Portico 2016/17

THE MAGA ZINE OF UCL I S S U E 3 . 2 0 16 / 1 7

Opening axe Professor Ijeoma Uchegbu traces the origins of the first human societies

Caught on film Christopher Nolan reflects on the early days of his stellar career Next machina The robots are coming Social animals Professor Danny Miller on human relationships online How to build a brain Making sense of the most complex organ in the human body

LONDON’S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

PORTICO ISSUE 3. 2016/17

LONDON CALLING

UP FRONT

02 Update 05 Free Radical 08 Extra Curricular 11 The Strong Room 12 Cloistered

FE AT URE S 14 Follow the crowd Uncontrollable, unpredictable and just a

20 A time to give Supporting the brightest minds from the broadest

U C L+

40 45 46 48

South Junction University Matters This Idea Must Die London vs World

backgrounds, UCL does things differently – and it needs your help.

26 How to build a brain Studying the brain is hard. Luckily,

little bit frightening: crowds create spaces where rules are broken.

UCL neuroscientists have rather a few tricks up their sleeve.

30 Next machina Metal men – and women. Synthesised voices.

If this is your idea of artificial intelligence, think again.

34 Social animals Professor Danny Miller says our use of social media supports, but doesn’t define, our human relationships.

40

As we launch our biggest ever fundraising Campaign, our students will be calling you to ask for your support.

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Update your details online: www.ucl.ac.uk/alumni

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Front cover: Professor Ijeoma Uchegbu, Pro-Vice Provost for Africa and the Middle East, with 400,000-year-old hand axes from the UCL Petrie Museum. Photograph by Alun Callender.

Editor: Mira Katbamna Commissioning Editor: Steve McGrath Art Director: Zoë Bather Project Manager: Helen Bradley

UCL Portico is produced

by YBM Ltd on behalf of the Office of the Vice-Provost (Development) info@ybm.co.uk www.ybm.co.uk

Office of the Vice-Provost (Development) Gower Street London WC1E 6BT +44 (0)20 3108 3833 alumni@ucl.ac.uk www.ucl.ac.uk/alumni

Vice-Provost (Development): Lori Houlihan lori.houlihan@ucl.ac.uk

© UCL. The opinions herein are those of the authors or persons interviewed only and do not necessarily reflect the views of UCL or YBM Ltd. All content correct at the time of going to press.

UP FRONT

DECONSTRUCTED Number crunching The proposed new UCL East campus based at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park will cover more than 11 acres and provide at least 125,000m2 of space, with the first UCL East facilities opening during the 2019/20 academic year.

Public eye Outreach is already a big part of UCL East, with projects including Inspire Newham, a long-term engagement project working with high-potential young people in Newham schools, and legal volunteering at Community Links, also in Newham.

Access all areas The new campus will house a wide range of expertise. Among the lucky candidates are: Global Future Cities Co-labs; the Centre for Access to Justice; a Robotics and Autonomous Systems Hub; Culture Lab; and an Experimental Engineering Research and Learning Hub.

People watching Phase one of the project will see more than 2,500 students, 200 academic staff, 200 researchers and 150 other staff on site, in addition to other users, visitors and onsite residents.

Forging links The campus will link four areas – Experiment, Art, Society and Technology – and break barriers between teaching, research, enterprise and public engagement.

I was interested to read Andrew Davies’ account of his time in the UCL English Department in the late 1950s (PORTICO, Issue 2). But I could not let the passing reference to “a man named Dodgson” go without comment.

Professor John McNeal Dodgson (1928-1990), after whom, I assume, the John Dodgson House hall of residence was named, was an Anglo-Saxon scholar and place names expert who was secretary of the English Place Names Society. Besides this, he was the most decent of men.

In my short time at the UCL English Department there were many stars – Frank Kermode, Randolph Quirk, Stephen Spender and the Earl of Gowrie (“call me Grey”) – but John Dodgson was not really one of them. He didn’t climb the greasy pole and didn’t think much of those who did, but was well loved.

Anne Falloon (English 1972)

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in this issue (page 20). “Philanthropy is not new to the university, but the need is more pressing than ever to support our ambitions.

“We want to transform the student experience. We want to continue to build on our leading position in the field of medical research. And we want to continue to encourage disruptive thinking – and thinkers.”

The Campaign formally launches in September 2016 with a series of high-profile events. Philanthropy is vital in enabling UCL to achieve its global ambitions – and in helping it to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges, among them dementia and cancer.

You can join the Campaign and volunteer your time or make a donation. For further information visit www.ucl.ac.uk/campaign

Illustration Hanna Melin

CAMPAIGN FOR UCL L AUNCHES he biggest philanthropic Campaign in UCL’s history launches this autumn, with the aim of raising more money and engaging more people with the university and its work than ever before.

“This is an amazing institution doing remarkable things and we want people to know about it,” writes ViceProvost (Development ) Lori Houlihan

UCL Alumni www.facebook.com/UCLconnect @UCLAlumni www.twitter.com/uclalumni @uclalumni www.instagram.com/uclalumni Or join the University College London (UCL) Official Alumni Group on LinkedIn

I was interested to read your piece about bacteria and anti-bacterial agents (PORTICO, Issue 2). In the text describing the figure with four Petri dishes you refer to Duchesne (1897) and the observation that mould can protect against the action of bacteria. The history of this kind of effect goes back to 1877 when Pasteur and Jaubert showed that anthrax could be inhibited by bacteria like E.coli, and injected rabbits to show this to be so.

Also that year Tyndall, the physicist who followed Faraday at the Royal Institution, was interested in, among other things, why the sky is blue, and in turbid fluids. It turned out that in his laboratory one of the tubes with turbid fluid from bacteria cleared when a penicillin mould grew in it.

The history of medical science has examples where discoveries are made which take a long time to follow through to clinical application, and the penicillin story is one of those – finally resolved, of course,

by Howard Florey and his group in Oxford.

Tim Biscoe (Jodrell Professor and Head of Physiology, Vice-Provost)

It’s a real pleasure to receive PORTICO and have UCL a part of you. I really enjoyed reading the thoughts of Andrew Davies as he wanders back to his old stomping grounds. It was beautifully written, with plenty of funny and wistful moments. I loved what Davies wrote about not knowing what he wanted to do for a career. Perhaps these are the kids who we need to look out for, not the destined selfstarters. Anyone who has seen the brilliant BBC series War and Peace might agree with me.

Pauline Suwanban (Comparative Literature 2014)

INBOX

UCL East

High speed Travel time between the Bloomsbury campus and UCL East will be from just seven minutes on high-speed rail and around 25 minutes on the London Underground.

Love it? Hate it?

Email us at alumni@ucl.ac.uk or write to us at Portico Magazine, UCL Development & Alumni Relations Office, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. Please mark your letters “for publication”.

Letters may be edited for length.

On page 20 of the latest issue of PORTICO you show a picture of students celebrating the relief of Ladysmith, presumably on top of the UCL portico.

You don’t say anything about the figure of the Scotsman in full Highland regalia.

My mother, who attended UCL around 1920, told me about this figure, which rowdy students would purloin from the front entrance of a tobacconist’s shop in Tottenham Court Road; I think he was holding out a snuff-box. They named him “Phineas MacLino”. My mother said that at that time the rowdiest students by far were the medical ones. I believe when I was at UCL (Architecture, Town Planning, 1951-58) the rowdiest were the engineering students, who one time hoisted someone’s little car on to the roof of – I seem to remember – the Slade School, which was next to the Bartlett.

David Birnbaum (Philosophy 1958)

#UCLPORTICO Jaquelin Pelagio boom_boom_baby

Don’t think I will remove the wrapping because this is in a way incredibly precious to me. UCL sending out magazines to alumni worldwide. As if it wasn’t enough experiences, memories and knowledge for almost half a lifetime that we gained there in half a year.

I miss those good times so much.

A cosy, warm spot that I go back to in my mind, from time to time

Ben Scanlan @ben_scanlan

Long day; bubbles, bath and #UCLportico providing much needed chill out and stimulation all in one

Kely Sarmiento @keljadue

#UCLportico in my hands, absolutely love it!

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500:

UP FRONT

CH A IR OF MEN TA L H E A LT H The Sackler Trust is funding a new Chair in the UCL Institute of Mental Health, which aims to improve prevention, intervention and treatment for mental health patients. Its work will encourage academic partners and NHS Trusts to work together to provide innovative clinical services for patients. The gift will allow UCL to combine its strengths in neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry to establish a major force in European and global mental health research.

BRITISH COUNCIL AWA R D S A UCL graduate who founded a €25m venture capital fund supporting new technologies being developed in Turkish universities has won the 2016 Education UK Alumni Award (Entrepreneurial) for Turkey. Okan Kara said he was inspired by his time at UCL and the entrepreneurial atmosphere of London. Other UCL alumni winners included Tamara Talal Tayeb, Saudi Arabia’s UK Alumni Ambassador for 2016, and Barbara Oliveira, who won the Social Impact award for Brazil.

Attendees at the annual Scholarships and Bursaries Reception in February.

UP FRONT

TWO NEW GRAND CHALLENGES

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CL is launching two new Grand Challenges following a review of its first five years. The new Challenges will focus on transformative technologies and justice and equality.

Transformative technologies will include how innovations, whether hi- or low-tech, can be conceived, developed and applied in order to benefit humanity and the planet. Justice and Equality will take in how to overcome societal structures that limit access to just solutions or sustain persistent inequalities.

Meanwhile, the activities around existing Grand Challenges – Global Health, Sustainable Cities, Intercultural Interaction and Human Wellbeing – will be refined.

“UCL Grand Challenges has tapped into our research community’s appetite to engage with the world’s problems,” said Professor David Price, UCL Vice-Provost (Research). “We are convinced that our

FREE RADICAL

Shiva Riahi, Manager/ Research Associate, Centre for Access to Justice

collective expertise and impact can be made greater than the sum of its parts.

In order to maximise UCL’s benefit to the world, the programme has provoked new and intense collaborations across the breadth of our disciplines and stimulated productive interactions with policymakers, practitioners and community groups.”

He added: “These developments will strengthen our capacity to address global challenges through our disciplinary excellence and distinctive cross-disciplinary approach. And the collaborative teams we bring together in the coming years will further enhance UCL’s ability to generate novel responses to global problems through disruptive thinking.”

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To find out more about UCL Grand Challenges, visit www.ucl.ac.uk/grandchallenges

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Illustration Lucinda Rogers

Thanks to nearly 50 years of support from The Reta Lila Weston Trust for Medical Research, the Reta Lila Weston Institute of Neurological Studies at UCL continues to identify preventative strategies and develop novel therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases, with an emphasis on Parkinson’s disease, dementia and stroke. In the last 10 years the Trust has contributed millions of pounds to help further understand the causes of these conditions, through clinical, molecular, cell biological and pathological (at the Queen Square Brain Bank) research.

