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Winter 2023/24 update
We are in the process of organising the programme for our 2024 Annual Conference and Dinner to be held on Saturday 13th April so this is an important date for your diaries!
At our last Steering Committee meeting in November, one of the suggestions for a theme was AI and other new technologies that are revolutionising medicine. We are delighted to have secured Professor Mark Girolami FRSE to be our keynote speaker to set the scene on the potential of machine learning applications to medicine and health care research and practice.
Prof Girolami is a Fellow at Christ’s College, Sir Kirby Laing Professor of Civil Engineering in Cambridge and Chief Scientist at the Alan Turing Institute. His research lies at the intersection of the statistical, mathematical and computing sciences. This lecture is timely as the Cambridge medical curriculum is being adapted to ensure current students are informed about the potential of AI and other novel technologies. During our Covid-19 webinar series we heard from several Alumni about their research contributions in testing AI utilisation and we will have contributions from staff and alumni illustrating this. Alumni speakers booked include Dr Andrew Soltan (m. 2012), Dr Ed Turnham (m. 2004) and Mr Piyush Mahapatra (m. 2004) all of whom work on the research and application of AI to healthcare. Details of the programme and registration details will be circulated shortly and posted on our website.
We continue to work with the CC Medical Society (CCMS) representing current students and are in advance planning for two events in the New Year with them. The first an afternoon meeting on Sunday 4th February when alumni will be invited to talk about their careers and how they decided to follow that path, to help students begin to think about future choices. Alumni contributing to this include Dr Chris Lane (m. 2002), Dr James Jones (m. 2005), Dr Jeremy Woodward (m. 1984), Dr Ankeet Tanna (m. 2014), Dr Judith Allanson (m. 1980), Dr Rashmi Patel (m. 2002) Dr Abteen Mostofi (m. 2002), Dr Maisam Fazel (m. 1994), Dr Alex MacMillan (m. 2006), Dr Ed Turnham (m. 2004), and Prof Richard Kirk (m. 1973). This will be followed by a drinks reception and dinner in College. Thanks to current CCMS President Jeremy Yuan and past President Ardon Pillay for organising this event.
Another date for your diary is an online talk and discussion with College Alumnus and distinguished historian Prof Sir Simon Schama at 6pm on Wednesday 13th March. He will discuss the inspiration for writing ‘Foreign Bodies - pandemics, vaccines and the health of nations’. The book was conceived, researched and written during the Covid-19 pandemic when like many people he was subject to lockdowns in the USA and observed the issues that arose such as the use of hygiene and quarantine controls as well as the abuse of public health government advisers such as Dr Fauci and of course the anti-vaxxers! He looks as some key scientists such as Waldemar Haffkine who helped develop vaccines for cholera and bubonic plague and led a programme of mass vaccination in British India against much resistance. The book is a fascinating read and the recent pandemic shows that many of the challenges remain in the 21st century.
The other event, targeted at students in their clinical years, will provide an opportunity at a w/e to hear about and try out some ultrasound technologies under expert clinical supervision. Our Treasurer, Prof Jonathan Gillard, is helping to organise the session alongside colleagues at Addenbrookes Hospital Imaging staff. Dates for this event will be advertised and will take place in the Lent term.
Finally at recent Steering Group meetings we discussed how we can both encourage donations to the College and CCMAA funds as well as utilise existing available funds. We have started cautiously and in addition to supporting these two events we have agreed to donate funds for all new clinical students to buy stethoscopes at the start of their clinical training. We also support a graduation dinner for clinical students completing their full medical course and will look at supporting appropriate student expenses for attending research conferences relevant to their studies. These initiatives are guided by the College Director of Studies Dr Andy Stewart and Secretary Dr Isabel Huang Doran.
I want to encourage all our medical alumni to join us at our Annual Conference. If you are not able to come please keep in contact with me and the new College Development Director, Alexandra Rowlands. Enquiries about gifting to the College can be made to the Development Office on email alumni@christs.cam.ac.uk
Dr Tony Jewell
President
Spring 2023 Update
The Conference held in College on the 15th of April was very successful despite a relatively small attendance due in part to the proximity to the Easter holiday and the current NHS industrial actions. However, the quality of our speakers was high with excellent keynote speeches by one of our Patrons Prof Sir Keith Peters and by Emeritus Prof Chris MacManus (UCL) on the topic of medical education and the impact of the Todd Report, the development of the Cambridge Clinical course and the research into the effectiveness of different approaches to medical education. Lord Todd Chaired the Royal Commission on Medical Education (1968) while Master of Christ’s College. After the keynote speeches we had a very useful session on the experience of gaining admission, studying medicine, and moving on to specialist training at Christs from Benjamin Bereford Jones (m 2014), Ardon Pillay (m 2018) and Mithylan Ganashwaran (m 2019).
