inspired carbon-capture technologies for a more sustainable future.

Kyra Wu

The Future of Colour: Enzymes, Sustainability, and the Science Behind Fashion

The colours we wear are built from chemistry, yet the dyes behind them carry major environmental costs, with synthetic colourants contributing up to one-fifth of global industrial water pollution. Enzymatic colour generation offers a sustainable alternative.

Laccase, a copper-containing oxidase, converts catechol into intensely coloured polymers that bind strongly to fibres, but the reaction is difficult to study due to scattering from the enzyme and rapid colour development that overwhelms conventional analytical methods.

This talk explores how chemical bonds create colour, how enzymes can build dyes in real time, and how my research aims to resolve the polymerisation pathway using optimised reaction conditions and simultaneous UV–Vis and Raman monitoring. By connecting fashion and molecular chemistry, this presentation highlights how mechanistic insight can support the development of a more environmentally-responsible industry.

Vincent W-S Lien

How is education possible

This talk reframes a foundational question in educational theory through an ecological reworking of systems-theoretical thought. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann, education is conceptualised as an autopoietic social system that reproduces itself through communication rather than intentional action. Social and psychic systems remain operationally closed – communication produces communication; consciousness produces thoughts – while education depends on contingent and fragile structural couplings unfolding over the life course.

An ecological turn extends this account by treating environments not as passive backdrops but as active, materially and semiotically generative conditions. Educational meanings emerge through shifting ecological entanglements involving institutions, bodies, technologies, histories, and cultural semantics. Second-order observation is refigured as ecological self-observation, as educational distinctions drift in response to changing environments.

The talk concludes by arguing that education’s central challenge is not the optimisation of learning outcomes, but cultivating ecological sensitivity to the conditions that enable or restrict educational possibilities.