Illustration Janne Iivonen

RE TA LIL A W E S T ON TRUST

big part of our work at the Centre for Access to Justice is to engender a sense of social justice and awareness in our students. It’s easy to think, “I’m just a student, I can’t do much,” but actually we show they can.

Since I was a child, I wanted to make a difference. That said, I fell into my role quite by accident. Having graduated from UCL in Law in 2012, I was taken on originally as a research assistant, and then stepped into a management capacity as the Centre developed.

At the moment, most of my time is taken up with managing relationships with our students and partner organisations, as well as managing pro bono projects such as the one at the Sir Ludwig Guttman Centre in East London to provide legal advice to people who couldn’t normally afford it.

This project brings together a lot of strands of what the Centre is all about: students volunteering to deliver pro bono work; students engaging with the Connected Curriculum through the clinical course that we run for final-year students (of whom I was one myself on the original pilot course); and the provision of legal advice to vulnerable individuals.

The clinic opens for two afternoons a week, where all our clients are registered with the local GP’s surgery. And because this is UCL, there’s a research project involved too – and this is where the importance of location comes in. Some time ago, the Dean, in her original research on legal needs, began to see the links between people’s legal problems and the impact this can have on other areas of their life, health being one of them. Someone might, for example, go to the doctor for anti-depressants and when the doctor asks why, they say they’re about to get evicted from their home. Of course, what they actually need is not to be evicted and it’s in recognition of these legal/health links that countries like Australia and the US now have health/justice partnerships.

It’s easy to think, “I’m just a student, I can’t do much,” but we show them they can In the US, for example, doctors who were treating a group of children with asthma realised they kept coming back because of the damp and mould in their rented accommodation, illustrating the need for doctors and lawyers to work together holistically to deal with the original root cause.

But despite feedback for these partnerships showing that they can be hugely beneficial, they still haven’t really taken off in the UK, and part of our work will be to see whether the empirical evidence can demonstrate tangible impacts – evidence that we’re uniquely placed to get because we’re based in a health centre.

We’re in the early stages and, this term, we’ve run a pilot study to see who actually needs legal advice, what their problems are and how they respond when you ask them

certain questions, so that we can produce the best questionnaire. We’re also talking to GPs to work out how to create systems that aren’t a burden on them, and we’re about to bring on a new member of our team – a health researcher who understands the structure of healthcare systems – to complement our understanding of the legal system and ensure a multi-disciplinary approach. The idea is that, eventually, legal advice would be seen as a medical intervention like any other – just another type of specialist you may be sent to.

Because of the cuts to legal aid, and the current state of the NHS, there is a particular danger of these most vulnerable members of society being lost, so the work we’re doing feels particularly pertinent.

We also know, from other UCL research, that there are clear links between social inequalities and health inequalities, and this provides our wider context.

In 2014, 600 UCL alumni donated more than £66,000 towards the Centre for Access to Justice. If you would like to support the Centre and its future work at UCL East, and for more information, visit our website www.ucl.ac.uk/campaign U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 5

UP FRONT

UP FRONT

JEREMY BENTHAM SPEAKS:

U C L A “ G L O B A L U N I V E R S I T Y ” S AY S P R O V O S T AFTER BREXIT DECISION The UK’s withdrawal from the EU will have a clear impact on universities, including UCL, particularly regarding the mobility of students and the funding of research.

The Provost, Professor Michael Arthur, has reaffirmed that UCL remains a global university through its outlook, people and enduring international partnerships.

“I also want in particular to address UCL’s staff and students from all countries of the European Union,” said Professor Arthur. “We value you

enormously – your contribution to UCL life is intrinsic to what the university stands for.”

He reassured UCL staff and students that, barring unilateral action from the UK government, the vote to leave the European Union does not mean there will be any immediate material change to the immigration status of current and prospective EU students and staff, nor to the UK university sector’s participation in EU programmes such as Horizon 2020 and Erasmus+. “Article 50 of the Lisbon

“The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.”

Treaty foresees a two-year negotiation process between the UK and other member states,” he said, “during which time the terms of the UK’s exit from the European Union will be decided.

“There will be many questions from many people in the UCL community and beyond about what this vote means for UCL. We will address these as a matter of priority as the details become clear.”

For more information visit the UCL news page: www.ucl.ac.uk/news

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Lecturer in Human Geography, says the implementation of Bentham’s vision is highly controversial in our modern world.

SEA HERO QUEST Mobile adventure game launches in brain study

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Illustration Hanna Melin

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team of scientific researchers from UCL has played a part in creating a new mobile game designed to help advance our understanding of spatial navigation.

Sea Hero Quest is a multi-level adventure game in which the player takes on the role of a sea explorer’s son traversing the seas, collecting the lost pieces of their father’s ocean journal. To date it has been downloaded more than a million times, and all data collected from the game will be made freely available to scientists worldwide and will also be used by UCL to develop new diagnostic tests for dementia.

Dr Hugo Spiers of UCL said: “This project provides an unprecedented chance to study how many thousands of people from different countries and cultures navigate space. This will help shed light on how we use our brain to navigate and will aid in future work on diagnostics and drug treatment programmes in dementia research.”

The game was led by Deutsche Telekom and was created by Saatchi & Saatchi London in partnership with the charity Alzheimer’s Research, UCL, the University of East Anglia and game developers Glitchers.

hat came to be known as “the greatest happiness principle” is one of the cornerstones of Bentham’s radical work, which aimed to develop models of social intervention, legal systems and governmental policies that would truly benefit the maximum number of citizens possible. Indeed, Bentham’s work challenged political systems that worked in favour of political elites by ignoring, or even directly undermining, their own citizens.

This appears a laudable framework for social and political action, and yet its implementation is highly controversial, including for reasons that Bentham himself recognised: that the happiness of ‘the majority’ of a state’s citizenry could precisely take place by sacrificing ‘the minority’, raising grave questions about whose happiness can and should be promoted by states, how, and at what (or whose) cost?

Challenges of inclusion and exclusion repeatedly emerge when states develop interventions on local and national levels, including with regards to the costs borne by both visible and invisible ‘minorities’ in a given state. In the contemporary political landscape, what appears particularly

relevant, however, is the way in which the proposition is effectively invoked by states and organisations on a combination of national, regional and international levels.

The controversial application of this principle is clearly illustrated in the policies that have been developed and implemented since 2015 by European states and the European Union in response to the largest recorded number of refugees in Europe since the Second World War. Last year, for instance, more than one million refugees fleeing conflicts, crisis, human rights violations and poverty in their countries and regions of origin (including from the ongoing Syrian conflict, but also from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Eritrea) arrived in Europe.

In response, European states and the European Union have publicly argued that their ultimate responsibility is to protect the wellbeing of the majority of their citizens (in numerical, ethnic and religious terms alike), and the means to do this is precisely by excluding others (minorities in numerical, ethnic and religious terms) who are perceived to threaten or disrupt that happiness.

In this framework, European citizens are officially identified as those who have

the right to happiness and stability, while others – in this case refugees, asylumseekers and migrants from outside of the European Union – are presented by European states as a threat to this; by extension, refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants are presented as not having the right to safety and due legal protection, let alone happiness. They have truly been constituted as not having even the right to have rights.

A key question in this context, then, is how the European ‘majority’ can ‘enjoy’ happiness in light of the pain, suffering and death of others – both within and outside of their national and regional borders.

Bentham recognised that the precise formulation and implementation of ‘the greatest happiness principle’ was controversial, and yet the overarching question that stimulated his thinking behind this principle remained at the core of his work throughout his life: what can or should be encouraged, and what discouraged, to create the conditions for the wellbeing of people to flourish?

For more information on Elena’s work and the UCL Human Geography Department please visit: www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/ U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 7

Christopher Nolan (English 1993) recalls the start of an illustrious career in film.

Words Kate Hilpern 8 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3

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because I wanted to be in London, at the heart of the film business, and I very much liked the idea of studying English,” he says.

What is true, however, is that once he’d heard about the Film Society he wasted no time in going along to its venue in the theatre’s basement. He never looked back.

“I’m unusual in that I decided I wanted to make films at a very young age,” he says.

“And once I’d done that first walk along the side of the cafeteria of the Bloomsbury Theatre and climbed further and further

Photograph ©2013 Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. and Paramount Pictures Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Photo credit: Melinda Sue Gordon

EXTRA CURRICULAR

hen Christopher Nolan arrived at UCL to study English, the last place he expected to be spending most of his time was a dark, windowless, airless basement room, with a musty smell and graffiti on the walls. But it was here, underneath the Bloomsbury theatre, where his social life – and indeed the start of his career – took centre stage.

It has been reported that Nolan selected UCL specifically for its filmmaking facilities. “But actually I chose it

down the staircase into the dark basement, I spent most of my time there.”

It helped that on his first day of university, he met his soon-to-be-producer and wife Emma Thomas (History 1993).

“Together, we wound up running the society together,” he says, recalling “the special code on the door that you were only told about when you proved you were serious!”

That door opened into what was a treasure chest for budding film-makers.

“There was a little video facility and an archive of the films that students had made over the years,” he says. Not to mention a couple of 16mm cameras and a Steenbeck editing suite, with real film and real spools, which, according to Nolan’s fellow student John Tempest (Civil Engineering 1968), had been bought at some point in the late 1960s as a result of a bequest.

It was, Nolan says, “a wonderful place to hang out, with great equipment and interesting people, many of whom are still my friends today”. There was a system that allowed you to easily synchronise sound to film and a huge amount of bric-a-brac that had built up over the years, including costumes and a piano. “I have a memory of an unnaturally long couch, with very little padding, that people slept on,” says Nolan.

“I wasn’t an all-nighter, though. I’ve always liked my sleep too much.

“The Film Society was a black hole that sucked you in and it’s fair to say that I spent far more time in that musty old basement than in the English department where I was supposed to be,” laughs Nolan.

Which is not to say that his English degree didn’t come in handy. “I remember my tutors were extremely engaging. A lot of what I learned about literature during that period informed what I was doing in terms of my writing and screenwriting.

So for me, there was a very inspiring relationship between what I was learning and what I was trying to do in my film-making.”

While the society had a real gravitas to it, there was no official structure to things, he says, “just a bunch of friendly, helpful and very creative students and former students who wanted to help you out”. Among them was David Julyan (Astronomy and Physics 1987), who wound up doing the music on Nolan’s films Memento and Prestige.

There was, he says, a great spirit of collaboration. “If someone had a script, you’d get a group of people together to try it out,” he says. “And there was a real buzz, particularly when the shooting for a film started coming together, for which a set would often be built down there. There

was such an energy when that happened.”

There was also great excitement when a film came back from processing, he says.

