Comment 168 - July 2006

the college newsletter

issue no

168 | J uly 2006

Prime Minister delivers Commemoration Oration T

Dominic turner

he Prime Minister, Tony Blair, gave a major policy speech on Africa and climate change on Monday 26 June in the Great Hall at King’s. Entitled A Year After Gleneagles, he announced a new body to monitor the progress of pledges made at last summer’s G8 summit.

In his speech, which was the College’s 2006 Commemoration Oration, Mr Blair outlined progress made on African aid and the challenge of climate change one year on from the Gleneagles meeting, and he stressed the importance of keeping these subjects at the top of the international agenda.

‘We can’t be complacent or underestimate the action required’ With Bob Geldof in the audience, he unveiled the Africa Progress Panel, to be chaired by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, which will include Geldof and Nigeria’s President Obasanjo.

The panel will produce an annual report to be submitted to the G8, UN and the Africa Partnership Forum to ‘maintain the international political profile of Africa achieved in 2005’.

The 250-strong audience listened intently as the Prime Minister gave

In his speech welcoming Mr Blair, the Principal, Professor Rick Trainor, noted that two previous Labour Prime Ministers – Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson – had accepted the invitation to speak at Commemoration Oration; but both had left office by the time they actually gave the speech. To much laughter, he noted that the ‘curse of King’s’ had been averted on this occasion and that we were all relieved that Mr Blair was still at Number 10! He also explained that there was particular resonance for the College in a Commemoration Oration speech about Africa, as the College had a long and enduring history of involvement with that continent.

Africa was one of the subjects addressed by King’s Fellow and alumnus Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 2004, when he spoke at Commemoration and outlined how the theological basis for his human rights beliefs had been developed here at King’s.

The College has educated many continued on page 2

The Prime Minister, The Right Honourable Tony Blair, delivers the College’s 2006 Commemoration Oration to a 250-strong audience of staff, students, alumni, press and guests such as Sir Bob Geldof.

an impassioned speech that was heavy on detail and emotion, and made no attempt to disguise the enormity of the task. ‘We can’t be complacent or underestimate the action required,’ he commented.

Talking about climate change Mr Blair said: ‘In the next 12 months we need to build a global consensus

about the scale of the action we need to take, and the long-term goal we’re all working towards.

We need to begin agreement on a framework that the major players – US, China, India and Europe – buy into and which has at its heart a goal to stabilise temperature and greenhouse gas concentrations.’

| 3|HRH officially South Range | 4 Update the out’ Principal | 5 Two Archbishops | 6 New Chairman of Pharmacy Council 2 RAE 2008 | 4opens Online history databases | 5from ‘Topping | 6 Admissions Policy | 7 Departmental focus: | 7|Top US Iraq spokesman | 8 Profile 14 Flashback | 19 Development & Alumni | 21 In the news Books| 16 Books 8 King’s people | 10 Flashback | 11 |Solidarity exhibition | 12 Research | 13 Student news | 14 |In23-24 the news

The celebrity bumper summer issue: from rock stars to royalty King’s is a magnet for VIPs!

News Dominic turner

continued from page 1

people who have made contributions not only to the religious and professional life of the country but also to the anti-apartheid and human rights movements.

Footage of the event appeared on all the major news channels King’s alumni and Fellows include Helen Joseph, who was tried for treason in South Africa for her courageous activities in support of the ANC, and Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, Desmond Tutu’s successor at Cape Town; the Reverend Barney Pityana, formerly Chair of the Human Rights Commission and now Vice Chancellor of the University of South Africa, and Ms Frene Ginwala, Speaker of the National Assembly of the Parliament of the Republic of South Africa since 1994.

The College’s involvement in Africa also extends to many current projects such as research on the environment, HIV and political affairs.

Matt Pusey, Students’ Union President, gave the vote of thanks after the lecture in which he thanked the Prime Minister for choosing King’s to make such an important speech and welcomed the fact that he spoke on topics so close to student hearts.

He wished the new initiatives well before outlining KCLSU’s involvement and commitment to this part of the world. He spoke about how activists from the People and Planet society helped KCLSU and the College to achieve Fairtrade status, and that the StopAIDS group had raised funds successfully.

In addition, work is being done for the next academic year to extend these efforts, including a WaterAid campaign, Amnesty International

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initiatives and the formation of a new UNICEF society.

A question and answer session followed the Prime Minister’s speech chaired by Vice-Principal (Research), Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman and a number of staff had a unique opportunity to put questions directly to the Prime Minister.

The Commemoration Oration celebrates King’s as a place of learning. Now an annual event at the College, the first ever Commemoration orator was the author and poet G K Chesterton.

Subsequent speakers have included C S Lewis, Clement Atlee, Harold Wilson, the Duke of Edinburgh and former Archbishop of Cape Town and Nobel Prize winner Desmond Tutu.

International media coverage of the Prime Minister’s speech at King’s was extensive, and footage of the event appeared on all the major news channels in this country.

The Prime Minister enters the Great Hall to deliver the College’s 2006 Commemoration Oration.

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Dominic turner

From left: Baroness Rawlings, Chairman of Council, Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, VicePrincipal (Research), The Prime Minister, The Right Honourable Tony Blair, Professor Rick Trainor, Principal, and Matt Pusey, KCLSU President.

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Sir Bob Geldof and The Prime Minister.

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Dr Funmi Olonisakin, Director of the Conflict, Security and Development Group, asks Mr Blair a question.

The Prime Minister meets with KCLSU sabbatical officers in the new Staff Common Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus after the speech.

News

HRH officially opens South Range Dominic turner

HRH, The Princess Royal, in the River Room with Baroness Rawlings, Chairman of Council, and King’s alumnus Rory Bremner.

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n 16 May HRH, The Princess Royal, Chancellor of the University of London, officially opened the South Range after the two-year, £40 million refurbishment.

The Chancellor was met by Baroness Rawlings, Chairman of Council, and Professor Rick Trainor, Principal, together with other senior members of staff.

The Chancellor’s tour began with a visit to the Information Systems Machine Room which has recently been refurbished and houses the College’s academic and administrative computer systems. She also opened its last refurbishment at the end of the 1980s.

Following a presentation illustrating the architectural transformation of the South Range in the 250-seat new lecture theatre, The Chancellor was taken to the Departments of Geography and War Studies where she was shown

Dominic turner

one of the new academic offices and one of the large dedicated rooms for graduates.

The tour culminated in a reception in the new River Room overlooking the Thames where The Chancellor talked to students, staff and guests before formally opening the South Range with a short speech and the unveiling of a plaque.

The Chancellor praised the way the redevelopment had been undertaken, saying that it would be ‘the talking point of many and the envy of a lot’. She thought that the refurbishment had been positive in every way and the new facilities should ‘give enormous encouragement to all those who used them’. She added that ‘King’s had proved it was possible to do a job on time and to budget’ which she hoped could be emulated by the 2012 Olympics with which she is involved.

HRH, The Princess Royal, meets students in one of the large rooms dedicated for graduate study. julian anderson

Chapters, a new 100-seat, multi-choice servery offering a wide range of meal options.

July 2006 | COMMENT |

News Update from the Principal

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n a report presented to College Council on 4 July the Principal, Professor Rick Trainor, gave an update on a number of matters of interest to the College community. Here Comment provides extracts from his report.

Strategic planning Progress continues with the conversion of the Draft Outline Strategic Plan presented to Council at its meeting in March into a final Strategic Plan with specified costed projects (focused on the next three years when our resources are constrained) and benchmarked targets (for that period and the remaining years to 2016), notably on postgraduate recruitment.

Meanwhile, many actions aimed at the overall goal of making King’s a world-class institution are proceeding. These include the inauguration of the Graduate School, whose director, Vaughan Robinson, from Swansea University, has been appointed. Improvements in internal communications and marketing are also taking place.

Degree-awarding powers King’s is now on the verge of acquiring its degree-awarding powers. All being well, the College will acquire degree-awarding powers before the autumn. These powers would not be used immediately. The enabling resolution asks for an intention in principle to use these powers: approval of that resolution would bring King’s in line with UCL and LSE with regard to degreeawarding powers.

University of London The Council of the University has approved in principle key recommendations which are emerging from the University’s Constitutional Review Working

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Group. What is envisaged is a new structure of governance which puts the colleges, in which the great bulk of the University’s academic activities takes place, at the centre.

The Heads of Colleges Committee would be transformed into a Collegiate Council, which would determine the strategic direction of the University and make proposals for resource allocation. Meanwhile, a Board of Trustees – with a lay majority – would have final authority for assets and serve as guarantors of fair play for the whole process.

It would appear that the University may acquire a looser, more college-centred, more efficient structure which would resolve many current difficulties.

Such a structure should also protect the aspects of the University which most matter to King’s – the Senate House Library and the School of Advanced Study.

Research After a period of uncertainty the Government has reprieved the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) while launching a consultation which assumes that subsequent assessment of universities for the selective allocation of general research money (QR) will be done on the basis of metrics, in other words quantifiable indicators of research performance.

We have supported the retention of the 2008 RAE, which will involve peer review judgements of the quality of research. King’s has taken this approach in part on the basis that institutions such as ours have been planning for it for years, in part because we hope that it will recognise the major advance in research at King’s in recent years.

Meanwhile, we have concerns about metrics – particularly for the humanities and social sciences

– even though some versions of such a system might work to the College’s advantage.

With regard to the health-related disciplines, recent Government announcements have also raised concerns. Against the background of considerable financial worries in the NHS, a review is considering a closer connection between NHS R&D and the research councils, especially the Medical Research Council.

The Government has reprieved the 2008 RAE As our income from the latter is large and rising we are cautious about these proposals while recognising that better coordination between the two types of funding would be useful. Meanwhile, College-related bids for the new NHS R&D system (‘Best Research for Best Health’) have all been shortlisted.

AUT/UCU industrial action In mid-June a settlement was announced in the national dispute between the Association of University Teachers (AUT, since 1 June part of the University and College Union, UCU) and the university employers’ organisation, UCEA. The settlement lifted the threat to our students of not receiving their results and graduating on time. A ballot is now being held; the result will be available on 17 July.

Whatever the result of the ballot, I am grateful that colleagues at King’s, despite contrasting views on the industrial action, minimised its effects on students, notably by allowing all our examinations (in contrast to many other institutions) to be set and sat on schedule.

