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New Fellows Rachel Quarrell
Andrew O’Bannon
Richard Ovenden
Balliol’s new Research Fellow in Engineering is a graduate of Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science, where he specialised in information engineering. After his doctoral degree, during which he was a Doctoral Research Fellow of Kellogg College, David became a Junior Research Fellow of Mansfield College. His appointment in 2013 as a Research Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering will lead to a permanent position in the Department of Engineering Science. His research interests are in Bayesian methods for timeseries analysis, typically using data from sensors in ‘health monitoring’ settings. His doctoral research resulted in engine monitoring systems used by the Airbus A380, Boeing 787 and Eurofighter Typhoon; his postdoctoral work translated this into the biomedical context, where he produced FDA-approved early warning systems for acutely ill patients in hospitals, using patient-worn sensors. He initiated the Computational Health Informatics Laboratory at Oxford, where his work is generalised to ‘big data’ problems in which genomic data are fused with patient healthcare. David is also the Associate Director for the Oxford Centre for Affordable Healthcare Technologies, which translates technologies into low-cost settings to improve access to healthcare in the developing world.
Professorial Fellow Richard Ovenden is Bodley’s Librarian, which is the senior executive position of the Bodleian Libraries. His previous roles include positions at the House of Lords Library, the National Library of Scotland, and the University of Edinburgh, after which he joined the Bodleian Libraries in 2003, becoming first Keeper of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts, then Associate Director, and, from 2011, Deputy Librarian. He is active in the sphere of libraries, archives and information science, being a member of the Board of the Legal Deposit Libraries and the Expert Panel of the National Heritage Memorial Fund; Chair of the Digital Preservation Coalition 2009–2013; a Trustee of Chawton House Library and the Kraszna Kraus Foundation; and on the Advisory Panel for Libraries and Archives of the Church of England. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
f lo r e at d o m u s b a l l i o l c o l l e g e n e w s
Byron Shafer Byron has come to Balliol from the University of Wisconsin to be Winant Visiting Professor (Politics) for Hilary and Trinity Terms 2015. As Hawkins Chair of Political Science at Wisconsin, he researches and teaches in American politics, broadly construed. He has written major monographs on reform politics, institutional change, policy divisions, structural influences, public opinion and strategic dilemmas in our time. He is currently working on two further monographs: Widening Gyre: Social Structure and Policy Preference in the Transformation of the American Party System, with Richard G.C. Johnston; and Born and Raised in Black and White: Political Structure and Political Substance in American Politics, 1945–2015. He is also editor of The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics.
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ian taylor
rob Judges
Andy is a Royal Society University Research Fellow in Oxford’s Department of Physics and he joins Balliol as a Junior Research Fellow in the Sciences. Before his Royal Society fellowship he was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich and then in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. Andy’s research is focused on physical systems in which strong interactions produce unusual properties, such as the quarkgluon plasma created in heavy ion collisions, which exhibits viscosity smaller than any other known substance. Few techniques exist to study such systems. Andy’s research is based on an imaginative new technique called holography, which equates certain strongly interacting systems with certain weakly interacting systems in Einstein’s theory of (general) relativity in one higher dimension and thus provides theoretical ‘toy models’ that may reveal patterns characteristic of strongly interacting systems. The main goal of Andy’s research is to discover as many such patterns as possible, using holography.
rob Judges
Rachel, now Fellow Dean, is no stranger to Balliol, having taught organic chemistry at Balliol for 15 years. As a postdoctoral researcher in medicinal chemistry at the Dyson Perrins Laboratory from 1994 to 2004, she published papers on combinatorial chemistry and the inhibition of enzymes, with a particular focus on the discovery of lead compounds with the potential to be used against targets including emphysema, malaria, the HIV virus and human dihydrofolate reductase (implicated in cancer growth). As well as being a Balliol Lecturer she teaches at Worcester and Corpus Christi Colleges. In 2001 she co-founded the Oxford Café Scientifique, a public science forum holding informal monthly science talks. She has also been the rowing correspondent for first the Independent and then the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs for the last 13 years.
David Clifton