“There were a lot of laughs. And I can remember this friendly rivalry between us film people and Bloomsbury TV.” The Film Society used that theatre to run Hollywood movies, he explains. “And we used the money from those screenings to make our 16mm films. But I had no money myself. Everything was handto-mouth. In my final year, I remember having a bucket of change by my front door that I’d use in the vending machine in the Bloomsbury Theatre – it thankfully took pennies. A couple of Fruit and Nut bars seemed enough to live off.”

The basement, he concludes, was a very self-contained, creative incubator, and Nolan himself made several short films there. He also continued to use the university to make films after he left. “There was this tradition of alumni hanging around a few years after leaving.

The trade-off for using the facilities was helping newer students learn the ropes and passing on knowledge.”

In fact, it was not long after he’d left that Nolan made his first commercialrelease feature film, Following, which starred university friends Jeremy Theobald and Lucy Russell. And Nolan’s links to UCL have carried on. Not only were both the beginning and the ending of Following made at UCL, but it’s also a location in Inception and Batman Begins.

There was a video facility, a couple of 16mm cameras and a Steenbeck editing suite with real film and spools – and a huge amount of bric-a-brac The impact of that time on his life is easy to quantify for Nolan. “I’m very grateful to UCL. My family stems from those days – Emma and our four children. And we have a business making films that has become the thing we’ve done with our lives. My entire life can be traced very directly to those student days and that basement.”

Christopher Nolan is a screenwriter, producer and one of the highest-grossing film directors in history.

HONORARY DEGREES This year, UCL awarded honorary degrees to: British economist Sir Anthony Barnes Atkinson; Professor Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer for England; Professor Jose-Marie Griffiths, President, Dakota State University; Zimbabwean healthcare specialist Professor James Gita Hakim; Professor Sing Kong Lee, Vice President (Education Strategies) and Vice President (Alumni and Advancement) at Nanyang Technological University; and President Dean Spielmann, lawyer and former President of the European Court of Human Rights.

UCL awarded honorary fellowships to: Ms Sophie Chandauka, Head of Group Treasury (Legal) at Virgin Money; novelist and journalist Ms Shirley Conran; artificial intelligence specialists Dr Demis Hassabis, Dr Shane Legg and Mr Mustafa Suleyman; Ms Ruth Kennedy, Managing Director at Kennedy Dundas and founder of The Louis Dundas Centre; Sir Frank McLoughlin, Chair of the Commission on Adult Vocational Teaching and Learning; Mr Trevor Pears, businessman, philanthropist and Executive Chair of the Pears Foundation; Iceland Chairman and Chief Executive Mr Malcolm Walker; and Professor Geoff Whitty, former director of the Institute of Education.

IN NUMBERS

UCL Alumni *

60k 90k in London

overseas

220k contactable alumni

191 70+ countries

alumni events worldwide each year

*alumni groups in new york, london, beijing, hong kong, greece, france, malaysia, singapore...

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UP FRONT THE STRONG ROOM

DECISIVE AXE

Professor Ijeoma Uchegbu, Pro-Vice Provost for Africa and The Middle East, talks axes, status and civilisation.

Interview Kate Hilpern Photograph Alun Callender

The thing that appeals to me most about these 400,000-yearold hand axes is the proof they provide of functioning societies long before Africa was colonised by various Western countries. The traditional narrative is that colonisation is the point at which things really start for the continent, but the axes point to a very early group of humans living in the Nile area of Egypt, with societies that were organised enough for a person to be making tools.

You can see and feel exactly where the stone has been chiselled away, but there are no sharp edges, so you are left with this wonderful smoothness that means they’ve been used quite a bit. From a tactile perspective, they really speak to me about the person who first made them and used them. It’s not that we know exactly what they were used for – we don’t – but what is clear is that, through trial and error, this sculptor decided that this was the best shape to get the job done.

Each hand axe fits beautifully into my (rather large) hand, suggesting they were made for a man. That makes you wonder what sort of place women had – probably quite lowly. It’s also likely that, conversely, the person making these tools would have had a very high status in this micro-society. And if you consider that early humans had to do everything for themselves, then these sculptors must have depended on others for those tasks.

From this, you can surmise that hierarchies were forming due to the possession of certain skills, and I like the way these tools tie in so neatly with UCL’s own aim of giving students knowledge to gain wider benefits – transforming them into highly skilled individuals, just like one of these early craftsmen.

If you think about what’s already known about early Egypt, it mostly comes from funeral-related objects, particularly around kings, revealing the power and high standing they had. In many ways, this has shaped our understanding about early Egyptian civilisation. How amazing to see that well before this, a lot of human activity was already taking place in this area of Africa.”

The UCL Petrie museum is open to the public Tuesday to Saturday 13.00 – 17.00.

For more information visit www.ucl.ac.uk/ museums/petrie or follow the museum on Twitter @Petriemuseum U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 11

UP FRONT CLOISTER ED

WAV IN G N O T D R O W NIN G

Can education be the answer to a widening gap between rich and poor?

Maybe, say UCL Institute of Education’s Becky Francis and Ann Phoenix.

Words Kate Hilpern Photograph Alun Callender

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hat is widening participation really about? Is it the answer to a fairer society? Or just a political convenience? Is getting more people into higher education a good in itself? Or is social mobility actually broader than education?

At the Institute of Education (IOE), Becky Francis and Ann Phoenix specialise in researching social identities and educational attainment. So what do they think about widening participation?

Phoenix and Francis agree that key to the issue is the question of wider social inequality, and the consequent difference in children’s starting points as they begin education. But perhaps especially because of this, the quality of education – and especially of early education – can have a significant impact on success or failure.

“Even school culture can have a massive influence on what makes kids sink or swim,” says Francis, Director of the IOE. “I went to what was a very workingclass comprehensive, but my middle-class background gave me the cultural capital to get on. I didn’t do well – just enough to go onto the next stage really – but many of my friends, who were just as clever as me, but from more working-class backgrounds, didn’t make that next stage.

“Meanwhile, some of my own research has found there are limitations of acceptable behaviour among children – that it’s not cool to be clever in some of these schools and, interestingly, that it’s hard to combine popularity with doing well academically. I think it’s important to keep these social factors in mind.”

Ann Phoenix, Professor of Psychosocial Studies, agrees, pointing to an area of the research she finds particularly compelling: the significance of the body in popularity at school. If you are considered good looking, you get a certain amount

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of prestige in school. Her own work on masculinities found that most boys don’t want to be seen as ‘goody-goody’, and has parallels with Francis’s research into the body and stereotypical gender perceptions.

“Prestige is heavily invested in sport, for example,” says Francis, “where the reality is that some bodies are better built to thrive – bigger bodies make you more likely to squash, rather than be squashed, in rugby, for example.”

And the story doesn’t end once students have won their place, says Phoenix. “It’s not just about getting more working-class and minoritised ethnic groups into university per se – it’s also about getting them to think beyond their local universities, which is where we know they’re likely to go, and to be accepted by high-status universities,” she says.

The research shows it’s hard to combine being popular at school with doing well academically To this end, UCL is trying to inspire students to look further afield by engaging hard-to-reach pupils through its summer schools and school visits, and by providing scholarships and bursaries to pupils who need financial support. But it’s not just about engaging students in the first place, as Phoenix points out: “It’s also an issue if these groups mainly come out with 2:2s and thirds, particularly in a climate where there’s debate around what exactly a graduate job is now.”

In fact, as Phoenix says, even when more disadvantaged groups do get into

the more elite universities, they find that academic staff and curricula do not reflect social diversity. Many ask, for instance: ‘Why isn’t my professor black and why is my curriculum white?’

She points out that, for its part, UCL was, in 2016, one of only eight institutions to receive a Bronze Award for a pioneering pilot of the Race Equality Charter for Higher Education, and has a Silver Athena SWAN award recognising its efforts to improve the recruitment, retention and promotion of female academic and research staff.

One of the biggest changes in student access in recent years has been the dramatic growth in international students, points out Francis. This has the enormous benefit of diversifying and enriching the student experience.

However, she points out that this does not widen participation in terms of socio-economic background, as, currently, this international population still tends to represent students from affluent backgrounds. Outreach work to students from working-class backgrounds, and supporting schools in more disadvantaged

areas, remain important – hence UCL initiatives such as its membership of the Realising Opportunities (outreach) scheme, and its sponsorship of initiatives, such as the UCL Academy.

Are universities on a journey in the right direction? Phoenix and Francis are in agreement: the answer has to be ‘yes’.

“UCL is a great example of a university that is committed to widening access,” says Francis, “upholding the pioneering vision of its original founders to offer high quality education to everyone, regardless of background. The way I see

it, discussions like this, and the research projects that form the backbone to them, are part of an essential journey. It’s one I’m very excited about being part of at UCL.” UCL offers an exciting range of visits, events and programmes for students in Years 7-13 as well as adult learners. These programmes also engage a wide variety of staff and students and are designed to give everyone a greater insight into UCL’s degree programmes and student life. For more information visit: www.ucl.ac.uk/prospective-students/ widening-participation/wp-home U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 13

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Uncontrollable, unpredictable and just a little bit frightening: crowds create spaces in which rules can be broken and thinking can be disrupted.

FOL LOW THE CROW D Words Lucy Jolin

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That’s the mysterious alchemy of crowds: they can change things. Their collective will can send a performance soaring or condemn it utterly.

We talk of both the ‘wisdom of crowds’ and ‘mob mentality’. Their will can inspire the courage to tear down walls of oppression, or the kind of fury that kills. Those in power court them, hate them – and fear them.

“We have a very strange relationship with crowds,” says Jorina von Zimmerman, a PhD student in experimental psychology, who studies how synchrony – people doing the same thing at the same time – creates a social bond between people, whether it’s soldiers marching in rhythm or football fans jumping up and down to celebrate a goal. “We fear them – they are unpredictable, the ‘mob’ – and at the same time we find them fascinating. Whether you’re in the crowd or observing it, it creates very powerful feelings on both sides. We get lost as individuals. We get immersed, and we feel part of a bigger whole.”

Right Revellers at the Tomatina Festival, Spain.

This spread © Jose Fuste Raga/Corbis

W

hen Bridget Minamore (English 2014), co-founder of Brainchild Festival, scheduled poet Maria Ferguson for the noon slot at the 2015 festival, she was just hoping for a good start to the day. When you’re operating on festival time, noon is early.

Opening acts expect sparse attendance and a ripple of applause if they’re lucky. But this time was different.

Ferguson was trialling a new show, Fat Girls Don’t Dance, which she took to the Edinburgh Festival this year. “It was a bit rough and she was clearly nervous at the beginning,” says Minamore.

“But word spread across the site about how good it was. After she’d been on stage for a few minutes, it was just clear that the crowd was with her. The tent was packed. She got a standing ovation at the end, when we didn’t even think most people would be up, let alone standing up. Something beautiful happened there. You could see it in Maria’s face, and the faces in the crowd.”