In addition, there were very

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useful discussions with the sabbatical officers of KCLSU and the officers of the recognised trade unions at King’s. These approaches have made it possible, once the settlement was reached, to move rapidly to finalise degree results.

Throughout the country many academics had come to the conclusion that the system of variable fees would make possible a very large leap in pay. In fact, given the £3,000 cap on such fees until at least 2009, such a leap is not financially practicable – even though there is a strong case in the abstract for an increase in pay, beyond the recent settlement, to compensate for the modest nature of the pay rises of the last couple of decades.

If UCU members approve the settlement – which involves pay rises of some 13 per cent over three years, including a review of university finances with respect to the final year – the College, like other university institutions, will implement it despite the award being at the limits of affordability for us. (The College has invested heavily in key additional academic staff posts during the last couple of years, and like other institutions King’s will have substantial additional pay costs associated with the pay and modernisation process.) If the ballot rejects the settlement, the consequences throughout UK higher education are hard to forecast.

News Two Archbishops visit in one month!

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Greg Funnell

n May the Archbishop of Canterbury, and King’s Visitor, Dr Rowan Williams and Archbishop Desmond Tutu visited the College.

Dr Rowan Williams Dr Rowan Williams visited the Guy’s and Strand campuses on 8 May. He met with staff and students and attended services in the chapels on both campuses.

The first part of the Archbishop’s tour began at Guy’s where he was met by the Principal, Professor Rick Trainor, and the Dean, the Revd Dr Richard Burridge.

They discussed issues including student debt and finances Dr Williams was shown the Gordon Museum, which has a large and growing collection of approximately 8,000 pathological specimens and a number of important historic collections.

A visit to the Wolfson Building followed where he saw, at firsthand, the work being undertaken in the field of stem cell research.

The tour proceeded to Guy’s Chapel where Dr Williams met the Guy’s Chaplain, James Buxton.

The tour culminated with lunch where Dr Williams met individuals from the Schools of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical & Health Sciences.

After lunch Dr Williams went to the Students’ Union in the Macadam Building on the Strand Campus. There he met members of the Students’ Union, where they discussed issues of concern, including student debt and finances.

The Principal and the Dean then escorted Dr Williams on a tour of the newly refurbished South Range

The Archbishop of Canterbury, and King’s Visitor, Dr Rowan Williams, meets students in Guy’s Chapel.

of the King’s Building before having tea with staff and students.

In a short address to the assembled guests, Dr Williams said that he had enjoyed a happy and

memorable day at King’s, and was pleased to meet so many members of the College community from whom he had learnt a huge amount.

The Archbishop then preached at angelina georgiou

From left: The Revd Dr Richard Burridge, Dean of the College, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Principal, Professor Rick Trainor and Dr Marguerite Dupree, the Principal’s wife.

service in the Strand Chapel which was attended by Senior Officers and members of the College.

The office of Visitor to a university dates back to the 15th century. The Visitor is appointed by the Queen.

Desmond Tutu On 19 May Archbishop Desmond Tutu returned to King’s to speak at a meeting in the Great Hall, Strand Campus, organised by the Canon Collins Trust, which supports education in southern Africa. Nobel laureate Archbishop Tutu is an alumnus of King’s, and in 2004 spent some months at the College as Visiting Professor in Post-Conflict Societies.

Fellowship success King’s has emerged as one of the winners in the second round of Research Councils UK Fellowship Awards designed to nurture postgraduate talent.

The College won 12 of the 400 fellowships announced in May, placing King’s seventh in the UK for the total number of awards made. It will receive £1.5 million of the £50 million fund and has doubled its fellowship funding from the first round.

The Fellowship Scheme gives postgraduate researchers £125,000 over five years and aims to give contract research staff more attractive and stable paths into academia.

The Fellowships are subject to universities guaranteeing a permanent, academic position following the end of the award.

The Fellowships will start between 2006-08.

July 2006 | COMMENT |

News Liberian President speaks at King’s

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he WOrLD’s FirsT WOmAn black President and Africa’s first elected female Head of state, ellen Johnson-sirleaf, President of Liberia, spoke at King’s on 29 may where she presented her Government’s development plan for Liberia. ellen Johnson-sirleaf was welcomed to the College by the Principal, Professor rick Trainor, before an audience which included several hundred members of the Liberian community in the UK, gathered in the Great hall at the strand Campus.

Also known as the iron Lady, ellen Johnson-sirleaf won the Presidential election held in

november 2005 as leader of the Unity party, and took office in January this year.

President Johnson-sirleaf said ‘growth without development’, is no longer an option for Liberia. rather her plan for Liberia is to achieve ‘growth for development’. she highlighted the importance of peace and security as a prerequisite for development, and the need to focus on education, health and addressing youth vulnerability, while ensuring efficient resource management. her development plan also includes the restructuring of the civil service and judiciary as well as decentralisation of power and

The President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, and the Principal, Professor Rick Trainor.

authority. she urged Liberians abroad to return home so that, collectively, Liberians can work to ensure that their country once again becomes a trailblazer on the African continent.

King’s has had close links with

New Chairman of Council The Council of King’s has approved the nomination of the marquess of Douro as Chairman of Council, following the completion in september 2007 of the customary three 3-year terms by the current Chairman, Baroness rawlings.

Lord Douro was born in 1945 and is a graduate of Oxford University. he has led a very successful career in business, having been Chairman of sun Life & Provincial holdings (UK) Ltd (1995-2000), founder and Deputy Chairman of Thames Valley Broadcasting (1975-84) and Deputy Chairman of Guinness mahon merchant bank (1988-91). he was Chairman of Framlington Group plc from 1993 to 2005. since 1990 he has been Chairman of richemont holdings UK Ltd.

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Lord Douro was an meP from 1979-89, and played a significant role in the entry of spain and Portugal into the eU. he is a

member of the english heritage Commission, and has served in the past as a member of Council of the royal College of Art and the University of surrey.

Lord Douro’s connections with the College are several. he is the eldest son of the 8th Duke of Wellington; the first Duke was one of the founders of King’s and famously fought a duel (whilst Prime minister) over its foundation. Lord Douro’s wife, who has a distinguished record of public service in her own right, is an english graduate of King’s.

Lord Douro’s appointment follows the unanimous recommendation of the College’s nominations Committee. he will take up his post on 1 October 2007.

Liberia since 2003 through the Liberia Programme in the Conflict, security and Development Group, based at the international Policy institute. The iPi brings together expertise in the school of social science & Public Policy.

Summer read

K

inG’s is The LOCATiOn OF a violent death in Catherine shaw’s latest 19th century murder mystery novel The Library Paradox. Journey with private detective Vanessa as she tries to solve this puzzling case in the heart of the strand…

News Top US Iraq spokesman gives keynote lecture

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rigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the man responsible for the media strategy of the US military, delivered a keynote lecture at King’s on 15 June. His speech, A revolution in US military and media strategy?, indicated that US strategy in the wider Middle East, including its approach to news media, has begun to change but further changes are needed.

Mark Kimmitt is Deputy Director of Strategy and Plans at the US Military’s Central Command (CENTCOM). He is responsible for the wider Middle East, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and was the public face to the world of the US military during the Abu Ghraib prison crisis as Chief Spokesman for the Multinational Force in Iraq.

He gave his views on how the US military is now engaged in a long war, which will require a radical, almost revolutionary change in US military culture.

He claimed that the US is shifting away from the use of ‘massive force’ to ‘maximal restraint’, geared to winning hearts and minds in a battle of wills rather than a trial of physical strength.

He said that the war may not

Naresh Verlander

Other key speakers at King’s

Brigadier General Kimmitt’s opinions were of great interest to the media. Jeremy Paxman (right) came to King’s to record a discussion for Newsnight, and Krishnan Guru-Murthy, a presenter of Channel 4 News, also interviewed the Brigadier General.

be over during the lifetime of this generation, and that the military component was only part of the process; indeed, he suggested that it may in due course be the least important part.

He underlined the part that technology played in the conflict and that, despite wishing to knock society back into the 14th century, extremists were reliant on the internet.

He emphasised that ‘Bin Ladenism’ was the first movement of the 21st that, like fascism, maoism and communism in the last century,

Law agreement

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n 19 June Professor John Phillips, Former Head of the School of Law, and Professor Wang Chenguang, Head of the School of Law, Tsinghua University, signed an agreement on co-operation in Legal Studies between King’s and Tsinghua University, north-west Beijing.

The agreement means that from September Tsinghua will accept a minimum of five King’s students on its Master of Laws (LLM) programme in Chinese Law and

King’s will accept a minimum of five students from Tsinghua to study its LLM degree. In addition, King’s will also provide one scholarship each academic year to a Tsinghua University student to undertake the LLM degree at King’s.

Professor Phillips commented: ‘This is a significant agreement and we are delighted to be working with Tsinghua University.

Collaborations such as these are vital to the College’s future and our international standing.’

would need to be defeated to preserve western values.

Brigadier General Kimmitt’s speech was part of a symposium Terrorism, Media and War: From New York to London, from Iraq to Iran, held at King’s on 15-16 June.

• The acclaimed writer and broadcaster Michael Rosen recently delivered the Department of Education & Professional Studies’ annual education lecture, What’s Politics Got To Do With It? • Ken Macdonald QC, Director of Public Prosecutions, ran a seminar, Building a modern prosecution authority organised

by The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies.

• Richard Holmes CBE, Professor of Military & Security Studies at Cranfield University, writer and broadcaster, gave the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives annual lecture Soldiers and Society.

National Portrait Gallery

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conference on 18 and 19 May at the National Portrait Gallery entitled Shakespeare: Portraiture, Biography and the Material World, organised by King’s and the Gallery, explored the events and relationships of Shakespeare’s life including his marriage, his property and his portraits, in the context of his work. Professor Ann Thompson, joint editor of the new Arden edition of Hamlet, spoke on ‘Hamlet in 1603’.

Also speaking from King’s was Dr Sonia Massai, on ‘The Good, the Bad and the Wise: The rise of Shakespeare in print’.

Another collaboration took place on 8 June at the Gallery.

