Christ's Hospital
Join us for an hour with… Old Blue live virtual talks from around the world
In the coming weeks we are, once again, delighted to be hosting a programme of live virtual talks by Old Blues which all members of the CH community are welcome to access. For this series of talks our Old Blue speakers will be joining us from around the globe.
The talks will be streamed via Zoom and there will also be the opportunity to put your questions to our speakers at the end.
Please register for any of the talks you are interested in, you will then receive an email reminder and the link to join the talk in advance of the day.
Once Upon A Time.. Story telling in the Modern Word
Wednesday 10th Nov – 1pm
Join us for an hour with…
Tim Benjamin
PeB, PeA 87-92
Tim Benjamin tells stories — and helps other people tell their stories — in lots of different ways.
He is a composer, a writer, a film-maker, a speaker, a stage and screen director, a live musician, a technologist, and a mentor. His work has been broadcast, recorded, and performed in many countries.
He is based in Yorkshire, but has recently spent time in Romania for the first performances of his new Symphony (officially his first, although he allegedly made two attempts in his early years at CH!).
Tim will be talking about modern day storytelling and storytellers, and their role in society.
RE-SCHEDULED – We were sorry not to be able to connect with Tim on 3rd November as planned. Unfortunately he was at the mercy of the Brazilian rain-forest weather and had lost all power and Internet access. We are delighted to say that Tim has agreed to re-schedule this talk.
Its A Jungle Out There! Biodiversity Research in the Amazon
Monday 15th Nov – 1pm
Join us for an hour with…
Tim Vincent
MidB 74-80
Based in Manaus, Brazil, Tim is immersed in the biodiversity of Amazônia, participating in a national project to prioritise areas for the restoration of native vegetation, working with Programa de Pesquisa em Biodiversidade (PPBio). In the past Tim has also been an animal management lecturer, herptile breeder, Bird Park Head Keeper, and parrot breeder.
Involved in collecting biodiversity data in the field, Tim will be talking about how and why biodiversity research data is collected and what happens to the data after the fieldwork has been carried out.
PPBio was created in 2004 with the aims of furthering biodiversity studies in Brazil, decentralising scientific production from already-developed academic centres, integrating research activities and disseminating results across a variety of purposes, including environmental management and education.
Climate Change is Nothing New
Wednesday 17th Nov – 12pm
Join us for an hour with…
Dr Jennifer Bates
ColA, GrW 05-07
Jennifer is an archaeologist specialising in the archaeobotany of ancient South Asia.
Having studied archaeology at Cambridge, and returning to take a PhD and her first Post Doctoral position as Trevelyan Research Fellow, she went on to be a Post Doctoral Researcher at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, at Brown University and then as Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Currently Assistant Professor of Archaeological Science at Seoul National University, her research involves archaeobotanical analysis focusing on South Asian prehistory.
Jennifer will be talking about the 4.2k event in South Asia: did this sudden weakening in the Indian Summer Monsoon lead to the ‘collapse’ of the Indus Civilization? Suggested as one of the main causes of the end of this Bronze Age civilization, Jennifer’s talk will explore whether correlation really does equal causation, and how people reacted to a climate change event in the past. She will also look at how archaeological data can and is having a real impact on our own climate change debates today, and how projects like Land Cover 6k are being used in modelling future climate predictions.
The Force: A Biological Reinterpretation of Dylan Thomas
Wednesday 24th Nov – 1pm
Join us for an hour with…
Nigel Ten Fleming PHD
PrepA, ColA 63-73
After leaving CH, Nigel won a Morehead Scholarship to UNC-Chapel Hill North Carolina USA, as one of the first British scholars on the equivalent to the Rhodes Scholarship, and did a degree of his own design in interdisciplinary studies. He then took a PhD at Cambridge University in Clinical Biochemistry, and did a postdoc at Boston University School of Medicine in diabetes, and then at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School’s Psychiatry Department in Alzheimer’s. He is currently a sculptor working in the ancient city of Girona in Spain, on the theme of ‘Nature Writ Large’.
In 1933, the then unknown nineteen year old Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, a stunning poem about Nature from his ‘womb-tomb period’.
As a biologist with a strong interest in quantum physics, Nigel will be taking the key threads of the Dylan Thomas poem and reinterpreting them in a somewhat unorthodox manner from this perspective.