U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 15

Think of crowds and the first thing that usually comes to mind is an image of protest – the voice of the people making itself heard. Dr Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, a specialist in the history of 20th century Britain, points out that street protest in modern Britain takes place against a context of increased democratic rights. The majority have the power of the vote. Yet people still take to the streets, despite democracy. Why? Identity politics play a big part, she says. “Why bother going to a CND rally, for example, such as those mass gatherings in the 1980s, even though 16 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3

the Labour Party rejected unilateral nuclear disarmament? It was about saying who you were.

You might not have brought about a change, but you still went to the rallies and bought the badge, because it said something about you.”

The complex forces that swirl around flashpoints of protest – the poll tax riots, the Brixton riots, the anti-war protests of the Blair era – mean that there’s little point in trying to quantify their effect. Images of protests reveal that those protests can be more effective than the corridors of power – arguably it was the

Above Holidaymakers crowd a swimming pool, also known as ‘China’s Dead Sea’, on a scorching day in Daying county, Suining city, southwest China’s Sichuan province.

This spread © Imaginechina/Corbis

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Complex forces swirl around flashpoints of protest – the poll tax riots, the Brixton riots, the anti-war protests of the Blair era

photogenic fury of protesters at the 1990 poll tax riots in Trafalgar Square which led to the junking of that tax, rather than the more prosaic alternative of Mr and Mrs Average sitting in their marginal constituency feeling rather cross and changing their voting intentions. “The protests were a very obvious demonstration of the policy’s unpopularity,” says Sutcliffe-Braithwaite. “But Chris Patten, then Secretary of State for the Environment, said it was ‘targeted like an Exocet missile’ on middle-class voters in marginal constituencies. It was incredibly unpopular U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 17

A crowd is no longer just a physical gathering.

It’s a resource. You can use its money to fund your new business, its passion to sign your online petition, or its expertise to decipher thousands of pages of manuscripts

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Top The Colour and Spring festival celebrating the love between Krishna and Radha, part of the Holi festival in Uttar Pradesh state, India.

A data gathering You can’t necessarily predict a riot, emphasises Fry. But information like this helps you plan for one. “Look at how earthquakes happen,” she says. “Once you know earthquakes happen, looking at the aftershocks, predicting where they are going to be, and how frequently they are going to occur, you can’t say for definite this is where it is going to happen but you can have a degree of predictability.”

In the internet age, a crowd is no longer just a physical gathering: it’s data. (IBM estimates that we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, including everything from the photo you posted on Instagram to information gathered by climate sensors in the Antarctic.) It’s a resource.

You can use its money to fund your new business, its passion to sign your online petition, or its

Above The London leg of the annual World Pillow Fight Day flashmob gathered in Trafalgar Square in April 2013.

Above A Gangnamstyle flash mob outside Moscow’s Olimpiysky Sports Complex, where Korean singer Park Jae-sang, better known as Psy, gave a press conference devoted to his 2013 Moscow concert.

This page © Golovkin Pavel/ITAR-TASS Photo/Corbis

the process was very similar to the way in which shoppers behave. They prefer to shop locally, but they’re prepared to go further for a big shopping centre. The rioters were the same, picking looting targets.

This page, top © Christophe Boisvieux/Hemis/Corbis This page, bottom © Mike Kemp/In Pictures/Corbis

with MPs in those constituencies and they were very nervous about it.”

And there are other, less obvious factors behind those people coming onto the streets. Dr Hannah Fry, lecturer in the mathematics of cities at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, describes her work as “studying patterns in time and space”. A crowd, she says, may seem random, “but we leave patterns in everything we do”. She points to the 2011 London riots, which started after a peaceful protest following the police shooting of Mark Duggan. A bus was set on fire, a local shopping centre was looted. The next day, copycat riots sprang up all over London. By the third day, the riots had spread all over London and the UK, with around 4,000 arrests and five fatalities.

When Fry and her team analysed data from the riots, working alongside the Metropolitan Police, they identified three key findings. The riots were contagious – their pattern resembled the way disease spreads through a city. The rioters came from some of the most deprived areas of the city.

And 80 per cent of people travelled less than three kilometres from their own homes to riot. In fact,

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expertise to decipher thousands of pages of Jeremy Bentham’s handwritten manuscripts, as the Transcribe Bentham project is currently doing.

And, of course, you can mine it for information – but you need to know what you’re looking for. The problem with crowds, says Sofia Olhede, professor of statistics, is that they might give us more data, but it’s not necessarily the information we actually want or need.

“If you want to know something, you need to design an experiment – but that’s not how people collect data nowadays,” she says. “We like using crowds because it’s so easy. We like using found data for exactly the same reason – there is so much of it that surely there must be some information within it. But data without our understanding of how it arose is valueless. You might as well go online and download numbers from an arbitrary website. You have to work out: how am I getting this data? And what do I know about this crowd?

Are they representative?”

And it’s vital to remember, says von Zimmerman, that when we talk about crowds, we’re not talking about some amorphous, faceless

mass. We’re talking about ourselves – both as individuals and how we act together. “Psychology knows a lot about individuals and has done a fantastic job of describing individual feelings and behaviours,” she says. “But essentially, we are social beings. There is hardly a situation where we are not influenced by something that is happening around us on a social level. So it’s very hard to separate the individual from the context which that individual is part of. That’s why we are trying to bring the study of groups and individuals together. We need to understand how people act in groups. Otherwise, we have done a poor job of understanding individuals as well.”

Amazing things happen when people come together.

The UCL alumni network has more than 200,000 people around the world. You can join our global community by attending events, volunteering, mentoring or making a donation to UCL’s work.

Visit www.ucl.ac.uk/alumni for more information and watch out for news about our on-campus festival, due to happen in Summer 2017, as part of the Campaign for UCL. U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 19

A TIME TO

UCL prides itself on doing things differently. A cure for cancer.

Revolutionary dementia research.

A new approach to global prosperity.

Scholarships for outstanding students.

Your support, your time, your brains and your donations can make all these ideas a reality. Back the future of UCL and join the Campaign for UCL.

Lori Houlihan is Vice-Provost (Development).

Together with the Provost, Professor Michael Arthur, Lori will lead the philanthropic Campaign for UCL. I am very excited about leading the campaign to support UCL through to 2034 and I get enormous job satisfaction from the pleasure people get from giving their time or money to the institution. My job, and that of my team, is to connect our alumni and global supporters to the academic community, allowing them to see the truly exciting projects under way at UCL and the many ways their money can make a difference.

This is an amazing institution doing remarkable things and we want people to know about it. Here at UCL everyone is excited and engaged in the plans for the

future and now we need to spread the word so we can raise the funds to make them happen. And in the spirit of disruptive thinking, which has so long been a tradition of UCL, we aim to find new and creative ways to do so.

Philanthropy is, of course, not new to the university: it’s the way we started here nearly 200 years ago. But the need is more pressing than ever to support our ambitions through the fundraising campaign, our largest ever.

We want to transform the student experience.

We want to continue to build on our leading position in the field of medical research. And we want to continue to encourage disruptive thinking – and thinkers. My challenge is to make sure we tell all these stories in the most impactful way possible so that we can build relationships with our supporters and make remarkable things happen at UCL.”

GI V E Words Sarah Woodward

We are London’s biggest university and one of its biggest employers. Help us build a new campus in east London that can house our next generation of radical thinkers and create new opportunities for people living and working in our great city.

RESEARCH & DESTROY Our health research leads international efforts against cancer and dementia. Help us fight cancer and make dementia a 20th century disease.

Students are our future – we want the best students to come here, whatever their background.

Help us support them to change all our tomorrows with scholarships, teaching and facilities.

DYNAMIC DISRUPTORS At UCL we discover the undiscovered and explore the unexplored. Your support will ensure that our staff and students can continue to develop ideas at the forefront of research and debate.

To support your university, give online at www.ucl.ac.uk/campaign, use the enclosed donation form or contact the alumni office.

ACT NOW.

LONDON CALLING

REBELS WITH A CAUSE

FIGHT CANCER. SUPPORT BRIGHT YOUNG MINDS. REGENERATE LONDON. HELP UCL BACK THE FUTURE.

It’s humbling that people want to help our research even when they know it’s too late for them, because they know it might help the next generation

I was cowering at the top of the stairs of our house at the time of the quake. I didn’t think I was about to die, but I didn’t feel very safe either

We can help shape the world by attracting, educating and encouraging the very best.

Which is why scholarships are so important

I am researching the links between legal homophobia and its manifestations in public discourse. UCL has given me the freedom, breadth and choice in my research

Professor Nick Fox heads the Dementia Research Centre at the Institute of Neurology in the faculty of Brain Sciences. With philanthropic support, the faculty wants to build a new Dementia Research Institute and move further and faster to improve the lives of people living with dementia and their families.

Dr Naomi Saville is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Global Health. Based in the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal, her work focuses on maternal and child healthcare, and she is currently planning a new research project based on healthy rebuilding following last year’s earthquake.

Professor David Coen is Director of the School of Public Policy and Head of the Department of Political Science, a role in which he oversees a large student cohort. He is closely involved in seeking funding for scholarships to broaden the department’s outreach.

Jack Kiely is a current Wolfson Scholar studying for his doctorate on the History of Homophobia in France 1942-2013.

For every six researchers looking into the causes of cancer in the UK there is only one working on dementia – yet this is a disease that has a greater impact on our economy than cancer and heart disease put together. That should give us sufficient reason to support research into ways of combating dementia.

At UCL, we do receive tremendous support, from all sorts of people and places. This includes an award of £20m from the Wolfson Foundation in 2011, which funded The Leonard Wolfson Experimental Neurology Centre. This Centre has already made terrific progress accelerating the development of treatments and identifying future therapeutic targets for neurodegenerative diseases.

Most recently there was also a mammoth effort from UK retailers, brought together by Iceland’s Chief Executive, Malcolm Walker, to form the UCL Dementia Retail Partnership and give proceeds from the sale of their 5p carrier bags to UCL Dementia Research.

A lot of my own work is with familial dementia, where the disease is inherited. People develop symptoms as early as their 30s or 40s, when they typically have professional or caring responsibilities, and also have the additional burden of knowing they have a 50 per cent chance of passing it on to their children. It is often very difficult to access care for people with dementia at such a young age as most services are geared towards older people. At UCL, we have set up the country’s first support group for these families and we are also finally reaching the stage of therapeutic trials for drugs to help these families, right here in Queen Square.

It’s humbling that people want to help our research even when they know it’s too late for them, because they know it might help the next generation. These are really amazing people and we are working hard with the great neuroscience strengths at UCL to accelerate the search for treatments for these devastating diseases.”