London Lives: Biography and the City involved five academics and biographers from the Department of English – Professor Leonee

national portrait gallery

Chandos portrait of Shakespeare.

Ormond, Professor Max Saunders, Professor David Nokes, Professor Marion Turner and Dr Neil Vickers – discussing their work on London figures such as Dr Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ford Madox Ford, the medieval Londoner Thomas Usk, and the Victorian cartoonist Linley Sambourne.

July 2006 | COMMENT |

Profile

Peter West

Naresh Verlander

Peter West, Professor of Theoretical Physics in the Department of Mathematics, was one of 44 scientists elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society at the end of May. How does it feel to be recognised by the Royal Society?

Although some of my work was recognised early on, much of my work has taken more than 10 years to become well known so it is reassuring to be recognised by the Royal Society. Being elected to this prestigious group of about 1,400 Fellows and Foreign Members is a great honour.

Tell us about your career.

I failed my 11 plus, but after a struggle I gained some good A-levels and I was awarded my degree in 1973 and doctorate in 1976 both at Imperial College.

I was fortunate to have Abdus Salam as my PhD supervisor.

Abdus, who unfortunately died some years ago, won the Nobel Prize with others, for his work in 1969 on the unification of the electro-magnetic and nuclear weak forces. It was Abdus who started me working on supersymmetry.

After two years of postdoctoral experience, I came to King’s in 1978 as a lecturer. I have found King’s a friendly and unpretentious institution where I have been able to carry out my own research and build up a group working on theoretical physics in the Maths Department where such groups are often found.

I currently hold a Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council Senior Fellowship and have recently been appointed to the RAE panel on Applied Mathematics. | COMMENT | July 2006

Describe your area of expertise.

The area of physics that I work in concerns the formulation of the fundamental laws of physics.

The Standard Model discovered around 1969 unifies the electro-magnetic, nuclear weak (the force which makes the sun shine) and nuclear strong (what holds the nucleus of an atom together) forces in a way that is consistent with the principles of relativity and quantum mechanics. The remaining force of gravity is usually described by Einstein’s 1915 theory of gravity.

This latter theory, together with the Standard Model, account for almost all observed phenomena, at least as a matter of principle, from those measured at distances far below that of the nucleus of the atom to the furthest observed effects in the universe.

However, Einstein’s theory of gravity is not likely to be consistent with the principles of quantum mechanics and so cannot be combined with the Standard Model into a single unified theory. It became clear with the discovery of the Standard Model that symmetry played an increasingly important role in formulating the underlying laws of physics.

Just before I began my research a new kind of symmetry called supersymmetry, which exchanged fermions and bosons (examples are electrons and light respectively) was discovered. I

was part of a relatively small band of largely European physicists that developed the implications of this symmetry for constructing a unified theory of all four forces.

Later on I also worked on string theory which was also originally found in 1969. It is now widely believed that supersymmetry and string theory are essential ingredients required to incorporate all four forces of nature in a single consistent theory.

[In their citation, the Royal Society said: ‘Professor West is distinguished for the development of the theory of supersymmetry and its application to the construction of unified theories of all the fundamental particle interactions.

His results have become cornerstones of the modern theory of superstrings and associated branes to which he continues to contribute actively.’]

Which theoretical physicists did you admire when you were growing up?

I try to manipulate the equations of physics in the hope of resolving some underlying physical puzzle.

One of the most important guides on how to change a theory is that it should result in more elegant equations. In this way of proceeding one does not have

to rely on having a big new idea to make important progress, but one can exploit the internal consistency of mathematics and the hope that the true underlying equations of physics should be very elegant.

One of the great exponents of this method of working was Dirac who discovered the equation describing the electron. James Clerk Maxwell’s work on the unification of electricity and magnetism at King’s is also one of the classic examples of this style.

Why would you encourage students to pursue their studies in maths?

Mathematics and theoretical physics have an internal consistency and beauty that provide welcome relief from some of the more mundane and banal aspects of everyday life. However, it must also be said that trying to find new results can be a gruelling endeavour where true inspiration only comes very occasionally.

It has become increasingly clear that a thriving modern economy requires in the community a good understanding of mathematics.

Also, the problem-solving skills developed while studying theoretical physics are a very valuable asset even in apparently distant fields; for example derivative trading.

King’s people Royal Society

Professor Peter Parker, London Research Institute (LRI) of Cancer Research UK, was recently elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

His research interests are in signal transduction and translational research. Professor Parker will soon take up a joint appointment with LRI and King’s to head the King’s Division of Cancer Studies.

He will also establish, with breast cancer specialist Anand Purushotham, the King’s College London Experimental Cancer Centre, which will bring together clinical and non-clinical academics to focus on translational research and advancing patient care.

National Teaching Fellowship Award Dr Mark Miodownik, Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering, has become the first member of staff to win a National Teaching Fellowship from the Higher Education Academy. Dr Miodownik was one of 50 lecturers and support staff who were awarded Fellowships worth £10,000 each.

The National Teaching Fellowships were established to promote excellent teaching in universities and are sponsored by The Guardian.

On hearing of his success, Dr Miodownik commented: ‘I’m very honoured to have won but much of

Queen’s birthday honours In the Queen’s birthday honours announced on 17 June staff, students and alumni were recognised.

One of the country’s leading medieval historians, Professor Jinty Nelson FBA of the Department of History, has been made a Dame Commander (DBE) in recognition of her services to history.

Professor of Medieval History, Jinty Nelson was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996, and a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 2000.

She was President of the Royal Historical Society from 2000 to 2004 and elected a Fellow of King’s in 2001.

Professor Nelson said: ‘I have been at King’s since 1970, and hope that colleagues and students, past and present, will feel they have a share in this honour for King’s.’

the credit should go to the excellent administrative, technical and teaching team we have here in the Division of Engineering.’

Dr Miodownik engages with engineering undergraduates, the university community and the general public by exploring the connection between science, engineering and the arts.

‘Engineering is first and foremost about understanding people’s needs and desires,’ says Dr Miodownik.

An art enthusiast, he encourages students to explore the overlap between the arts and engineering science. ‘You have got to get students out of the lecture theatre and out of the mindset that engineering is about equations. It’s about human needs.

It’s all about passion.’

Alon Fink, a third-year student who has been taught by Dr Miodownik said: ‘Mark supervised my final-year project which

Naresh Verlander

Professor Jinty Nelson FBA DBE in her office overlooking the Strand.

Katherine Grainger, Olympic silver medallist and Law PhD student, has been awarded an MBE for services to sport. At the 2004 Olympic Games Katherine won a silver medal in the women’s coxless pairs. In the 2005 Rowing World Championships she was part of the British women’s rowing quartet (which also included King’s student Frances Houghton) which won gold.

Professor Cathy Warwick, Honorary Professor of Midwifery in the Florence Nightingale School of

Nursing & Midwifery, was awarded a CBE for services to healthcare.

She is General Manager Women & Children’s Services/Director of Midwifery, King’s College Hospital NHS Trust.

Eric Nicoli, Chair of the EMI Group and alumnus of King’s (Physics, 1971), has been awarded a CBE for services to the music industry.

Michael Morpurgo MBE, prizewinning children’s author and cofounder of Farms for City Children, has been awarded an OBE for services to literature. Mr Morpurgo is a former student of King’s (BA, AKC 1967) and was elected as a Fellow of the College in 2001.

Linda Nazarko, Visiting Nurse Lecturer in the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing & Midwifery for the last four years, has been awarded an OBE for services to elderly people.

linda nylind 2006

involved building a prototype dreadlocks machine. He gave me the opportunity and the freedom to challenge my creativity while inspiring me with his imagination and passion for engineering.

‘He is the perfect icon for a young engineer: he is passionate, well aware of social issues, enthusiastic and pragmatic in solving real-life problems.’

Last month Dr Miodownik took part in the Cheltenham Science Festival. He gave a lecture on the ‘essence of fluorescence’ and answered questions such as ‘what makes your teeth glow under ultraviolet light’ and ‘why does a zebrafish sparkle in the depths of the ocean?’ He also ran catapult workshops for kids and spoke about science stories hitting the headlines.

July 2006 | COMMENT |

King’s people College Awards Researchers into pre-eclampsia, electrosensitivity and life in medieval Europe, have emerged as the winners of the College’s Annual Award Scheme, now in its second

year. The winners will each receive a cheque for £500 and be automatically entered for the prestigious Times Higher Education Supplement Awards.

The winner of the King’s ‘Research Project of the Year’ is

Professor Lucilla Poston, Director of the Research Division of Reproductive Health, Endocrinology & Development, for her work on the Vitamins in Pre-eclampsia (VIP) trial (fast-tracked in The Lancet) which evaluated the role of antioxidants

in the prevention of pre-eclampsia.

Pre-eclampsia is a worldwide problem affecting 1 in 20 pregnant women, and results in significant maternal and fetal morbidity.

An outstanding young academic, who was awarded his PhD just two

Teaching staff commended The winners of the annual King’s Awards for Excellence in Teaching were announced last month.

These awards, now in their fourth year, provide students with an opportunity to recognise teaching

staff from each of the College’s nine Schools of study. Nominations were put forward by students and endorsed by Heads of Department.

One winner per School (either one member of academic staff or a

group) was then selected by a panel chaired by the Head of School. The winners were announced at the College Teaching Committee and one award of £1,000 will be made per School.

School of Biomedical & Health Sciences Dr Barbara Daniel Dental Institute Dr Barbara Moreland School of Humanities Dr David Crankshaw (Department of Theology & Religious Studies) Dr Siobhán McIlvanney (Department of French) Florence Nightingale School of Nursing & Midwifery Carol Fordham-Clarke Suzanne Watts School of Law Monica Chowdry

Dr David Crankshaw Dr Pamela Garlick

Institute of Psychiatry Dr Kim Wolff (Department of Addiction Sciences) Professor Mark Harman

Dr Michael Rainsborough Dr Siobhán McIlvanney

School of Medicine Dr Pamela Garlick, Course Director, EMDP Dr Tunji Lasoyse, A&E Consultant and Director of Postgraduate Medical Education School of Physical Sciences & Engineering Dr Ian Mackie Professor Mark Harman School of Social Science & Public Policy Dr Michael Rainsborough (Department of War Studies)

Dr Barbara Moreland

10 | COMMENT | July 2006

Dr Barbara Daniel

Dr Kim Wolff

King’s people

wholly web-delivered mA degree, drawing on the expertise of the top-ranking Department of War studies, War in the modern World, will be submitted. in the ‘Widening Participation initiative of the year’ category, ‘somali success’, which began in 2003, and aims to raise the educational aspirations and attainment of young people of somali heritage in London, will be entered.