Following the medical education section of the conference we had my presentation about Dr Szeming Sze, a distinguished medical alumnus and his role in the founding of the WHO and defining ‘health’. This was followed by Lucy Gardner, the winner of the Tim Heymann Travel Prize in 2022 who gave a very interesting report about her elective in Tanzania and Malawi. Electives in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) is something that the CCMAA strongly encourages.
The post conference dinner was held in the OCR, and I am grateful to Dr Arnold Fertig (m 1968) for providing the ‘vote of thanks’ after a very enjoyable meal. I hope to get the presentations uploaded on the College Alumni events website to enable those unable to attend to dip into the slideshows.
The CCMAA Steering group also met before the conference and agreed to amend the terms of the CCMAA fund to enable us to better support medical students and young doctors in training in line with our mission. The recent conference was an example of the mutual benefit to students and alumni of joining together on specific issues.
At the meeting we reported back on the success of the four Covid webinars we organised and the lecture from Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter last November 2022 which was delivered in College to a mixed audience of students, staff, and alumni. There is an appetite to do further lectures from guest speakers as well as explore visits to places of interest in and around the Cambridge biomedical campus. Please get in contact with me with ideas about speakers and a theme for next year’s conference.
Dr Tony Jewell
President
Christ's College Medical Alumni Association (CCMAA) Autumn Newsletter 2022
CCMAA Autumn 2022 Newsletter
Welcome to the Autumn 2022 CCMAA Newsletter
There are key messages and some dates for your diaries!
The first is that I am delighted that Prof Margaret Stanley OBE FMedSci (Fellow) Emeritus Prof of Epithelial Biology, Dept of Pathology has accepted our invitation to become one of our Patrons. Margaret has spoken at our conferences, taught our students and supervised researchers. She has also made a major contribution to science and public health through her research on, for example, the role of HPV in cervical and other cancers and the development and advocacy for the roll out of the HPV vaccination globally. I am sure that she will continue to support our work as one of our distinguished patrons at Christ’s College.
There are three dates for your diaries. The first is our next and hopefully final Covid Webinar:
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Christ's College Webinar Series
'Life Beyond the Pandemic'
Presented by the Christ's College Medical Alumni Association
27 October 2022
6:00-7:30pm BST
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As part of our regular College Webinar Series, the Development Office, along with the Christ’s College Medical Alumni Association (CCMAA) and the Christ’s College Medical Association, are very happy to invite all alumni to the first webinar of the 2022-2023 academic year. The event will take place on Thursday 27 October 2022 from 6:00 to 7:30pm BST and will be hosted by Dr Tony Jewell, President CCMAA.
This is the fourth webinar in our series discussing Christ’s College and the contributions its members have made towards managing COVID. The first two in the series were held in late March and early April 2021--just over one year after the first UK lockdown was announced--and covered how the College, University and local NHS managed the pandemic, the development of the novel vaccines, and advising the government via SAGE. The third webinar, held in November 2021 as life began to return to normal, sought to answer common questions about how to mitigate risk in day-to-day life, the success of the vaccine rollout, and immune responses to previous infections.
This upcoming webinar will look at life beyond the pandemic. How can we use the research and technology that was developed to manage COVID for other practical applications? And how are doctors and public health officials using the research generated during the pandemic to enable us to live with COVID going forward?
Our panellists and the titles of their talks are:
- Dr. David Thomas (m. 1972), Clinical Reader in Immunology and Inflammation and Wellcome-Beit Fellow at Imperial College London, ‘Covid, Kidneys & Co-receptors: the predictive value of LRRC15’
- Dr. Andrew Soltan (m. 2012), NIHR Academic Clinical Fellow, University of Oxford, ‘Engineering a screening test for Covid-19 using routine clinical data: the case for AI in today’s practice’
- Dr. Benjamin Beresford-Jones (m. 2014), Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease, ‘Through the gut, down the drain: wastewater surveillance during COVID and beyond’
There will be time for questions following the talks.
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The next event this autumn is a Lecture given by Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE on the 16th November 2022 in the Yusuf Hamied Lecture Theatre on the topic of:
"Should we trust the statistics about Covid (or anything else)?"
David is Professor of Statistics and Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in Cambridge and will be familiar to us all in his media role of explaining statistics to the public in an easy-to-understand fashion! While referring to the use (and sometimes abuse) of statistics during the pandemic he will no doubt provide other examples that relate to medicine and healthcare. The CCMAA are co-hosting this event with the CC Medical Society and the lecture will be open to all members of College and is not ticketed.