In the immediate aftermath of the Nepal earthquake we weren’t able to rebuild anything as the ground needed time to settle. But the rapid and generous response from the appeal to you – UCL’s alumni – meant that we were able to use our existing network of women’s groups to provide much-needed psychological support very quickly, secure in the knowledge that the funds would be there when we were able to rebuild, which is now.

Working for UCL, but living in Nepal, I can sometimes feel quite disassociated from university life. But I found it very comforting to discover that in a time of great need the UCL community cared deeply about the fate of my fellow countrymen and women.

I was cowering at the top of the stairs of our own house at the time of the quake and remember feeling it was like being on a ship on the high seas. As the house was built using rammed earth technology, I didn’t think I was about to die, though I didn’t feel particularly safe either. Now we have lots of visitors to our house as we encourage the rebuilding programme to raise money for healthy, safe houses.

The fact that I live here with my family means that I am well placed to see what needs to be done. There are still 600,000 homes to be rebuilt in Nepal, and countless schools and hospitals. I used money I had raised personally straight after the disaster to help build a firstdemonstration, low-cost home and now we will put that experience to good use in injecting funds raised from UCL. And, from a personal viewpoint, having UCL funds to contribute towards community building initiatives has allowed me to volunteer my own time over and above my research work to facilitate others actually doing the muchneeded rebuilding work. It’s a complicated environment here in Nepal and it is crucial that the money raised is well spent for the future.”

It is our aim at UCL to be as inclusive as possible and to broaden our outreach – in that way we can help shape the world by attracting, educating and encouraging the very best. But in order to be able to attract the best and brightest we rely on support from outside funding.

Which is why scholarships, such as that recently established by The Pentland Group, with the support of its Chairman, Stephen Rubin, for students from the global south to study for our Global Executive Master of Public Administration (EMPA), are so important. Lydia Tesfaye, the current holder, came here from her job as Chief of Staff for the State Minister at the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia, a post to which she will be returning after her studies. Meanwhile she is spending a term here at UCL, a term at New York University and a term based on a client project, an opportunity which, coming from such a poor country, would not have been open to her without outside help.

UCL’s American alumni have also recently funded a scholarship for an American to study on the EMPA programme, as have the Fulbright Foundation for a British student. The first recipient of the US scholarship is Ariella Rojhani from New York City. She came from a post as Senior Advocacy Manager for the NCD Alliance, a global network of civil society organisations that work together to combat non-communicable diseases (such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes and dementia), the major cause of death and disability worldwide.

It’s early days of course but our hope is that by supporting such people we will enhance future policy debate and implementation. But giving back is not just about money. We learn a lot from our alumni who come back to tell us about their experiences. It’s good to know that our students return to the outside world better equipped to fulfil their role in society.”

I don’t think it’s too much of an overstatement to say that the scholarship has changed my life.

Without it, the financial pressures would have been too great. From a young age I had always been attracted to academic research and was encouraged by my chemistry teacher at school in Lincolnshire, who had done a PhD, and inspired me about the possibilities.

I was the first from my nuclear family to go to university and the language and culture of France had always fascinated me but, to be honest, I thought it would end there. And then I discovered that through the generosity of others there was outside funding available to support my research.

I had spent a year abroad, in Rouen, as an undergraduate, a few years before the protests in France against gay marriage, and the idea for my thesis started fermenting then. My dissertation for my MA at UCL was on the intersection between homophobia and racism in France – a huge topic. I am researching the links between legal homophobia and its manifestations in public discourse in France, and having the scholarship has given me greater freedom, breadth and choice in my research. It has been very liberating, allowing me to physically get hold of published material, travel back and forth to France, and exchange ideas with colleagues and contemporaries.

By demonstrating the very real presence of homophobia in France today, my intention is that my research will have important social relevance. The Wolfson Foundation have supported me in so many ways, not just financially but by taking a genuine interest in my work and helping me reach a wider audience. I only hope that I can live up to the trust they have put in me. I cannot stress enough how incredibly grateful I am for the scholarship and the difference it has made not only to my life, but hopefully to the lives of others who may follow in my research footsteps.”

The UCL Dementia Retail Partnership is raising funds to build a new Dementia Research Institute at UCL. You can help support this campaign: www.ucl.ac.uk/dementia/support

UCL launched a fundraising appeal for Naomi’s project following the Nepal earthquake, and 337 UCL Alumni and Friends donated more than £45,000.

UCL Alumni have volunteer groups all over the world, including New York, Beijing, Greece, France and Hong Kong. To join a group please visit: www.ucl.ac.uk/alumni

If you would like more information on how to help UCL support student scholarships, please visit our website at: www.ucl.ac.uk/campaign

24 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3

U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 25

Words Lucy Jolin Photographs Lydia Whitmore Styling Aliki Kirmitsi

Studying the brain is challenging.

You can’t chop bits off it. You can’t take it out and put it back in again.

Luckily, brain scientists turn out to be a fairly ingenious lot.

T

he human brain floats gently in its tub of formalin: pinkish-brown, shiny and elegantly whorled on the surface, like a magnified fingerprint pattern.

PhD student Christina Murray tenderly lifts it out.

Underneath floats a rubbery material, like a swimming cap, and a long rope ending in a mass of tiny threads.

These are the dura, the brain’s protective covering, and the spinal cord. She points out the brain’s geography. “Here’s your temporal lobe and here’s your occipital lobe, the back of the brain, which is associated with vision,” she explains.

“And here’s the frontal pole, where your personality lies.”

This brain, one of around 2,000 held at the Queen Square Brain Bank for Neurological Disorders (QSBB), once held not only the control centre of every aspect of being alive – walking, swallowing, learning – but also memories, likes, dislikes, dreams, hopes; in short, a human mind. It has around 86 billion brain cells that make more than several hundred trillion contacts. The mass of squidgy-looking tissue inside our skulls is more complex than any computer, or any network of computers, ever made. So how do you even begin to study it?

Lighting up the brain It all starts, naturally, with what you want to find out about it. Dr Hugo Spiers studies spatial cognition – how our brains represent and think about space. If he wants to know more about our sense of time and space, and how warped and biased it can be, he can start with a simple tool: questions. “All I’d need to do is to ask my subject how long they think it will take for them to get to the ground floor from the fifth floor of the 25 Wakefield Road building, for example, and look at how much they under- or over-estimate,” he points out. “But, for me, there are more exciting tools.”

These tools – chiefly magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) – represent one of the biggest leaps forward, allowing researchers to track activity in a living person’s brain. Spiers asks subjects to watch virtual reality

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simulations of a city environment projected on to a screen within an MRI scanner, and work out how they would get to a certain place within that environment. The scanner takes images of the brain every two to four seconds. What you end up with, however, isn’t the ‘x bit of the brain lights up when you do y’ trope beloved of headline writers.

“It doesn’t light up, there’s no sound, but there’s a vast, complicated web of biology going on in there,” says Spiers. “Certain circuits of beautifully arranged cells are communicating with one another via electrical signals that transmit through the synapses, causing change in the circuits between those cells. So when a bit of the brain ‘lights up’, that means the dynamics of those circuits have changed.”

One limitation of MRI scans, however, is their reach.

You can’t put 100,000 people in a scanner. But you can get them to play a computer game on their phones and harness the data, which is the thinking behind Sea Hero Quest, a citizen science project funded by Deutsche Telekom. Spiers is the scientific adviser on the project, which aims to find out how navigational ability changes over time by asking users to play a simple game that involves finding their way around an ocean to capture sea monsters. The resulting data will be analysed to try to build up an understanding of the age at which changes to our brain occur that affect navigational ability, and how we respond to those changes.

“The eventual goal is a universal test for Alzheimer’s – something that doesn’t currently exist,” he points out.

“A lot of the current tests are designed for one language or culture, which hampers translation across countries and cultures.” The team was hoping for 100,000 downloads over a year and so far has received nearly a million downloads in a fortnight, generating 1,800 years’ worth of data.

“It has been phenomenal, a much greater success than we had possibly hoped for,” says Spiers. The research team at UCL will make their first announcement of the results at a neuroscience meeting in San Diego in November this year.

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Although we can study the brain at postmortem, it’s a bit like turning up at a crime scene when the criminal is gone. You’ve got to put it together from whatever is left

So what about when you need to actually look at a brain? Familiar diagnostic techniques simply aren’t available to those who study the brain. Brains have limited capacity to repair themselves, unlike other tissues such as skin, muscle and liver, explains Professor Tom Warner, director of the Reta Lila Weston Institute and QSBB at the UCL Institute of Neurology. So a biopsy to study a particular brain disease isn’t usually possible.

In addition, cells taken directly from the living brain don’t like growing in culture dishes, making it hard to study them. Ultimately, the only way to be absolutely sure of a diagnosis such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease is to study the brain after death using neuropathological techniques. That’s where the QSBB comes in.

When a patient who has agreed to donate their brain dies, the brain is removed as soon as possible. It’s then couriered to the brain bank, where it is cut in half. One half is snap-frozen (normally in liquid nitrogen to bring its temperature down rapidly) and the other preserved in formalin. From this, sections just seven micrometres in thickness (one micrometre is a thousandth of a millimetre are cut and placed on slides. Those slides are then stained and examined by a neuropathologist, and a definite diagnosis of a particular brain disorder can then be made.

Most of the donated brains are from those who had neurological conditions such as dementia (Alzheimer’s, frontotemporal dementia) or Parkinson’s. Many donors will have died of their condition, but others may have died earlier of a different condition, such as a heart attack, allowing scientists to look at the pathological changes at different stages of the diseases. The bank also holds control brains – often from the partners of patients, who want to help find answers to the condition that took their loved ones. These are critical for comparing normal with affected brains.

The slide may be a faint stain of a tissue slice, but the person it came from is still very much present to those who study it. Every brain is backed up by a full clinical history of its donor, which makes the samples even more valuable. “From those patients who generously joined the donor scheme during life, we have very detailed information about their symptoms and tests. We can see the whole history of what happened to them,” says Warner. “That means we can follow the course of their illness, which is absolutely critical in studying the different types of neurodegeneration and dementia.

“We can correlate what we find in the brain with what happened in life, and use this to understand the disease process and develop markers for clinical trials in the

future.” With modern technology, study of postmortem brains is no longer limited to just looking down a microscope, either: DNA/RNA proteins and lipids can now be extracted from the samples, allowing researchers to study the key molecules which play a part in disorders such as Alzheimer’s in far more detail.

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Dementia in a dish And there is now a way of following how a neurodegenerative disease progresses – “dementia in a dish” as Dr Selina Wray, Senior Research Associate at the Department of Molecular Neuroscience, puts it.

“Although we can study the brain at postmortem, it’s a bit like turning up at a crime scene when the criminal is gone,” she says. “You’re left with all the damage that’s been done but you can’t retrace the steps. You’ve got to put it together from whatever is left at the end. That’s not to say postmortem tissue isn’t valuable, but we need a way to understand in what order things go wrong. And we’ve really struggled with that, as we can’t access the brain easily during life.”