Dr Robert Mills has won the College’s ‘young Author of the year Prize’ for this book.

years ago, has won the College’s ‘young researcher of the year’ award. James Rubin, Lecturer in Psychological medicine at the institute of Psychiatry, is the UK’s leading expert on electrosensitivity, undertaking groundbreaking research into people’s sensitivity to mobile phone signals. His findings demonstrated that innocuous exposures can produce a ‘reverse placebo effect’ and received widespread media coverage. he has also secured a grant worth almost £1 million from the home Office to examine public reactions to chemical, biological and radiological terrorism.

Dr Robert Mills, Lecturer in the Department of english, has been awarded the College’s ‘young Author of the year Prize’ for his book Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture. investigating the ideological uses to which images of punishment were put in the 14th and 15th centuries, Dr mills shows how penal representation in this period generated and legitimised various modes of pleasure.

Additionally two further College projects will be entered into the Times Higher Awards. in the ‘most imaginative Use of Distance Learning’ category, King’s first

Winston Churchill Fellowship

KCLsU Awards The KCLsU Awards were held on 24 may at Tutu’s. This was an opportunity for KCLsU to recognise students and staff who have made a contribution to the King’s community this year. The following current and former College staff were acknowledged: Philip Blake Dr Norman Borrett Professor David Carpenter Ann Conlon Peter Frost Mike Hansen Stephen Large Professor Alison Mainwood Philip Marshall Joseph May Dr Barbara Moreland

Book prize

Dr Leone Ridsdale from the Departments of General Practice and neurology was presented with a medal by her majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace on 6 June for an international Winston Churchill Fellowship titled Delivering better neurology care in the community.

The Winston Churchill memorial Trust offers Fellowships to British citizens resident in the UK to acquire knowledge and experience abroad and explore areas of mutual interest.

Dr ridsdale is Director of neurology Undergraduate Teaching. her aim was to gain new ideas for neurology teaching and new strategies for delivering better neurology care in the community. she visited and gave lectures at Kaiser Permanente and the universities of California, Vancouver, singapore, Auckland and Wellington in 2003-04.

Award-winner Joseph May, Assistant site services manager.

Valerie Pancucci Clare Pearson Professor John Phillips Professor Michael Silk Jane Turner

book, which also demonstrates the author’s own journey.’

regenerative medicine Award

Professor Alan Norrie, edmundDavies Professor of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, has won the prestigious hart/socio-Legal studies Association Book Prize for 2006.

The judges stated: ‘Law and the Beautiful Soul is an important book which crosses a breathtakingly diverse terrain, co-locating sociolegal, critical legal, ethical and historical studies around common themes of contradictory identities in legal discourse and the nature of legal critique. it is a beautifully written

Last month Dr Stephen Minger, Director of the stem Cell Biology Laboratory at King’s and Dr Chris Mason of UCL’s stem Cell & regenerative medicine Bioprocessing Unit, were awarded the Outstanding Contribution to London Biotechnology Award 2006.

Dr minger and Dr mason were recognised by the organisation London First for their work setting up the London regenerative medicine network and for their roles as ambassadors in the field, raising the profile of London’s excellence in stem cell and regenerative medicine research.

Dr minger was also recently appointed, with effect from 1 July, as the stem cell expert to the Department of health’s Gene Therapy Advisory Committee.

July 2006 | COMMENT | 11

King’s people

Humanities computing award

Dr Willard McCarty, Reader in Humanities Computing at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, was presented with the Richard W Lyman Award at a ceremony on 17 May at the New York Public Library.

Dr McCarty was selected for the award, the most prestigious in his field, by a committee of distinguished scholars for his contributions to, and leadership within, the field of digital humanities.

This is the first time the prize has been awarded outside the US.

Home Affairs Committee

Ben Bowling, Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice, was appointed by the Home Affairs Committee as Specialist Advisor to assist the Committee in respect of its inquiry into Young Black People

12 | COMMENT | July 2006

New Head of Administration College Council has appointed Ian Creagh – currently University Secretary of City University – as Head of Administration and College Secretary from 3 October 2006.

Ian Creagh took up the post of University Secretary of City University in 2001. Prior to taking up that position Ian was a senior administrator – Executive Director, Student and Staff Services – at the University of Adelaide, where he was one of four deputies reporting to the Vice-Chancellor.

He took up his post at Adelaide in 1997 after 13 years of working in public service in Australia. During that period he worked for several years in the Higher Education Department, where for example and the Criminal Justice System.

The purpose of the inquiry is to examine causes of young black people’s over-representation in the criminal justice system and to establish whether patterns of criminal behaviour amongst young black people differ in any significant way from patterns of crime amongst other young people.

The Committee will consider whether any specific policies are required to tackle these issues.

Professor Bowling was appointed on the basis of his extensive research on this topic including his contribution to the definitive Oxford Handbook of Criminology (4th edition, 2006) and the standard text Racism, Crime and Justice (2002).

His role will be to supply information which is not readily available and to elucidate matters of complexity within the committee’s order of reference.

The Committee is now taking written and oral evidence and will report early in 2007.

he was policy adviser to a national review of higher education which provided the foundation for future radical reforms.

Ian Creagh was educated at the University of New South Wales, where he received a BA and a Diploma of Education.

He subsequently took an MA at University College London.

New Council member James Ritblat has recently been appointed as a member of College Council for the customary threeyear term. He is Chairman and Chief Executive of Delancey, which provides real estate related advisory and management services to a variety of clients. He has a strong background in property and has spent the last 21 years in the real estate sector.

Cabinet Office Analyst Dr Robyn Fairman, Deputy Director, Centre for Risk Management, has begun an 18-month four-day-a-week secondment with the Cabinet Office as a Senior Policy Analyst.

Dr Fairman is working to develop regulatory innovation policy. ‘We are exploring how we can make

regulation better for everyone and improve outcomes whilst reducing the burden faced by those regulated. This is obviously a very difficult task and I am in the bluesky thinking unit providing policy analysis to help develop better strategy in these areas.

‘This is significant for King’s in that I will be developing future regulatory policy strategy for both private and public sector regulation.

I will gain valuable insight into policy development and implementation.’

Internship

A new 12 month full-time internship funded by the London Development Agency and Elanco Animal Health, a global business division of Eli Lilly and Company, has been established at KCL Enterprises.

This internship, which is the first of its kind in the UK, is aimed at scientists who have recently completed a PhD and who are interested in acquiring the skills and acumen needed to pursue a career in scientific business sectors.

The successful candidate, Andrew Heggie, will spend six months gaining university commercialisation skills with a particular focus on technology transfer, at KCL Enterprises followed by six months gaining commercial experience of businessto-business interactions in the pharmaceutical industry supervised

by Elanco at their European headquarters in Basingstoke.

Research No ‘Iraq War Syndrome’

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wo large-scale studies by scientists from the Centre for Military Health Research, published in The Lancet, have found no evidence for a new ‘Iraq War Syndrome’ but that reserve forces are experiencing more mental health problems than regular troops.

A team led by Professor Simon Wessely looked at the health of male regular UK service personnel deployed to the 2003 Iraq War as well as non-deployed colleagues.

They then compared these findings to their 1991 Gulf War data. The same team published research in 1999 which showed that the health of the Armed Forces had been affected by the 1991 Gulf War. Deployment to the 1991 War was linked to a marked increase in symptomatic ill health, (known as ‘Gulf War Syndrome’), but there are only slight rises in symptoms in the Iraq War group. Also Gulf War soldiers were more likely to report

their health to be fair or poor.

In a separate Iraq War study, Professor Matthew Hotopf’s team compared the health of deployed and non-deployed UK service personnel. They found no worsening of mental health problems over time.

However, reserve soldiers are reporting worse mental health compared to regulars.

Professor Wessely says: ‘It remains true that some military personnel are returning from Iraq with mental health problems, which can be serious and may need treatment. But our results show that at the moment there is no greater risk from service in Iraq than elsewhere.’

Skin colour match

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new method of matching silicone to skin has been jointly developed by Dr Trevor Coward in the Dental Institute and Pure Colour Ltd. It will enable better matching of prostheses used in reconstructive surgery and improve the rehabilitation of patients.

Prostheses are used to reconstruct or replace face and body parts which cannot be reconstructed with the patients’ own tissues. They are constructed from silicone elastomers and colourmatching to the patient’s skin is a challenge. Currently, the method is to judge the colour by eye, which is subjective and dependent on the clinician’s training.

In this new method, a hand-held spectrophotometer records data

Artificial ear prosthesis matched using the colour formulation system.

from a suitable target area of the subject’s skin. This data is then entered into a computerised colour formulation system which calculates a colour formula and mixes it to produce a closely matching pigmented silicone sample.

Pure Colour and King’s have filed a joint patent application which has been licensed to Pure Colour to commercialise this technology. It is expected to be launched by the end of 2006.

Unfair interviews A report for the Department for Work and Pensions by a team in the Department of Education & Professional Studies, provides a detailed examination of current job interview practices and shows how ethnic minority candidates may be at a disadvantage.

The research was based on 60 real job interviews for low-paid jobs which were video recorded and analysed by a team of applied linguists led by Senior Research Fellow, Celia Roberts.

They found that although there was no overt discrimination by interviewers, a number of practices indirectly disadvantaged ethnic minorities. For example, past work experience scored low if it did not fit the expected

narrative structure and foreign work experience was frequently discounted.

Also, interviews are commonly designed around key competences such as team working and customer service.

Answering these questions demands communication skills which are not required for the actual job.

Celia Roberts comments: ‘Job interview English is different from the day-to-day communication you need. Our main recommendation is that organisations need to consider alternative methods to interviewing that test job skills more directly, such as work experience, especially for entrylevel jobs.’

Transplant genetics

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cientists in the Department of Nephrology & Transplantation have found that a variation of a particular gene in kidney donors can improve the chances of a successful transplant.