The final date for your diaries is next years CCMAA Annual Conference which is booked in College on Saturday April 15th 2023 and this conference will be timed ahead of term, so Alumni who wish to stay over and enjoy a dinner in hall will be able to do that. The theme of the conference is still to be agreed but we hope to have an opportunity to look at the influence of College Fellows and Alumni on the establishment of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 1948, the development of the Cambridge University Medical School and a debate on ‘Discrimination in Medicine and what needs to be done’ which we had planned in the pre-pandemic days!
The CCMAA Steering Group continues to support our work and we are grateful for the support of the College Development Office, the Director of Studies for Medicine and the students Medical Society for helping to build relationships and guide us in how we can continue to both network our Alumni and add value to current medical students learning.
Dr Tony Jewell
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Christ’s College Medical Alumni Association (CCMAA) Summer Newsletter 2022
Welcome to the CCMAA Summer 2022 Newsletter which updates our news over the past six months.
We had our third ‘Christ’s College and COVID’ webinar on the 25th November 2021 with very popular presentations.
The programme for the webinar included presentations from:
- Prof Julian Tang (m 1986), Professor of Respiratory Sciences about the evidence for the use of facemasks to prevent aerosol spread of the virus;
- Dr Lucy Jessop (m 1995), Director of Public Health at the National Immunisation Office ROI on the successful rollout of the vaccines in the Republic of Ireland;
- Prof Paul Moss (m 1980), Deputy Head of the College of Medical and Dental Sciences and Professor of Haematology at the University of Birmingham covered the increasing importance to policy of the work being undertaken by the UK Immunology Consortium;
- Prof Theresa Marteau DBE FMedSci (Bye Fellow), Director of Behaviour spoke on her role leading the COVID events’ research programme for the government.
All the webinars are still accessible on the College website at: https://alumni.christs.cam.ac.uk/pages/alumni-community/christs-college-webinar-series .
We are reviewing possibly hosting a final Christ’s and COVID webinar on residual topics to include the global picture, the continuing UK community transmission, pandemic preparedness and assessing the impact of long Covid.
We had hoped to hold a Conference this past April with in-person lectures and discussions followed by a formal dinner in Hall. However, in view of the continuing spread of Omicron and its lineages such as BA 2, the decision was taken to hold a remote event for another year. The programme focused on various avenues pertaining to Prevention, with the following speakers:
- Prof Margaret Stanley OBE (Fellow), Emeritus Professor of Epithelial Biology, Department of Pathology. Associate Fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy spoke of the incredible HPV science and Cancer Prevention vaccine programme.
- Professor Dame Theresa Marteau DBE FMedSci (Bye Fellow) Emeritus Professor of Epithelial Biology, Department of Pathology. Director, Behaviour and Health Research Unit, Department of Public Health and Primary Care University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine. Associate Fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy drew attention to the often-unrecognised strong evidence for preventing a high proportion of non-communicable diseases by changing the environment, which, in turn changes the behaviours of the population to reduce the prevalence of common risks such as sedentary lifestyle, smoking, alcohol, fast foods as pre-cursors of diseases such as cancer and Type 2 diabetes.
- Dr John Barber (m. 2003) National Medical Director’s Clinical Fellow at the CQC. Senior Clinical Fellow in Prevention Team at NHS England reviewed how the role of the health services should also be described in terms of delivering some of the prevention programmes like vaccination and screening but also in making every consultation count.
- Dr Judith Allanson (m. 1980). Consultant in Neurological Rehabilitation, Addenbrooke’s Hospital talked about the need to ensure early access to rehabilitation programmes that can deliver better outcomes for serious and disabling conditions such as stroke and head injuries.
The Conference also updated attendees on the work of the Executive Committee and Steering Group and the President thanked everyone including the Development Office team for their support to the CCMAA.
We noted the winners of the Tim Heymann travel prizes since our last Conference:
- 2019 Natalie Weller (m 2013) – elective to Sri Lanka
- 2020 Vladimir Popa-Nimigean (m 2014) – to Romania and the Netherlands
- 2021 Not awarded due to Pandemic interruption!
The work of the CCMAA is led by the Executive team and supported by the Steering Committee and College Development Office.
If you want to suggest a topic/speakers for future events or to get engaged in our work such as joining the Steering Committee please contact me via email.