Her team uses techniques developed by Nobel Prize winners Shinya Yamanaka and John Gurdon, who discovered that the body’s mature stem cells can be ‘reprogrammed’ and turn into cells that make up any of the body’s tissues – including brain cells.

They take skin biopsies from patients who have genetic changes known to cause Alzheimer’s disease, turn those skin cells back into stem cells, and then turn them into brain cells. “We can then use them as a discovery tool,” says Wray. “What we’ve got in our culture dish are really young brain cells, so we can study them to see the progress of the diseases. We’re trying to follow the disease in real time so, eventually, we can use this model for drug screening.”

It makes sense, when seeking to understand this most brilliantly complex of organs, that there’s no single best way to study the brain – but gradually, it’s being coaxed to give up its secrets. “There is such a wide range of techniques and they all have their advantages and disadvantages,” says Wray. “We need to use all of them and piece that information together like a jigsaw. Thanks to them, the brain is now more accessible than ever before – and that’s very exciting.”

You can help UCL discover more about the human brain by texting UCDR16 £5 to 70070 to donate to UCL Dementia Research. Or play Sea Hero Quest, available globally for iOS and Android devices. Download for free from the App Store and Google Play, or visit: www.seaheroquest.com U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 29

FE ATUR ES FE ATUR E TITLE

Metal men – and women.

Synthesised voices. Strange, staring eyes. If this is what you think a robot is, think again.

Or maybe, let the robots think a bit for you.

Words Peter Taylor-Whiffen Illustrations Tom Gauld

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R

obots can think for themselves. In fact, ‘thinking robots’ – or, as they are also known, artificial intelligence and machine learning – have been with us for decades. In 2016, however, things are changing. Today, bots can use data they have gathered to take themselves – and us – to (humanly) unimaginable places. It doesn’t mean you should be scared – but it does mean the human-robot relationship requires redefinition.

“To take full advantage of the science of robotics – and there are infinite possibilities – we have to hand over some control to the machine and exploit its automation capabilities,” says Dr Danail Stoyanov, Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for the new MSc in Robotics and Computation. “To give it autonomy may mean trusting it to make decisions based on data that it is aware of, but you are not.” He should know – Dr Stoyanov is leading UCL research on a diagnostic ‘pill’ which can travel around your body, diagnose what is wrong with you and then use a combination of collected data and its own intelligence to work out what test to do next – or even immediately fix the problem. Within the same department another team is developing the capability to go even deeper, performing the most intricate surgery at a nano-level on human cells to enhance IVF outcomes.

Handing over control to the robots, however, is potentially easier in some situations than others. Jason Kingdon (Electronic and Electrical Engineering 1989), tech entrepreneur and chairman of process automation company Blue Prism, says his company has developed smart software that can do what he describes as the “grunt” work in an office environment. “Imagine having an U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 31

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innovative idea and having it made so, instantly. And as the robot is carrying it out, it’s also gathering data – the most fine-grain time and motion study of the task it is completing so that the work can be made even more efficient. And, because it never gets bored, it boosts productivity by an almost infinite degree. This technology is headed into the mainstream, with the potential for applications we haven’t even thought of yet.”

In fact, for many people, the word ‘robot’ still retains many of the simplistic ‘metal men’ connotations of old, says Professor Stuart Robson, Professor of Photogrammetry and Laser Scanning and Head of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering. “But robotics today is taking us far beyond that – it moves us beyond human thought and capability to machines with the ability to act on data that cannot be gathered or processed by humans.”

But allowing a robot to take control raises more ethical (and legal) concerns when diagnosing an illness or in other AI applications – such as, for instance, drone warfare. “The big question is what happens when it goes wrong?” says Dr Stoyanov.

“In healthcare treatment, where does the burden of consent lie? Is it reasonable for a robot to assume consent, or to give it on behalf of the patient it’s treating? In warfare, are robots allowed to make decisions? Should they be? Do they need to be in possession of all the same ethical considerations as a human?”

It’s a tricky area, made more complex because it is not just the science of robotics that is developing – our human relationships with them are evolving too. “We’ve all heard the gloomy science fiction vision – everyone will be made redundant, humans will be 32 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3

kept as pets and so on,” says Kingdon. “Yes, technological advances are taking jobs away, but they’re creating new ones by freeing up humans to look at work in a different light, in the same way that we no longer send ponies down pits or children up chimneys.

“One of the first things we always see is anthropomorphism – even though our robots reside in software, people give them names: ‘Oh, Henry can do that for us’,” continues Kingdon. “Unlike traditional technology, robots can be trained. And because we are replicating human activity, human co-workers see the software as a human replica doing all the mundane jobs they’d rather not do, so they love it. Humans are not threatened by it, and that’s because the job doesn’t go but the capacity changes and it gives humans the time to do what humans do best – think creatively. Our outlooks change; we become leaders of thought, and creators of work, thinking: ‘What else could Henry do for us?’”

Senior Research Associate Dr Vijay Pawar’s research facilitates the development of robots that can help clinicians operate on donor cells in-vitro to fight disease more effectively. “Our work on haptic technologies enables us to perform microsurgical tasks, such as cell biopsies and micromanipulations, with greater control, ease and efficiency. The very best engineer we have is nature – robotics can help us to understand how nature works, and build tools that can develop organisms better than ever before.”

And the robotic input into individual human life doesn’t end there. “Technology will develop – we already have exo-skeletons that support people,” says Dr Pawar. We are looking at a future of augmented humans who are robotically enhanced. If we can replicate nature, that is something special.”

Dr Stoyanov agrees: “Robotics is enhancing healthcare, and synthetic biology is enhancing drugs to the point where we may in the future see, instead of treatments for a particular illness, personalised medicines based purely on each human’s individual make-up. The ability of robots to react, to interact, independently – autonomously yet trained by us – develops them and us as we both ‘learn’ how to do new things and shape each other. Looking forward is tremendously exciting because the robots will discover ways of operating, of ‘thinking’, that have not even occurred to us.

But of course we have to innovate responsibly and carefully, aware of the potential dangers that robots and AI could bring.”

This ‘human-in-the-loop’ technology is one of the key themes as UCL’s Faculty of Engineering Sciences prepares to expand into a 3,000-square-metre studio space at Here East on the former London Olympics site. The premises will provide flexible spaces for research and open up the department’s work with a system of robotic interfaces that let humans touch, explore and manipulate structures above and below normal human scales.

The new area will cover the team’s work, from nanoscale robotic surgery to large-scale manufacturing and construction.

“The whole space itself will use robotic engineering to be adaptable and flexible to enable us to keep redesigning it for our needs as we go along,” says Professor Stephen Hailes, Professor of Wireless Systems and Head of Autonomous Systems. “Regardless of whether the robots are for the intricacy of surgery or designing aircraft, it allows us to have a toolkit adaptable for all these applications. It’s not a static building – the robotic technology makes it a ‘living’ organism capable of changing with us.”

“For the past 40 years the primary impact of robotics has been in the automation of tasks that we, as humans, have either priced our way out of or we have decided we are not predictable enough for,” says Peter Scully, Director of the Bartlett Manufacturing and Design Exchange. “However, something with a far greater impact than just automation of current tasks is on the horizon.

“Technology is being developed now without target application: ‘What could you do if this was possible?’ Currently, many of these opportunities are being taken up within the arts and media, but the real impact will be when enough people are able to author and build robotic applications. If the UK is to play a role in this, the universities will need to work with the public, schools and business.”

Flexibility is key not only to the advancement of robotics as a discipline, but also in passing on the baton to the next generation of scientists, says Professor Robson. “As well as the surgical, healthcare and synthetic biology applications, it will advance manufacture, digital fabrication, structures testing and inspection at large scales. Robotics doesn’t just change the way we are physically, it has the power to enhance our perception of the world around us.”

A new Robotics and Autonomous Systems hub will be developed at UCL East, a major project within UCL’s fundraising campaign.

The University will be building new partnerships with companies, foundations and individuals to support the ambitious plans for the new campus. To add your support please visit: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-east U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 33

S O C I A L

A N I M A L S I

t is the coffee break that steals an hour out of your day.

The sneaky peak that drives your partner to distraction.

The essential destination to find out what everyone is talking about. Whatever you think of it, social media – checking it, posting to it – seems to take up an ever greater part of our daily lives.

So what is going on? It might surprise you to hear that until recently the answer to this question wasn’t actually clear. Most discussion of social media that emerges from the newspapers – or indeed government funding for research – is problem-focused. People want to know if social media is causing new syndromes such as Facebook or smartphone addiction, whether it leads to teenage suicide through cyber-bullying, the break-up of marriages through making adultery more visible, new forms of democracy, a loss of social skills, changes in the brain, and so forth. Almost no one has bothered to ask the most basic question: why do we post? And do we post for the same reasons around the world?

I wanted to know the answer, so together with colleagues around the world, I began an anthropological study that would look at social media at specific field sites in Brazil, Chile, China, England, India, Italy, Trinidad and Turkey. The use of social media is fascinating to an anthropologist – and particularly the notion that technology is bringing us all together in a common, shared experience. Our research across nine countries around the world shows that our use of these platforms serves only to underline what we already knew about how our different cultures behave.

There are three primary arguments underpinning our approach. The first is that the study of social media shouldn’t be the study of platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, but should focus instead upon content, which often migrates and switches easily between entirely different platforms almost regardless of their properties.

Secondly, precisely because social media exists largely in the content of what people post, it is always local. Just as there will be Chinese or Trinidadian social media, the most important element in understanding social media in an English village is to appreciate how English it is. Indeed the study of social media turns out to be just as revealing

As part of his Why We Post research project, Danny Miller, Professor of Anthropology, says our use of social media supports, but doesn’t define, our human relationships.

Words Danny Miller Photographs Chris Lee

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about the nature of Englishness as it is about the nature of social media. And the third argument is that social media should never be considered as a place or world separated from ordinary life. Such a mistake perpetuated the early misconception of the internet as a virtual place.

The best precedent is to consider social media as an elaboration of the traditional telephone. It is unimaginable that today we would consider a landline telephone call as taking place in another world, outside of all other conversations. Social media takes us beyond this analogy, however; in some ways it is now also a place where we live and where everyday life happens, but it is simply another place that could be compared with the way our lives are distributed between spending time at work, within the home or in a restaurant. It may be digital, but it is in no sense virtual.

The Goldilocks approach So what did we find out about the use of social media in England? Our study focused on the average English village.

Pretty, yes, but not chocolate box. Population 6,500. People are born, work, live and die locally. Despite its size and the fact that central London can be reached in less than an hour by train, everyone refers to it as a village. Let’s call it Highglade: a real – if anonymised – English village.