In the future, typing both recipients and donors for these variations should help doctors predict transplant outcome much more accurately.

The study was funded by Guy’s & St Thomas’ Charity and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr Neil Sheerin and his team studied the DNA of 662 pairs of adult kidney donors and recipients and compared it to the clinical outcome data on the transplanted patients.

They found that variations of one particular gene encoding a protein known as C3 appears to strongly influence the transplant outcome. Depending on the type of C3 produced by the donor kidney, the survival of the graft can

Structure of human complement component C3 showing the site of the C3F/S polymorphism.

differ by up to 30 per cent due to a lower rate of Chronic Allograft Nephropathy – the most common cause of transplant failure after the first year.

Dr Sheerin says: ‘We hope in future to use this type of information to identify patients at greater risk of CAN. This will allow us to alter our treatment of these patients and improve transplant survival.’

July 2006 | COMMENT | 13

Flashback

Suffer the little children P

aediatrics had to wait until the end of the 19th century to be formally recognised as a clinical specialty.

Although diseases such as whooping cough, tuberculosis, pneumonia, diphtheria, scarlet fever and measles killed many children, the idea of hospitals specifically for children was opposed for fear they might spread infection.

Florence Nightingale suggested it was better to place children among adults: ‘The woman in the next bed…often becomes the child’s best protector and nurse. And it does her as much good as it does the child’, she wrote in 1863.

The Evelina Hospital for Sick Children was founded in Southwark in 1869 by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild to commemorate his wife Evelina who had died in childbirth. It had a flexible layout to allow for playrooms and the need to quarantine infectious children.

The Evelina transferred to Guy’s Hospital in 1975 and was rebuilt in 2005 at St Thomas’ Hospital.

George Frederic Still gave his name to a form of juvenile arthritis, and has been described as the father of British clinical paediatrics. In 1899 he joined King’s when it became the first teaching hospital to establish a paediatric department. In 1937 Still was knighted for his services as personal physician to the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret.

meaning ‘disease of the deposed child’, because this syndrome afflicts children who have been abruptly banished from the maternal breast by the arrival of a new baby. In Singapore in 1939 Williams gave a lecture entitled ‘Milk and Murder’, condemning companies which promoted sales of tinned milk and led mothers to give up breastfeeding.

The development of children’s hospitals and paediatric departments produced the essential concentration of patients and expertise to stimulate research in sub-specialities. Paediatric cardiology and intensive care were led by Michael Joseph, and Ronald MacKeith set up a pioneering clinic for children with cerebral palsy, and he also championed open access for parents to their children in hospital, to reduce the devastating psychological outcomes which often followed long-term admissions.

Liver and renal paediatric units began at King’s and Guy’s under the leadership of Alex Mowat and Sir Cyril Chantler respectively. Sir Eric Stroud noted the local high Robert Aberman

Milk and murder

One of Still’s students, Cicely Williams, identified the protein deficiency disease ‘kwashiorkor’ – a word from the Ga language 14 | COMMENT | July 2006

In 2005 the Evelina Children’s Hospital moved into a new £60 million building at St Thomas’.

The Illustrated London News Picture Library

The Prince and Princess of Wales visit the Evelina Hospital for Sick Children, 1890.

incidence of sickle cell disease and instigated a clinical service for afflicted children. Neonatal intensive care was developed at St Thomas’ by Harold Gamsu and Jon Scopes. Genetics was established as a specialty in 1960 under Paul Polani, the UK’s first professor of paediatric research.

The Harris Birthright Research Centre at King’s College Hospital, established in 1984, has an international reputation for the development of antenatal diagnostic tests for congenital defects, which have transformed obstetric practice. The Centre has also been a leader in devising new operative techniques to correct congenital abnormalities in the womb.

Professor Kypros Nicolaides and colleagues at the Centre discovered that an increase of fluid in the neck can be used to detect more than 50 congenital abnormalities. Since 2001 researchers have combined this test with another for the absence of nasal bone (which effects up to 75 per cent of Down’s babies) and

with blood tests to improve the detection rate for Down’s syndrome using non-invasive methods to around 90 per cent.

Surgery in the womb

The Centre has pioneered several procedures to correct deficiencies or congenital defects while the baby is still in the womb. Among these are transfusions of blood or platelets, and inserting a shunt between the pleural cavity and the amniotic fluid to drain pleural effusions.

This article is based on a feature in Contributions to biomedicine: a continuing story, an illustrated history celebrating the pioneering contributions to biomedicine made by staff past and present of King’s College London and of the Guy’s, King’s College, St Thomas’ and Maudsley hospitals.

Written by Claire Taylor, Gwyn Williams and Christine Kenyon Jones, it was published in April.

Copies can be obtained, price £10, from claire.taylor@kcl.ac.uk

News Kew connections

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n 25 May the Kew Gardens’ Heritage Festival opened celebrating the gardens’ royal connections and 250 years of history. As well as the opening of the newly refurbished Kew Palace and Pagoda, a range of exhibitions and displays are running.

How Kew Grew One of the displays, How Kew Grew, explores Kew’s past through 3D reconstruction. Produced by King’s Visualisation Lab in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, How Kew Grew takes the viewer on an animated journey through the centuries of history from Roman landscape to the present day.

Viewers can see iconic buildings such as the Palm House, Temperate House, Kew Palace, Pagoda and the Orangery. Small garden buildings built for the temporary pleasure of the royal family in summer residence appear and disappear – although some, for example the Ruined Arch, are still standing today.

Peter James of the Visualisation Lab and producer of How Kew Grew comments: ‘The presentation hopefully will work equally for anyone who has never been to Kew before, but will also uncover some ‘secrets’ for visitors more familiar with the gardens who may not be aware of some of the significance of the buildings and landscapes through which they walk regularly.’

This was a collaborative project between the King’s Visualisation Lab and the Department of Educational Services of Kew Gardens.

Kew Palace exhibition A key manuscript from Archives & Corporate Records Services forms part of an exhibition to mark the reopening of Kew Palace, once home to King George III. The exhibition highlights the King’s many scientific

Childhood matters he Child Studies Programme held its first conference Childhood Matters: Contemporary Issues on 7 June, in memory of Alison Richards, Assistant Director (2001-05).

The conference attracted an audience of nearly 200 and was chaired by Professor Jo Sibert, a distinguished consultant paediatrician. Speakers included Dr Danya Glaser FRCPsych (Great Ormond Street Hospital), Professor June Thoburn CBE (University of East Anglia), Professor

John MacBeath OBE, (Chair of Educational Leadership, University of Cambridge), Mr Rob Allen, (Director, International Centre for Prison Studies, King’s) and Professor Jane Fortin (Director, Child Studies, King’s).

A range of contemporary issues relating to children were covered from a variety of professional perspectives, including children’s rights; the effect of child maltreatment on brain development; global perspectives on out-of-home care; and children, crime and custody.

Naresh Verlander

A 3D reconstruction of the Pagoda.

interests, including astronomy.

The manuscript describes observations of the transit of Venus in June 1769 when the planet crossed in front of the sun – an event that enabled the distance between the earth and the sun to be accurately measured.

The observations were carried out at Kew’s Royal Observatory and witnessed by the King. The transit was also observed by astronomers worldwide and famously by Captain Cook on board the Endeavour, and was one of the first examples of international scientific co-operation.

Professor Arthur Bell (1926-2006) Professor Arthur Bell, who died on 11 June aged 79, was director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (1981-88). Professor Bell was not a botanist, rather by his own description a ‘spoiled chemist’.

He worked as a research plant biochemist at ICI and was appointed as a lecturer in Biochemistry at King’s in 1949 where he remained until his appointment at Kew, becoming Head of Plant Sciences in 1972 and Dean of Natural Science.

He was also President of KCLA (1993-96).

From left: Dr Danya Glaser, Professor Jane Fortin, Professor Jo Sibert and Professor June Thoburn CBE.

Tsunami centre opens Psychiatrists and psychologists from the IoP have created a new centre for trauma, resettlement and mental health in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The Samutthâna Resource Centre was opened on 26 May by Sri Lankan Minister of Disaster Management & Human Rights, Hon Mahinda Samarasinghe MP. The centre’s volunteers will offer supervision and professional support for individuals and organisations working with people affected by the tsunami. Through training, lobbying and research, they hope to improve Sri Lanka’s

disaster readiness and its ability to respond to psychosocial needs in the future.

Martin Prince, Professor of Epidemiological Psychiatry, says: ‘The need to support mental health professionals and partners in addressing trauma and resettlement is of utmost importance at this time.

We hope that in its first year, this centre will provide training to over 1,000 people in local community, Government and nongovernmental organisations and benefit more than 25,000 people affected by the tsunami.’

July 2006 | COMMENT | 15

News Promoting prison reform

Did you know...?

GreG FUnneLL

A King’s edition of the world’s best-selling board game is on sale in the students’ Union shop in the macadam Building, strand Campus. it is estimated that 500 million people have played MONOPOLY and more than five billion little green houses have been built. So, why not roll the dice, collect £200 and set your stakes on The Great hall?

Shaping Swedish policies

s

WeDish GOVernmenT authorities turned to King’s when faced with the dilemmas involved in integrating their security and development policies within a coherent whole.

The shared responsibility bill (Act of Parliament 2003/04) mandated all government departments to contribute to the development objectives endorsed by the international community (millennium Development Goals).

16 | COMMENT | July 2006

To help bring swedish security and development policies closer together, King’s international Policy institute team – robert Picciotto, Funmi Olonisakin and michael Clarke – conducted a comprehensive policy review. it led to the formulation of specific recommendations with respect to the design of human security policies, conflict prevention operations, conflict management methods, engagement with fragile states and the harmonisation of development co-operation activities in zones of turmoil and transition in the developing world.

The resulting study Global Development and Human Security: Towards a Policy Agenda was published by the ministry for Foreign Affairs of Sweden with forewords by Annika soder, state secretary for Development Co-operation and Professor sir Lawrence Freedman, Vice-Principal.

A revised version addressing the broader development community will be issued in December 2006.

A

n ArABiC VersiOn OF The Guidance Notes on Prison Reform produced by the international Centre for Prison studies (iCPs) was launched at a major conference in marrakech in may. The conference Prisons in the 21st Century, Prison Reforms in the Arab World was attended by 150 delegates from 14 countries in north Africa and the middle east.