Dr Tony Jewell
President
Newsletter Autumn 2021
Christ’s College Medical Alumni Association Newsletter Autumn 2021
Welcome to the Autumn 2021 Christ’s College Medical Alumni Association (CCMAA) newsletter. We apologise for not issuing regular newsletters over the past year but are now trying to catch up with activities and forward planning.
Webinars
We have not been entirely inactive; with the College Development Office we organised a couple of ‘Christ’s College and COVID’ webinars in March and April 2021.
The first Webinar looked at how the College managed during the first two waves of the pandemic and how this affected College life and the medical student experience. We also covered how the local public health teams worked with the University and how our local NHS responded to the challenge. We had a good audience and received positive feedback. Thanks extend to Senior Tutor Dr Robert Hunt, Students Abe Tolley (Year 3) and Isabelle Zou (Year 4) and Dr Mike Knapton (m 1977) who is a Non-Executive Director at Cambridge University Hospital Foundation Trust.
The second Webinar focused on how some of our Alumni and College staff have contributed nationally and internationally during the pandemic. Prof Paul Elliot talked about the REACT research programme and Prof Sarah Walker about the epidemiology of COVID-19 infection and vaccine immunity. Dr Maheshi Ramasamy shared some of her experience as part of the Oxford AZ Vaccine Group and Professor Dame Theresa Marteau reflected on her contribution to several SAGE advisory groups. The webinar covered many aspects of pandemic science and policy and was fascinating. Both webinars were recorded and are available on the website at:
https://alumni.christs.cam.ac.uk/pages/alumni-community/christs-college-webinar-series.
We were delighted to hear in the 2021 Birthday Honours that Professor Paul Elliot’s contribution was recognised by awarding him the CBE and Sarah Walker the OBE for her exemplary work. They both continue to lead the research and epidemiological outputs.
Our next Webinar is planned for November the 25th at 5pm with guests and topics include:
- Prof Julian Tang (m 1986), Professor of Respiratory Sciences at University of Leicester; To Mask or not to Mask – that is the question.
- Dr Lucy Jessop (m 1995), Director of Public Health at the National Immunisation Office ROI; Reflections on the successful rollout of the national immunisation programme in Ireland.
- Prof Paul Moss (m 1980), Deputy Head of the College of Medical and Dental Sciences and Professor of Haematology at the University of Birmingham; The immune response to SARS-CoV-2-lessons from the UK Immunology Consortium.
- Prof Theresa Marteau DBE FMedSci (Bye-Fellow), Director Behaviour and Health Research Unit University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, Science in the time of COVID: Reflections on the event’s research programme.
Alumni were emailed with the invitation to register and the webinar will be by Zoom. There is no charge to attend. There will be opportunities for Q&A and the webinar will be scheduled to last for 90 minutes.
Biennial Conference
In 2020 we had planned our biennial conference on Prevention and the celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Women at Christ’s College. However, due to the pandemic and the lockdown policies, we postponed the conference. The Committee have reviewed the situation and feel that both the subjects remain relevant and we have some excellent speakers lined up. We propose to hold the Conference as planned on 23 April 2022.
Due to the uncertainty that still surrounds the pandemic we will plan the Conference as a Hybrid Event which will allow us to have in person attendance if possible, a mixed event or a wholly on line Zoom event. The programme will be finalised and circulated once we have secured our speakers.
We will have dinner and drinks in the Hall following the Conference.
The Officers and Steering Committee
The CCMAA have three Patrons and Executive Officers as follows:
Patrons – Dr Visvanathan Navaratnam, FAS
Prof Martin Johnson, FRCOG, FMedSci FRS
Pro Sir Keith Peters, ScD, FRS, FRCP
President – Dr Tony Jewell
Secretary – Dr Isabel Hunag-Doran
Treasurer – Prof Jonathan Gillard, FRCR
The Patrons and Officers look to the College Directors of Studies and the CCMAA Steering Committee for guidance and support.
We are always looking to welcome new members to join our CCMAA Steering Committee, which is not an onerous role and benefits from a spread of matriculation years. The current members with their matriculation years is as follows:
Dame Theresa Marteau (Bye Fellow)
Arnold Fertig – 1968
Mike Knapton -1977
Fazal Hasan - 1979
Judith Allanson – 1980
Sanjay Jariwala – 1990
Tom Turmezei – 1996
Abteen Mostofi – 2002
Ali Amini – 2004
Dylan Mac Lochlainn - 2009
Liam Flynn – 2011
E A Weatherstone - 2013
Rishi Umeria - 2016
We would like to ensure that existing members are content to remain as members and we welcome nominations of new people. The next Steering Committee meeting will be held in College in the morning before the Biennial Conference starts, with Zoom access if required.