So why do people post in Highglade? To meet new friends? To network? To perfect their humblebrag? Or something else? We decided to examine a range of popular assumptions about social media to see how they stood up in Highglade. Take the idea of using social media to keep our friends and family at arm’s length. This is a peculiarly English trait. Rather than the online community having a sense of the infinite, social media generally remains a very local environment which reflects the social norms of those who use it. And with the English, that means a ‘Goldilocks’ public approach to our friends and neighbours, rejecting both the ‘too hot’ and the ‘too cold’ relationship in favour of the in-between.

For most English users of social media – as very distinct from those in other countries – we found life is all about avoiding things that are too hot or too cold. A very individually English word reflects this perfectly –

Opposite A trio of Fine Arts students relax outside the Slade. “How often do I check my phone?” asks Emily Lazerwitz (centre). “That depends. Right now, a lot, because I’m waiting for a delivery.”

U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 35

FE ATUR ES SOCI A L A NIM A LS

So why do people post?

To meet new friends?

To network? To perfect their humblebrag?

Or something else?

1

3

1. Diego de la Fuente MSc Economic History 15/16 “I’m in the middle of my exams, so I’m not using it much, but I do always check the news. I go to lots of different sources – I like to keep informed.”

2. Lilly Douse Natural Science, 3rd year “I use my phone for everything. I do try not to, because it’s a bit antisocial.

I don’t if other people are around. But for little bits of time, it’s something to do. I was just contacting my friends.

I finished my exams last week. My results will come by email so I’ll find that out on my phone too.”

3. Jennie Toft Pharmacist, UCL Hospital “I’m on call, so I have my pager at my waist, my phone in hand in case I get a call-out, and I’m reading on my Kindle.

I can never be without my phone.”

4. Alan Bracey Research support librarian, UCL “I’m definitely a real-world person. The phone is a tool. I use it a lot for directions, maps, and to check out events. Right now I’m using it to plan my Friday night, while listening to music.”

4

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2

U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 37

8

5

9

6

“nice”, a very convenient way for us to describe the precise temperature of our interactions. We want “nice” online relationships. It’s nice to keep in touch, it’s nice to see online what people are doing and it would be nice to see them in person – but we don’t want to arrange a meeting and certainly don’t want to appear so interested in their posts that they feel they have to meet us.

The English, too, are more reticent when it comes to connecting with people they do not already know offline, compared with, say, the Chinese, who tend to see social media as a real opportunity to meet new people.

The English Goldilocks strategy, by contrast, finds social media to be a wonderfully useful modern-day version of the net curtain, keeping us informed of, but at a safe distance from, friends, neighbours, even members of our family. Which is nice.

Why do we post?

One of the perceptions of social media is that it is making us more individual and narcissistic, and this is evident.

But it’s more common to find examples of social media actually reinforcing social groups and our place within them: in one case that will be the family, in another the caste and in a third the tribe. The same technology is used differently by different cultures – and therefore it cannot 38 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3

be that social media has changed the world, but rather that the world has changed social media.

So why, then, do we post at all? Again, it seems to depend where we are – for instance, if Italians’ offline lives are largely satisfactory they make little use of social media, but employ it more if they need help or advice from support groups, such as those for single mothers. In south-east Turkey, the limitations on young women’s movements and social networks mean they use Facebook to develop friendships with young men outside their family. In Brazil, young people prefer the combination of both worlds – being able to maintain solid relationships while exploring new contact opportunities in education or work. And in India, social media curbs users’ trends towards individualism, such is the extent of family monitoring of social media and its categorisations around kinship, age, gender, caste and class.

But, generally, repair is a common theme. Most people in most places feel that the intensity of their social connections – an intensity they associate with a past ideal of community – has been lost in modern life. There is a widespread fear in some societies that sociality itself is something we are losing and that we are shifting more towards self-interest.

But this, too, is developing – especially as we learn to use, or rather shape, our different forms of social media

7

5. Aiping Xu MA New Media, Leeds University (at UCL for a workshop) “I’m trying to quit. I was spending too much time on social media. Now I’m trying to use my phone just for email.

How’s that going? Okay. I’m juggling.”

6. Chloe Meyronnet English, 3rd year “I’m just on my Facebook while I wait for a meeting. I wouldn’t say I use my phone that much – just mostly while I’m waiting.”

7. Zhonghao Shi (left) and Yugi Xu (right) Electronic and Electrical Engineering, 1st year students “I can’t imagine losing my phone,” says Zhonghao Shi. “It’s like part of my body. It’s always in my hand. I use it for everything: work, news, social media, Instagram and Facebook. Phones are part of relationships between people.”

10

8. Candida Fernandes MSc Clinical Mental Health Sciences “I’m using WhatsApp, texting to make a social engagement. All arrangements between friends are done on WhatsApp now.”

9. Adriana Tormos MSc Technology and Analysis of Archaeological Materials “I’m using TimeHop. It’s an app that pulls from your Instagram, Facebook, your camera’s photo roll, and shows you what you were doing on this day in the past. So I’ve just seen that a year ago I was at a wedding. Three years ago I was in Düsseldorf with a friend.

Four years ago I was at ComicCon back home in Puerto Rico. Six years ago someone was posting on my wall saying thank you for their birthday present.

It’s a fun reminder. I love it.”

10. Joyous Pierce African Politics “I make Instagram videos with music and abstract art and upload them.

I’ve got 1,500 followers, but I’d like more! Yes, I am studying for my exams at the same time.”

for different ends. The small groups of WhatsApp are now being used to balance the larger groups of Facebook. The intimacy of Snapchat balances the contact with strangers on Twitter and Instagram.

Critics of social media – and indeed many users – believe we are all becoming more superficial in this virtual world. But what is actually going on is far more incredible – that these are social media, woven into the texture of our relationships. Social media expands our capacity. But the anthropological findings are that however much we use it, even abuse it, it does not change our essential humanity.

It doesn’t, in the end, matter whether we do indeed have 10, fifty, a hundred Facebook friends – because, ultimately, it doesn’t change the people we are.

Danny Miller is the director of Why We Post: The Anthropology of Social Media, an extensive, nine-country research project and free online course exploring the varying uses of online communities around the world and their consequences for relationships, policies and everyday life.

For more information visit: www.futurelearn.com/courses/ anthropology-social-media Follow us on Twitter @UCLAlumni or find UCL Alumni on Facebook and Instagram.

U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 39

UCL + SOUTH JU NCTION

What Janani, Sarah and Adam did next

Since 1826, scholarships have enabled students – whatever their gender, background or class – to come to UCL and shape our world.

Words Sarah Woodward Illustration Miles Donovan

Janani Paramsothy was awarded the Clairmonte E. Bourne Bursary and received her LLB in Law in 2013. She is now a civil servant.

Did I think as a disillusioned teenager that I would one day be sharing a speaking platform with the MD of Credit Suisse? Perhaps not, but that’s what the opportunity to study at UCL helped me achieve.

At 18 I had just come through a very difficult time during my A-levels: my father had passed away, and as the eldest of three, I was suddenly head of the family. I became heavily involved in Tamil activism and when the civil war in Sri Lanka came to an end in 2009 I was devastated with the outcome. As an angry 18-year-old, I felt the system didn’t believe in, or work for, me, my family, my people or the interests of fairness or justice generally.

It was in the middle of this that I got my place at UCL to read Law, and was offered the scholarship. It made such a difference: not just the financial support, although of course that was helpful, but that someone believed in me enough to invest in my education and development as a person. My time at UCL went a long way towards working through my deep distrust of the system, so much so that now I am a civil servant, working at the Cabinet Office.

It gave me the time to get back on my feet, the learning to set me up not just for a career, but for a happy and fulfilling life, access to some amazing tutors and now friends from around the world.

Halfway through my first year I met Clairmonte Bourne, who funded the scholarship and is now MD at Credit Suisse. UCL – and everything it stands for – has a special place in my heart and life.

40 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3

“My father had passed away and as the eldest of three I was suddenly head of the family. I felt the system didn't believe in me or my family”

Sarah Morris received the Land Securities Scholarship in 2008. She is now Head of Science at a preparatory school in Nairobi, Kenya.

There’s a lot of talk these days about youngsters having respected role models, and the fact that I can inspire my pupils is undoubtedly the biggest impact of my Master’s from UCL. But it all began quite differently.

At 26, four years of volunteering and travelling overseas after graduating with a First from UCL in Human Sciences, I was working in a remote part of Australia looking after camels; that’s when I decided that it was time to launch a ‘real’ career and apply for an MSc. I was offered a place on the MSc European Property Development and Planning course and getting the scholarship took away the financial burden of taking a year out to go back U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 41

UCL + SOUTH JU NCTION

HOW WILL

SOCIETY SURVIVE TO THE

22 ND CENTURY? To mark the launch of the Campaign for UCL, some of the university’s leading academics will debate how their research is shaping how we live in this century and beyond at a major public event on Thursday 15 September.

To attend, register at www.ucl.ac.uk/campaignlaunch You can also watch the event live from 6pm BST at ww www.ucl.ac.uk/live/ucl-campaign-launch and catch it afterwards at www.ucl.ac.uk/campaign

I was working in a remote part of Australia looking after camels. I knew it was time to launch a ‘real’ career and apply for an MSc

to London and study in my mid-20s.

I was also lucky enough to have a two-week work placement with Land Securities.

Without that encouragement I might not have returned to my studies.

Now I am very grateful I did, even though my subsequent career has not ended up in property. When I graduated, I was looking for roles in the property development sector abroad. However, it was 2010, the sector was in a slump, and it was difficult for recent graduates to find roles. So I went in search of somewhere to put my experience to good use, ending up in Kenya.

None of the work I’ve done since would have been possible without the support of the scholarship, and I hope that the impact of my time at UCL will help to inspire my pupils for years to come. Though my career path has changed slightly from where I originally set out, I’m so pleased to be teaching and to be able to help develop the next generation of students – maybe even some might come back to UCL! Adam Koon (MA 1999) was awarded a Chevening Scholarship and subsequently the Denys Holland Award. He is now an in-house lawyer for Credit Suisse.

If I hadn’t been awarded the Chevening scholarship through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office my life would have turned out very differently – it was my ‘Sliding Doors’ moment.

Rather than a career practising law in Malaysia, which is where I went back to after completing my undergraduate law degree, I was able to study for a Master’s at UCL in Law, Philosophy and Public Policy, and I’ve since been able to use my knowledge and experience to advise some of the biggest names

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in financial services, including JP Morgan, Lansdowne Partners and State Street Bank.

As a student in the late 1990s I found UCL to be challenging and hugely rewarding, and the course, which was new, had a pioneering feel. I became very involved in student life, relaunching the UCL union magazine, PI, as its Editor, and later becoming Arts Editor of the University of London newspaper.