The two-day event was organised by the iCPs, the moroccan prison service and the British embassy in rabat. iCPs Director rob Allen and Professor Andrew Coyle gave presentations along with associates engaged in prison reform projects in Libya and morocco. rob Allen enthuses: ‘The

conference showed an encouraging commitment to a sparing use of prison and a human-rights approach to prison management. There was great enthusiasm about creating a network of officials and experts willing to exchange best practice.’

Last month rob Allen and Professor Coyle also visited Central America and the Caribbean to explore the scope for prison reform in the region. Part of a Foreign Office funded programme to disseminate the Guidance Notes on Prison Reform, the trip involved meetings with ministers and senior officials, visits to prisons and two regional seminars. it is hoped that the visit will stimulate interest in a sustained programme of reform.

Dental Institute events nAresh VerLAnDer

Professor Nairn Wilson CBE and Jan Oliver.

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n 6 JUne The DenTAL institute held a ViP event organised by the Director of External Affairs, Professor Stephen Challacombe, and the Dean and head of school Professor nairn Wilson CBE, to raise the profile of the Dental institute amongst health authorities, the hospital’s Trusts, funding bodies and the local community. Guests, including the Principal, Patricia moberly, Chairman GsTT nhs Foundation Trust, sue Greening, President

of the British Dental Association, Jan Oliver, non-executive Director GsTT nhs Foundation Trust, and Lord Colwyn, Dental Peer, house of Lords, met staff to learn more about the services and activities which make the institute the UK’s toprated in terms of research, clinical provision and training.

The institute welcomed more guests recently when staff from a dental clinic in ystad, sweden, visited to find out about the UK dental system.

News Origins of the universe

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rofessor Nick Mavromatos, Dr Mairi Sakellariadou and Professor Sarben Sarkar from the Department of Physics are members of UniverseNet, a European Network of researchers, co-ordinated by the University of Oxford.

The Department of Physics is a node on this network and host to an early stage researcher. The theme of the network is to explore the links between particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. This is in view of the spectacular experimental developments over

the last 10 years in astrophysics, concerning findings on the structure and origin of our universe, as well as the anticipated exciting results on the nature of the fundamental constituents and properties of matter from high-energy accelerator experiments.

King’s has recently invested in the research area of astro-particle physics with two appointments in astrophysics: Dr Ignacio Ferreras and Dr Mairi Sakellariadou. Dr Jean Alexandre will bring more mathematical physics expertise to this area of research. In addition,

Timeline of the universe.

Nick Mavromatos has recently been promoted to Professor in the Department of Physics. Professor Mavromatos’ research in theoretical physics is in elementary

Scientists brief Congress Members

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r Stephen Minger, Director of the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory, chaired a briefing on 1 June for visiting US Congressional Leaders on the subject of stem cell research in the UK. Both he and Professor Peter Braude, Head of the Department of Women’s Health, gave an overview of their work and the UK’s legal background to this area of science. The aim was to strengthen transatlantic

understanding of embryonic stem cell research.

Dr Minger explained that his team at King’s has now derived three stem cell lines, including one which contains the most common mutation of the cystic fibrosis gene.

He said there has been a great deal of interest in this line and he is currently facilitating its shipment to scientists in a number of other countries. Professor Braude went on to discuss the UK approach to

Human embryonic stem cells differentiated into lung epithelial cells.

sourcing eggs and embryos and some of the associated ethical issues.

Florence Nightingale nursing lecture

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r Linda McGillis Hall Associate Professor and Visiting Scholar from the Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto gave the Dean’s Lecture at the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing & Midwifery, Beyond the Sum of the Parts: Nurse Staffing, Work Environments and Outcomes.

She provided an overview of the state of the science on studies linking nurse staffing to patient outcomes, and the substantive evidence base in this area. Findings

from a Canadian study examining the strategies employed during an era of healthcare restructuring, and the subsequent initiatives now underway to rebuild nursing health human resources were outlined.

Emerging research led by Dr McGillis Hall examining aspects of the healthcare work environment which can have an impact on outcomes was presented, and parallels drawn to the NHS campaign to Improve Working Lives.

The challenges with applying

Dr Linda McGillis Hall and Professor Anne Marie Rafferty.

health services research evidence to service settings were highlighted in a lively discussion with audience members.

particle theory – broadly the study of nature on a very small scale and the formulation of models of the fundamental constituents of our universe.

Online exams Last year the Dental Institute won funding to evaluate online assessment as a development of computer-marked answersheet multiple choice question examinations.

The online examinations were well received and this year this assessment has been used in end-of-course exams and in the International Qualifying Examination run by King’s for the General Dental Council.

Candidates answer questions by a click of the mouse, and have the opportunity to go back and change their mind until they finally submit. The questions are delivered to individual candidates in a random order to minimise collusion or copying and also enhance the security of the question bank. By the time the last candidate has submitted their answers the entire exam has been marked and a full analysis is immediately available.

The Dental Institute sees online assessment as the future for assessing knowledge.

July 2006 | COMMENT | 17

News

News in brief Implant dentistry In May two new surgeries dedicated to implant dentistry were opened at the Dental Institute. Thanks to a financial contribution from Astra Tech, which develops, manufactures and markets healthcare devices and dental implants, both surgeries are fully equipped and will be known as Astra Tech Dental Implant Surgeries 1 and 2. The new surgeries form an integral part of the Dental Institute’s teaching and clinical facilities. They complement the existing state-ofthe-art Clinical Skills Laboratory which enables 60 students to be taught simultaneously from a central computer console linked to independent workstation monitors.

Archives move Archives & Corporate Records Services has recently moved the College’s records storage from Kay House to Drury Lane. After prior consent from the Records Management team all modern records, including student files, personnel files and exam scripts, should now be forwarded to: Archives & Corporate Records Services, c/o Strand Post Room, Room LG03, 26-29 Drury Lane, London, WC2B 5RL. To arrange the transfer of your records or for any other records queries email records-management@kcl.ac.uk or phone ext 2283.

Theology colloquium Over the last three years the British Academy has funded a work group of Jewish and

18 | COMMENT | July 2006

Christian theologians and philosophers from British and American universities, including King’s. The group has been developing new kinds of thinking in areas of common concern for both Judaism and Christianity, focusing on law and politics, reason and revelation. The final session of this high-profile international project was hosted by the Department of Theology & Religious Studies. A continuation of this project, including Islamic theologians, is currently at the planning stage.

Cutting carbon emissions The College was recently presented with a certificate at the Institute of Civil Engineers by Tom Delay, Chief Executive, The Carbon Trust, in recognition of its participation in a pilot scheme within The Carbon Trust’s Higher Education Carbon Management programme. The programme is designed specifically for universities and higher education colleges, providing them with support and guidance to cut their carbon emissions and reduce their energy costs. King’s, along with 20 other universities from across England and Wales, will now take part in phase two of this innovative programme.

Tobacco cessation The Commonwealth Dental Association meeting on 19 May in Geneva saw a significant contribution from Dental Institute academics. Professor Saman Warnakulasuriya gave the opening conference address and Dr Liana Zoitopoulos delivered a presentation on the role of public dental services in smoking cessation. Professor Raman Bedi co-chaired the meeting and the

main outcome was a consensus statement on smokeless tobacco cessation and the role of dental health professionals. This statement was presented to the Commonwealth Health Ministers’ meeting the following day as a take note and action agenda item.

IEEE visit Dr Nim Cheung, President of the IEEE Communications Society, recently visited the Centre for Telecommunications Research, Division of Engineering. He spent time with researchers engaging in discussions about the future of telecoms research and the role of the IEEE Communications Society. He then gave a seminar entitled Towards the era of ubiquitous networks. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Society promotes the advancement of science, technology and applications in communications and related disciplines.

IoP email project IT specialists from the IoP, Information Services and Systems and Management Information Systems are working to plan and implement a pilot state-of-the-art email system for the IoP, based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Outlook 2003. Key goals are to create a single College-wide directory service to manage authentication and deliver enhanced email and collaboration tools. IoP staff and students’ accounts are being transitioned to a locally hosted Outlook email service. They will then be migrated to the new College-hosted system towards the end of the year.

The lessons learned will inform

recommendations to upgrade the email system College wide.

Fluid Mixing conference The Fluid Mixing VIII International Conference, organised by the Fluid Mixing Process Subject Group of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, was recently hosted by the Experimental and Computational Laboratory for the Analysis of Turbulence (ECLAT), Division of Engineering. The conference was attended by 80 people from 15 countries across five continents, with 33 per cent from industry. The event was chaired by Professor Mike Yianneskis, Head of the School of Physical Sciences & Engineering, with support from Drs Kalok Lee, George Papadakis, Shahriar Sajjadi and Stavroula Balabani. The conference was highly rated by participants and ECLAT has been selected to host the thirteenth European Conference on Mixing in 2009.

Print exhibition An exhibition entitled The printed page is running in the Weston Room, Maughan Library & Information Services Centre, Chancery Lane, until 18 August.

The exhibition looks at the work of the printer over the past 500 years through a selection of items from the College’s Foyle Special Collections Library. It begins with the library’s oldest printed book (printed in 1483) and ends with a selection of late 20th century artists’ books and works of concrete poetry, whose experimental nature challenges our preconceptions of what a book should look like. For more information please visit: www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/iss/library/ speccoll/news.html

Development & Alumni

Alumni Weekend 2006 O n 9-11 June the College was host to many familiar faces as 850 former students, their families and friends came together for the biggest Alumni Weekend to date.

The third annual Weekend delivered a variety of social events that succeeded in appealing to a broad selection of alumni.

Highlights were many, but included the live radio broadcast of BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? from the Greenwood Theatre at Guy’s Campus. This event attracted more than 400 guests drawn mainly from alumni but also including staff, students and members of the local community. Both the BBC production team and the show’s panellists were thrilled with the turnout and in response delivered what regular listeners to the show described as a ‘vintage debate’.

Saturday saw hundreds of alumni exploring the refurbished South Range of the Strand Campus, many also attended a reception hosted by the Principal to thank donors for their generosity. Staff members Drs Ann Wood and Gillian Sales held a successful day of events for Life Sciences alumni that included a reunion and several entertaining lectures.

