This page contains a list of all the upcoming events for the society. It is in a blog format so you can see some of our past talks too.
Date and Time: Wednesday 15th May, 18:00 GMT
Location: Tim Cadbury & Music Room
Dr Parker is a senior lecturer in the Cambridge PDN (Physiology, Development and Neuroscience) department studying the networks underlying sensory, motor, and cognitive functions to understand how behaviours are generated. As our Easter speaker, he gave a talk on the philosophy of science from a neuroscientist’s perspective.
Date and Time: Monday 11th March 2024.
Location: Howard Theatre
A talk and networking event delivered by VitaDAO, a collective dedicated to funding and advancing early stage longevity science research. In conjunction with the Cambridge Society of Ageing and Longevity Research.
Date and Time: Wednesday 28th February, 18:00 GMT
Location: Howard Building
Our long-anticipated first academic talk of the year will be delivered by Mary-Ellen Lynall, a psychiatrist investigating the immunology of psychiatric disorders, Medical Research Council Clinical Research Training Fellow and Bye-fellow at Christ’s College.
Date and Time: Friday 6th May, 18:00 GMT
Location: Wilkins Room
Our speaker of Easter term, and last talk of the year, will be by Dr John Tregoning of Imperial, a respiratory infectious diseases expert who read Natural Sciences at Downing from 1995 – 1998. His work focuses on how viruses and bacteria infect the lungs and how our immune system fights them.
Date and Time: Friday 25th February, 18:00 GMT
Location: Virtually from E Staircase
Our second speaker event this term is from biologist and author Sean B Carroll. This talk will be given virtually and screened live in the Tim Cadbury & Music Room, (E Staircase) with the option to also watch live online.
Date and Time: Saturday 12th February, 12:00 GMT
Location: Virtually from E Staircase
This term, we will have a talk by molecular biologist Prof. Dennis Lo. The talk will be given virtually and screened live in the Tim Cadbury & Music Room, (E Staircase) with the option to also watch live online.
Dennis Lo is a chemical pathologist who is currently the Director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Please look at his Royal Society Page for more information!
Date and Time: Tuesday 16th November, 18:00 GMT
Location: Virtually from E Staircase
This term, (Michaelmas 2021) we had one talk by Prof. Sir John Pendry on how metamaterials open new horizons in electromagnetism.
In the last decade a new area of research has emerged as a result of our ability to produce materials with entirely novel electromagnetic properties. Known as metamaterials because they take us beyond the properties of conventional materials, they display remarkable effects not found in nature, such as negative refraction.
Spurred on by these new opportunities, theorists have produced exotic concepts that exploit the new materials: we can now specify how to make a lens whose resolution is limited not by the laws of nature but only by our ability to build to the stated specifications; we can guide radiation along a trajectory, avoiding objects and causing them to appear invisible; we can design and manufacture materials that are active magnetically in the optical range.
There has been a truly amazing amount of innovation but more is yet to come. The field of metamaterials is developing into a highly disruptive technology for a plethora of applications where control over light (or more generally electromagnetic radiation) is crucial, amongst them telecommunications, solar energy harvesting, stealth, biological imaging and sensing, and medical diagnostics.