When I finished my MA I was invited to do a doctorate and applied for the Denys Holland Award, set up by his former students in memory of the Dean, who took the view that being good at exams wasn’t the only important thing. It allowed me to have another fantastic two years at UCL and I hope I made a meaningful contribution during that time (not least in setting up the UCL Ultimate Frisbee Club, which I still support!).

When I l left, I used the media contacts I had made to work as a film journalist and editor before I went back to the law. I am enormously grateful for my time at UCL – the scholarships granted me a first-class education that continues to enrich my everyday life, providing great friends, memories and inspiration.

The Campaign for UCL aims to improve the student experience by raising more money than ever before for scholarships and bursaries and by supporting the construction of a new student centre. The campaign will also look to build our global network of alumni volunteers, who enhance the UCL student experience through events and careers mentoring. If you would like to support these activities visit our campaign website for more information about how to give your money and time at www.ucl.ac.uk/campaign U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 43

LONDON’S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

UCL + U NIV ERSIT Y M AT TERS

The power of philanthropy Your contribution, in whatever form, has a direct impact on UCL’s lifelong community.

T COME AND CELEBR ATE UCL! UCL invites you to join us for the Festival of Philanthropy which will take place over our central Bloomsbury campus in summer 2017. www.ucl.ac.uk/campaign

he feature on philanthropy in this issue reminds us again of the positive impact that supporters continue to have on UCL. As we have just launched our largest ever fundraising and supporter engagement Campaign, it feels timely to reflect on what forms that impact can take.

Philanthropy is increasingly important for universities. Total new philanthropic funds given to universities in the UK in 2014-15 totalled £860m, continuing an upwards trend over the last decade. This is despite the changes to the government funding of higher education over the same period.

Perhaps the two are related – not a case of philanthropy filling gaps (at UCL it has never done that, and never will; it is about adding excellence to our core), but a case of universities having to work harder for their share of diminishing research council funding. In 2014, for the first time, ‘impact’ was assessed as part of the Research Excellence Framework, linking the amount of funding a university receives with the changes and benefits it achieves outside of academia. UCL performed extremely well in this regard.

An unexpected effect of using impact to justify government funding is that it has forced universities to communicate more effectively about the causes to which they are mobilised and the benefits they bring to wider society. This has instilled in the public a confidence in universities as agents for positive and lasting change – social, cultural, medical, philosophical, technological, scientific, economic and so on – and as worthy and trusted recipients of charitable funding. Last year’s carrier bag levy supporting our dementia research was a perfect example of a university entering into traditional ‘charity’ territory.

At UCL the concept of providing a public utility for the greater good is

There is a confidence in universities as agents for positive and lasting change deeply embedded in our Benthamite values. I am encouraged by the consideration that our undertaking rests, after a period of public funding difficulty, on the voluntary contributions of individuals. In case the syntax didn’t give it away, those words are from our 1826 prospectus; they remain entirely relevant today.

The concept of ‘voluntary contributions’ is a broad one, and goes far beyond the donation of money.

The Campaign’s overall goal is to help us deliver the UCL 2034 strategy, a principal aim of which is to foster a lifelong community.

This can, and does, take many forms. Alumni reunions, whether organised by former students themselves or by our dedicated team

at UCL, bring together former classmates and society friends to reconnect and reminisce (this year we had the football team of 1965/66 gather in Church Stretton, Shropshire, just one of many UCL reunions locally, nationally and globally).

But alumni activity is not simply about looking back. Increasingly, we engage our alumni in order to inspire our current student body by passing on knowledge, advice and opportunities.

In addition, our UCL Connect series goes from strength to strength, with more than 900 registrations for our professional networking events that this year covered topics as diverse as careers in philanthropy, tech entrepreneurship and assertiveness. In 2016, we took UCL Connect overseas for the first time, with events in Hong Kong and the USA, and it is our aim to extend this to new regions in the year ahead.

We are a global university and ours will be a global Campaign. More than 90,000 of our 220,000 alumni live outside the UK. We have more than 230 international alumni volunteers supporting our efforts. They lead local alumni groups, assist with student recruitment, host and speak at events, mentor fellow alumni and raise the profile of UCL in their region, by plugging us in to local corporations, foundations, universities, NGOs, governments and others. These are all essential ‘voluntary contributions’, as important to UCL as the donation of money.

If you have read this far then you are clearly already quite engaged with UCL. So, if you haven’t yet done so, I urge you to register for the new UCL Alumni Online Community, advertised elsewhere in this issue, and get involved. I hope to see you at one of our events over the coming year.

Professor Michael Arthur UCL President & Provost U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 45

UCL + R ESE A RCH

THIS IDEA MUST DIE:

“We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the ocean floor” Dr Helen Czerski, research fellow in the Faculty of Engineering Science and science presenter for the BBC, is a physicist, oceanographer and writer.

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Interview Lucy Jolin Illustrations Chris Dickason

I

don’t really understand why we spend so much time and effort exploring space, but so little exploring what’s on our own doorstep. We travelled all the way to the moon, and what did we do when we got there? We looked back at ourselves. And we saw the ocean.

Our blue planet. If aliens were to look at our planet from space, they would identify it by the oceans – the vast blue that we barely think about.

Comparisons between our knowledge of the moon and the ocean are unfair because the two are simply not equivalent. Yes, the moon has been mapped and not all the ocean floors have been. But there’s much more of the oceans to find out about. We’re still learning the many subtle and not-so-subtle secrets of the ocean: how it interacts with the atmosphere, ecosystems, ice and rocks, and how the entire Earth system fits together.

If you wrote down all the information that we know about the ocean, it’s loads more than we know about the moon, but it is still a small fraction of the total.

Weather, for example. It doesn’t just happen. The oceans absorb energy from the Sun, perhaps move it around, and then pass it on to the atmosphere.

Water evaporates from the oceans, and then journeys across the skies before finding its way back, perhaps via rivers and reservoirs on land. About half of all food chains begin in the ocean. The ocean shapes our lives in so many ways. Its currents dictate trade routes. Its life sustains ours. It pushes science forward, and it changes history – the D-Day landing date was chosen as a result of groundbreaking work into wave modelling, and the operation succeeded in part because the scientists got that modelling right.

My own research team is studying how the oceans breathe: the gases they take from the atmosphere and the gases they give back. Finding out more about this process will help us understand more about our weather and our climate and how they might be changing. It’s a hugely complex, beautiful, flexible system. And the moon? Well, it’s very nice, but it just sits there. It hasn’t changed in thousands of years.

So why does the idea that we know more about the moon than the oceans persist? Perhaps it’s because we’ve seen pictures of Apollo astronauts standing on the moon – 12 people, still more than the number of people who have been to the deepest parts of the ocean. But standing on it isn’t the only way to find out about a place.

Studying the ocean is perceived as somehow being more difficult than travelling to the moon. Well, yes, it can be difficult. But space travel means getting in a rocket and going into orbit and landing safely. That’s difficult, but we did it. And modern ocean science still shows a huge variety of sophistication – sometimes you are still just dangling sensors over the sides of ships on bits of rope. But sometimes you’re using the latest underwater robots. Both are still needed. And there’s a lot to see down there. Put your head under water and

If aliens were to look at our planet from space, they would identify it by the oceans – the vast blue we barely think about you’re truly in an alien world. Who needs science fiction when we live on a planet that has octopuses? They change colour in three different ways.

They’re intelligent problem-solvers.

They have three separate brains. You don’t need to invent another planet – just go and look at a coral reef.

So if I could invent one thing, it would be a pair of binoculars that would allow you to see down into the ocean the same way that you can look up into the atmosphere. Up there, we can all see the clouds and birds, the colour of the sky and haze on the horizon. Down in the ocean, you’d see so much: great empty plains, massive rainforests of plants, rocks, canyons, mountains, deserts. You’d see currents flowing in different directions at different depths, some flowing fast, some slowly. You’d see those waters

carrying tiny plants and animals drifting in huge underwater clouds, and you’d see all the extraordinary, diverse life living in, and on top of, that. And then, perhaps, you’d appreciate just how incredibly important the ocean is.

There’s an argument that we need to study the moon and places like it in case we need to leave Earth one day. I don’t buy that: why not study what we already have and learn what we can do and what we can’t? There is nothing more important than that. Humans used to think that we couldn’t affect the ocean because it was simply too big. We know now that’s not true. We are adding plastic pollution that turns up all over the oceans now. We are heating the oceans up, and making sea level rise. We are making the ocean less alkaline, which means that plants with calcium shells at the base of the food chain will find it harder to grow.

Our planet is our life-support system, and understanding our oceans is vital to help us manage that system. That’s why the idea that space exploration is the be-all and end-all must die.

For more information on Dr Czerski’s academic work please visit: iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/ profile?upi=HCZER87, or visit: www.helenczerski.net U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3 47

LONDON’S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

UCL + STUDENT LIFE

UCL EAST A NEW CAMPUS FOR UCL

London vs World Jonny Chadwick (UCL English) says London is special for what it allows you to be.

UCL is creating a new campus, UCL East, at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. UCL East will be part of a new world-class Cultural and Education District which will include the V&A, Sadler’s Wells and University of the Arts London.

Photograph Julian Anderson

T

here may be dementia wards all around the world, but there’s only one Mile End Hospital and, within its walls, only one Eunice. She is a skilled raconteur, and while there are occasional lapses in her grasp of the narrative, she manages to tell the story of her dastardly twin cousins stealing toffee apples from her grandmother in full, breaking off regularly to describe the physical environment of her childhood home with an almost Proustian flair for tangents.

Without the Befriending scheme run by the housing association, Hestia, I would never have met Eunice. The initiative pairs mental health patients with a volunteer who visits them weekly to provide company, support and offer a much-needed reprieve from their daily routine in the hospital.

48 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 016 | I S S U E 3

And it’s just one of any number of opportunities that London provides for its students. It is not having a Starbucks within arm’s length or an infinite supply of pulled pork that makes this city special.

I find London the perfect place to study, not for what it allows you to have, but for what it allows you to be. Whatever your interest and personality, London has the opportunities you need to be fulfilled in whichever way you desire.

While the dementia ward is a scene that might inspire pity, there is rarely a sustained period of sombreness, with regular release from one of the patients demonstrating how they have maintained their lifelong sharp wit and intelligence. My weekly visits are incredibly rewarding in isolation,

but also in giving me a greater understanding of my family members’ experience. As I rarely saw them in their later years, I was largely unaware of the condition that would define the later years of both my grandfathers.

I became interested in mental health during my break from studies in 2015, and it did not take me long to gain experience and knowledge in the area as soon as I returned to London. A quick look at UCL’s excellent volunteering service site and within 10 minutes I was applying to the befriending service; a matter of months down the line and I am now applying for a Master’s in mental health.

It is a quality unique to London: inspiring you to be interested in the world around you, then providing you with the opportunity to fulfil that interest entirely.

Find out more: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-east

LONDON’S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

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