In the evening a well-attended black-tie ball at the Waldorf Hotel brought alumni of different ages and subjects together to enjoy sumptuous surroundings and to let their hair down on the dance floor.

On Sunday alumni attended a series of talks at our Archives Department by Dr Geoffrey Browell and colleagues, followed by events at the Imperial War Museum.

Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman delivered an address on the subject of War in the Modern World that held the audience rapt.

Any Questions? live from the Greenwood Theatre. From left: Mary Jo Jacobi, Dr David Starkey, Jonathan Dimbleby (Chair), Lisa Jenkinson (BBC), Lord Ashdown and John Pilger.

Alumni fill the famous Palm Court at the Alumni Weekend Ball.

Alumnus Nick Barratt (History, 1991, PhD, 1996) spoke on a more light-hearted subject – family history – and after delivering a hugely interesting talk about his involvement in television history programming he gamely answered many detailed genealogical enquiries. Families also enjoyed the ‘Great Escapes’ exhibition at the Imperial War Museum and special ‘Duck’ tours.

Staff are encouraged to get involved in future alumni events which are enjoyable and provide an opportunity for departments to reconnect with former students and engage them as supporters in the challenges they face today.

King’s alumni...

1. 90,000 alumni. This is the number of former students the Alumni Office is in regular contact with. In Touch magazine is sent twice a year to each of them.

2. Alumnus, alumna, alumni. The term originates from the Latin for nursling or pupil and refers to a graduate of a school or college.

At King’s we have extended our definition to include former staff, junior year abroad and medical elective students.

3. Financial support. Thousands of alumni make small regular or one-off gifts in support of the College; in the last decade over £3 million has been distributed to projects across all campuses.

4. The Maughan Library. The largest donation of the last fundraising campaign was from an alumnus, Sir Deryck Maughan (Geography, 1969), to support a new College library, which was then named in his honour.

5. Worldwide. Nearly 20,000 King’s alumni live overseas. The Alumni Office organises events and gatherings around the world and supports alumni groups in more than 20 countries. Going overseas? We can put you in touch with alumni at your destination.

Contacts The Alumni Office Rachel Beer, Head of Alumni Relations, ext 3458 Alumnus Nick Barratt discusses family history.

Alumni and their families enjoy an exclusive ‘Duck’ tour with a commentary from King’s naval historian Professor Andrew Lambert.

Alumni and staff giving Kathrin Ostermann, Individual Giving Manager, Development Office, ext 3005 Alumni and Development Communications (including In Touch magazine) Rachael Corver, Development Office, ext 3053

July 2006 | COMMENT | 19

Obituaries

Professor David L Yudilevich MD 1930-2006

D

avid L Yudilevich passed away in London on 28 May. He was born in Santiago, Chile in 1930 and received his MD in 1957 from the Universidad de Chile.

After three and half years post doc in the USA, David returned to the Medical School until the 1973 Chilean military coup when he sailed to Britain to work at University College London.

In 1974 he was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Physiology at Queen Elizabeth College. As Head of Department (1974-85) David always encouraged research-led teaching initiatives and under his leadership the department prospered. (Queen Elizabeth and Chelsea Colleges merged with King’s in 1985.)

David was passionate about research and during his early career made seminal contributions to the field of capillary permeability, studying microvascular permeability in the isolated perfused gastric mucosa, heart and brain using the multiple indicator dilution technique.

He extended this technique to study carrier-mediated transport of nutrients across the maternal and fetal interfaces of the isolated perfused guinea pig

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placenta, blood-brain barrier, salivary epithelium and lastly umbilical vein endothelial cells from normotensive and gestational diabetic pregnancies.

David was committed to strengthening research links between Chile and Britain, culminating in his appointment as Honorary President of the Joint Meeting of The Physiological Society and Sociedad Chilena de Ciencas Fisiologicas in Pucon, Chile.

David remained research-active throughout his academic career and well into retirement. He published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed international journals and researched the travels of Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt in Chile and South America, publishing a number of books on both.

In retirement, David’s contribution was further acknowledged by awards including an Emeritus Professorship of Physiology at King’s.

David was a unique, lively and driven individual, always seeking to explore new horizons. Perhaps David standing in the mountains in Chile, with his travelling bag, highlights his wanderlust and appreciation of science, nature, life and, above all, his family.

Giovanni E Mann, Professor of Vascular Physiology

with King’s and Queen Elizabeth College. In 1992 Barbara took over responsibility for all pensions.

Barbara took the mergers with the United Medical & Dental Schools and the Institute of Psychiatry in her stride and played a major part in the smooth running of a large department.

Barbara officially retired in 2001 however she spent several months helping out until her replacement arrived. Although she had a few health problems at the time of her retirement Barbara was always cheerful and positive. She started visiting Spain well before tourism caught on and eventually bought a second home there.

The very high regard she was held in by friends, family and former colleagues was obvious by the large number who attended her funeral and the many floral tributes.

Dick Bywaters, Pensions & Payroll Manager

K Krishna Rao 1928-2006

Barbara Smith 1941-2006

B

arbara Smith started work in the Finance Department at Chelsea College on 18 October 1971 working on pensions.

Barbara helped with the introduction of the Universities Superannuation Scheme in 1975 and then SAUL in 1976.

In 1985 Chelsea College merged

K

Krishna Rao was well known for his work on photosynthesis as a renewable energy source and carried out most of his work at King’s with Professor David Hall.

Krishna was born in 1928 in the village of Kadakkal at the southern tip of India. He studied Chemistry

at the University College, Trivandrum, where he obtained his MSc in 1950, and went on to teach Chemistry to degree level. In 1962 he won a US State Department Scholarship at the University of Hawaii. After obtaining his PhD he moved to Berkeley, California, during an exciting period of discovery in photosynthesis. In 1969 he came to King’s, working with David Hall and with Bob Whatley, then Head of the Botany Department, who had first isolated ferredoxin. Krishna became an honorary lecturer in Plant Sciences, and studied ferredoxins from a wide variety of bacteria and plants. In 1972, Hall and Rao wrote an introductory book on photosynthesis for the Studies in Biology series; the sixth edition is still widely sold and has made their names familiar to generations of students worldwide.

Krishna Rao and David Hall were pioneers in the development of bio-hydrogen as a future renewable energy source. The laboratories, first in Half Moon Lane and then in Kensington, saw many students, research workers, eminent scientists, and the occasional politician or film crew passing through. They would all ask for Krishna and he treated everyone with the same courtesy and good humour. He could be found in the basement lab, often into the night, except when the Indian team was playing at Lord’s or the Oval; he was a passionate cricket fan.

Krishna’s retirement was spent enjoying the company of his grandchildren. He died in King’s College Hospital on 25 March and will be remembered fondly by everyone in Biology at King’s and the many students whom he helped and encouraged.

Professor Richard Cammack, Department of Biochemistry

In the news

Cause of death A BBC1 Real Story programme Who Killed My Dad? examined how the cause of death of patients was recorded on death certificates.

Professor Sebastian Lucas, Head of the Department of Histopathology, was interviewed for the programme as his research had shown that 45 per cent of death certificates state the wrong cause of death.

Multiple choice Jonathon Osborne, Professor of

Science Education, criticised plans to introduce a GCSE science exam consisting solely of multiple choice questions. His comments were featured in The Daily Telegraph, TES, The Times, Daily Mail and Daily Express.

Straight talk Tony Thorne, Head of the Language Centre, discussed the use of the word ‘gay’ by Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles to mean rubbish, and commented on its use by young people in The Guardian G2 and also in an interview with BBC Radio London Drivetime.

Happiness formula Simon Wessely, Professor of

Epidemiological & Liaison Psychiatry, was interviewed on BBC2’s The Happiness Formula series on multiculturalism. Paul Salkovskis, Professor of Clinical Psychology and Applied Science, talked in an earlier programme about the use of medication as an artificial way to control happiness.

Chicken or egg?

What came first, the chicken or the egg? A King’s philosopher, David Papineau, Professor of Philosophy of Science, backed up by a geneticist

and a chicken farmer, claimed to have found the answer. It was the egg. The debate featured in The Independent, The Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express and in international publications including the China Daily and the Daily India.

Assisted pregnancy Professor Jonathan Glover,

Director of the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics, wrote in a feature for The Guardian how criticism over a 63-year-old’s assisted pregnancy echoes unease over use of reproductive technology to eliminate disabilities.

Trouble with flags Simon Mundy, Director of the Centre for the Cultural Environment, reveals the emerging tensions between culture and nationalism within the changing context of Europe and asks whether national culture is becoming a real threat to political and artistic progress on Radio 3’s 20 Minutes series.

Politics of science Dr David Demeritt, Reader in

Geography, took part in a discussion on the behind-thescenes debates between politicians and scientists on Radio 4’s Material World regarding the most contentious subjects of the day.

Police role Ben Bowling, Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice and Director of Criminological Studies, commented on the role of police in the community in an article in The Sunday Telegraph on violent crime.

East London raid Dr John Gearson, Reader in

Terrorism Studies, discussed the

significance of arrests made in east London on Radio 4 and also on ABC Australia. Michael Clarke, Professor of Defence Studies, was interviewed about the raids on the 10 O’Clock News.

Violent crime Chris Eades, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, gave interviews on violent crime and the knife amnesty to the BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel 5 News. He was also interviewed by BBC Three Counties Radio and BBC Radio Humberside.

Embryo screening British fertility specialists have developed a new way to test embryos for inherited diseases, offering many couples their first realistic chance of having healthy children. Peter Braude, Professor of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, was part of the research team and was interviewed by national and international TV and radio. The research was covered by all the national press.

Paranoia Dr Daniel Freeman, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, was quoted extensively in a Times 2 report on new research into the increase of paranoid thinking and the distress caused every day by this new trend.

The research was also featured on BBC Online and in the Daily Mail.

More gay friendly Universities need to do more to tackle homophobia in the workplace, the Queer Pedagogy conference organised by academics at King’s, heard.

Dr Robert Mills of the English Department applauded King’s and several post-92 universities in an article in the Times Higher.

Alcoholics’ children Dr Patricia Conrod, Clinical Psychologist, took part in a 15-minute debate on Radio 4’s You and Yours, concerning the vulnerabilities of children growing up with alcoholic parents and commented on their potential genetic susceptibilities to follow the same path.

Disadvantaged pupils Dr Bethan Marshall, Senior

Lecturer in the Department for Education & Professional Studies, dismantles education consultant Tony Sewell’s recent assertion that school culture has become feminised in an article in The Independent. Her comments that the curriculum actually disadvantages girls were also reported in the Daily Mail and the Australian Daily Telegraph.

Serbian Navy Andrew Lambert, Laughton Professor of Naval History, discussed the problems facing the Serbian Navy if Montenegro gained independence on BBC World Service’s Newshour.

Prisoners on streets Richard Garside, Acting Director of

the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, is quoted in an article in The Times on ministers seeking emergency powers to allow the early release of thousands of prisoners in order to relieve the crowding in jails. He was also interviewed on GMTV about the probation service.

See www.kcl.ac.uk/headlines for the latest media coverage or any of the Campus noticeboards.

Comment is keen to know of any staff featured in the media, call ext 3202 or email pr@kcl.ac.uk

July 2006 | COMMENT | 21

Student news

£150,000 to King’s students

safely on two wheels.

This popular society’s commitment to motorcycling is now extending outside King’s. Members are working with Transport for London to introduce a scheme aimed at making motorcycling safer for teenage riders.

For information email bikerssociety@hotmail.com

Campaigning Union

T Members of the King’s Players Society.

The Annual Fund has awarded £150,000 to more than 20 projects which will enhance all aspects of student life across the College and Students’ Union.

The funds were given by the Development Committee from donations made by alumni, staff and friends to the Annual Fund.

Student prizes

T

his year the Tadion Rideal Prize panel unanimously agreed to award Dr Thomas Trevethan from the School of Physical Sciences & Engineering for his PhD, Theory of atomic scale dissipation in non-contact atomic force microscopy, supervised by Dr Lev Kantorovitch in the Department of Physics. The runners-up were Dr Bin Hu and Dr Yongmin Ma, both from the School of Biomedical & Health Sciences.

The £1,000 prize is awarded annually to a graduate student from the Schools of Biomedical & Health Sciences or Physical Sciences & Engineering who has conducted outstanding research for their PhD in the area of molecular science.

One student in each of the Florence Nightingale School

22 | COMMENT | July 2006

The awards include support for the Debating Society to take part in the European Debating Competition in Berlin; a grant to the King’s Players Society which will enable them to participate in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; and funds for the women’s cricket club.

of Nursing & Midwifery’s preregistration programmes (diploma: Joanna Bradley, degree: Emma Howell, and midwifery: Lindsay Owen) was recently recognised with a £1,000 Taylor Wessing Prize for Excellence. These awards are given annually by this European law firm which is committed to excellence and to supporting education and medical and nursing practice.

Safer motorcycling

M

otorcycle accidents in central London have dropped by around 12 per cent since 2001 however motorcycling in the capital is still no easy ride. Awais Bokhari founded King’s Bikers Society to provide students with advice about riding

hanks to the Efforts of societies such as Amnesty and People and Planet, King’s students have been recognised for their campaigning by the University of London Union.

Margaret Rose, secretary of the Amnesty Society, was named Campaigning Student of the Year and KCLSU was declared Campaigning College Union of the Year for achieving Fairtrade status and re-focusing campaigning on grassroots student action.

Success stories Over the past year KCLSU has: • Increased disabled access at Boland House • Refurbished lifts in the Macadam Building • Refurbished the Waterfront • Put pressure on the National Union of Students to reform • Changed the face of UK students’ union governance • Lobbied the College for increased chances for students to feed back about courses • Conducted the first online election at King’s • Introduced a new-look student website • Expanded volunteering so students can set up their own projects • With the College gained Fairtrade University status for King’s • Secured a pilot of 24/7 library access • And still returned a surplus.

MUN Soc success

Members of the Model United Nations Society at the Forbidden City, Beijing.

Members of the Model United Nations (MUN) Society recently returned from Beijing where they represented the College at the University of Harvard’s WorldMUN conference.

Hosted by Peking University, the conference attracted 1,380 students from across the world to debate international issues.

WorldMUN 2006 was particularly successful for the 23-strong King’s delegation; the team won four Outstanding Delegate awards placing the Society alongside the best university MUN organisations in the world and top of the eight delegations attending from British universities.

Books Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture

of expression and debate still survive in our age of email.

Palgrave Macmillan

Dr Clare Brant, Senior Lecturer, Department of English

Shunned

Discrimination against people with mental illness Graham Thornicroft, Professor of Community Psychiatry, Head of Health Services Research Development

People with mental illness commonly describe the stigma and discrimination they face as being worse than their main condition. Discrimination can pervade every part of their daily lives.

Though things have certainly improved in the past 50 years, discrimination against the mentally ill is still a major problem throughout the world.

Shunned presents clearly for a wide readership information about the nature and severity of prejudice against people with mental illness and what can be done to reduce this.

The book features many quotations from people with mental illness showing how this has affected their home, social and working life.

After showing, both from personal accounts and from a thorough review of the literature, the nature of discrimination, the book sets out a clear manifesto for change.

Oxford University Press

Who wrote letters in the 18th century? Who read them? What were the conventions of letters, and how were they understood?

Each chapter of this major study explores these questions in relation to characters such as men and women of letters, parents, lovers, criminals, travellers, historians and Christians.

Bringing together both nonfictional and fictional epistolary material, this book helps readers to understand the central place of letters in 18th-century writing, and provides a new way of looking at 18th-century life.

Most of the attention literary critics have given to letters of this period has been to the personal correspondence of canonical authors and the epistolary novel.

Recently critics have started to take serious interest in letters written by people other than the literary and literate.

The contribution made by this book is to bring out some of the patterns of thought that were enabled by a genre, central to the Enlightenment, whose patterns

of biochemical terms, including the use of Greek letters and other formatting, which is easily lost in online database searches.

The entries include details of biochemical substances and the processes in which they are involved, illustrated with over 900 chemical structures.

Oxford University Press

Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Richard Cammack, Professor of Biochemistry, Dr John Stirling, Department of Biochemistry et al.

The Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology provides a comprehensive and encyclopaedic guide to the subject.

Well-thumbed copies of the first edition of this book are found on the bookshelves of many practising biochemists and molecular biologists.

This second edition has been comprehensively revised to include many new words and concepts.

The 21,000 main entries of the guide are short but informative, defining relevant terms from the fields of bioinformatics, biophysics, cell biology, chemistry, genetics, immunology, mathematics, microbiology, pharmacology, systems biology and toxicology.

They give the accepted form

Seeking the Spoils Simon Mundy, Director of the Centre for the Cultural Environment in the International Policy Institute, using the pen-name James Eno

Seona Mackenzie, young Member of the European Parliament, and Gaynor Schultz, New York Times journalist, have little in common – except age, loneliness, and getting caught in foul weather in the west of Scotland.

They find themselves in a battle to save the landscape from corporate greed and political corruption.

This is a fast-moving thriller of intrigue, humour and passion that contrasts the raw beauty of Scotland with the machinations of Strasbourg and Brussels.

Hay Press Limited

July 2006 | COMMENT | 23

Books Islamic Imperialism: Stoicism A History Dr John Sellars, Department of Professor Efraim Karsh, Head of Mediterranean Studies

From the first Arab-Islamic Empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the history of the Middle East has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of imperialist dreams.

So argues Professor Karsh.

Rejecting the conventional Western interpretation of Middle Eastern history as an offshoot of global power politics, Professor Karsh contends that the region’s experience is the culmination of long-existing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behaviour, and that foremost among these is Islam’s millenarian imperial tradition.

The author explores the history of Islam’s imperialism and the persistence of the Ottoman imperialist dream that outlasted World War I to haunt Islamic and Middle Eastern politics to the present day.

Yale University Press

Philosophy

This is the first introduction to Stoic philosophy for 30 years.

Aimed at readers new to Stoicism and ancient philosophy, it outlines the central philosophical ideas of Stoicism and introduces the different ancient authors and sources readers will encounter when exploring Stoicism.

The range of sources that are drawn upon in the reconstruction of Stoic philosophy can be bewildering for the beginner.

Dr Sellars guides the reader through the surviving works of the late Stoic authors, Seneca and Epictetus, and the fragments relating to the early Stoics found in authors such as Plutarch and Stobaeus.

The book includes an introduction to the Stoics and their works. It also considers how the Stoics conceived philosophy and structured their own belief system as well as the impact of Stoicism on Western philosophy.

Chesham: Acumen & Berkeley: University of California Press

Complex Analysis with Mathematica William Shaw, Professor of Financial Mathematics

Complex Analysis with Mathematica offers a new way of learning and teaching a subject that lies at the heart of many areas of pure and applied mathematics, physics, engineering and even art.

This book offers teachers and students an opportunity to learn about complex numbers in a state-of-the-art computational environment.

The innovative approach also offers insights into areas too often neglected in a student treatment, including complex chaos and mathematical art.

Students are also led, optionally, into cubic or quartic equations, investigations of symmetric chaos and advanced conformal mapping.

A CD is included which contains a live version of the book: in particular all the Mathematica code enables the user to run computer experiments.

Cambridge University Press

Overcoming Paranoid & Suspicious Thoughts Dr Daniel Freeman, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, Philippa Garety, Professor of Clinical Psychology, IoP, and Jason Freeman

Groundbreaking research from IoP clinical psychologists shows that one in three people in the UK regularly suffers paranoid or suspicious fears. This level of paranoia is much higher than previously suspected and means that paranoid thoughts may be almost as common as depression or anxiety.

Worries about other people are so common that they seem to be an essential – if unwelcome – part of what it means to be human.

The results of the research are detailed in this, the world’s first self-help book on dealing with paranoid thoughts. The book explains how these fears arise and presents practical steps to deal with them.

Constable and Robinson

COMMENT is the College’s regular newsletter, produced by the Public Relations Department | Articles and/or photographs are welcomed from all members of the College, but please note that the Editor reserves the right to amend articles | Copy for the next issue can be sent to Julie Munk, Public Relations Department (ext 3075), James Clerk Maxwell Building, Waterloo Campus, or emailed to julie.munk@kcl.ac.uk by 25 September.

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