It was agreed that the current and former CC Medical Society Presidents are invited to be members so that we can ensure a positive link between undergraduate medics and alumni. We are in addition looking to support joint events with the students in term time on a diverse range of topics.
Please contact me or Isabel Huang-Doran, our Secretary, if you want to step down or join the Committee.
Travel Prize
The Tim Heymann Travel prize was not awarded in 2021 due to the interruption to electives and overseas travel by the pandemic. The 2020 prize was awarded to Vladimir Popa-Nimigean who will be invited to make a presentation of his project at our next Conference. Congratulations to Vladimir.
Dr Tony Jewell
President
Patrons
Sir Keith Peters
Dr Visvan Navaratnam
Prof Martin Johnson
President
Dr Tony Jewell
Secretary
Dr Isabel Huang-Doran
Steering Committee:
Drs Judith Allanson, Jonathan Gillard, Fazal Hasan, Mike Knapton, Arnold Fertig, Martin Johnson, Visvan Navaratnam, Theresa Marteau, Andrew Sharkey, Samuel Perkins, Tom Turmezei, Ali Amini, Dylan Mac Lochlainn, Abteen Mostofi, Erin Weatherstone, Liam Flynn, Sanjay Jariwala, and Isabelle Zou (CCMS President 2019-20).
Christ’s College Medical Alumni Association Newsletter Winter 2019
CCMAA Conference
The next CCMAA conference is planned for the 18th April 2020 and will be on the theme of Prevention. We have two College Fellows to provide keynote speeches - Prof Margaret Stanley OBE on the HPV story and Prof Dame Theresa Marteau to talk about her work on ‘changing minds about changing behaviour’. They will be supported by two contributions from Dr Judith Allanson (m.1980) on using brain injury as an example of the different types of prevention and hearing about how NHS England is developing their prevention policies from Dr John Barber (m.2003).
In the second part of the afternoon we will hold a debate on “Experiencing gender discrimination in clinical practice and research” This session will be introduced and Chaired by Dr Julia Chisholm (m.1980), Consultant in Paediatric and TYA oncology at the Royal Marsden Hospital. A Panel of the speakers, including the CMS President, Isabelle Zou (m.2017), will support Julia but we will be looking for audience participation.
The planning of the conference has been undertaken in recognition of the 40th anniversary in 2019 of the admission of women to Christ’s College. Hence the invitation to two prominent female speakers to give the keynotes and to have the debate focused on gender and gender discrimination in medicine. The full programme is here below and we encourage alumni to put the date in your diary.
In order to encourage Christ’s medical students to attend the conference we have made the date the weekend before the summer term starts so sadly there is no College accommodation available but we will have the Conference dinner in Hall as usual.
Medical student electives
We had a joint meeting with the Christ’s College Medical Society on the 18th October 2019 on the topic of medical student electives. Some final year medical students gave some short presentations on their electives. This provided a range of interesting and varied experiences from Australia and Vanuatu, to Berlin. Professor Stephen Bown (m. 1962) gave a presentation on his travel award scheme for Christ’s students wanting to visit LMICs and focus on some of the public health challenges in resource poor populations including access to contraception and family planning. The Stephen Bown award, which offers a £300 supplement to the College elective grant, is another opportunity alongside the Tim Heymann Travel prize, which is awarded each year via a competitive process with a monetary value of £300 and something to note on the CV! The prizewinners will be invited to give a short presentation on their electives at the conference.
We hope to continue with these joint meetings, which provide feedback and shared learning for students to plan their elective and also access local resources such as the Cambridge Global Health Partnership (CGHP) team who support students plan their electives to be ethical and safe. See the Cambridge Ethical Electives resource at http//cghp@act4addenbrookes.org.uk.
Alumni meetings planned
Another initiative the CCMAA is supporting with the CMS students is to host an evening meeting where 2-3 CCM Alumni make short presentations (10-15mins) on their careers and what they have learned from the experience and the choices they made. This would lead into a general discussion with contemporary students. We are looking for CCMAA volunteers to undertake this so please contact Isabel or myself if interested.
Information sharing
We also want to share information about CCM Alumni who have been recognised in some way for their work. We may not get to know about such events so please don’t be shy. One such example is Professor Mike Morgan (m.1969) who was awarded the 2019 British Thoracic Society (BTS) medal at the recent BTS conference.
Support the work of the CCMAA
The CCMAA encourages alumni to volunteer to contribute to our work and increase our interaction with current students at Christ’s and help young doctors to advance their careers. We keep a CCMAA fund, which needs to be replenished through regular donations. These can be made via the Christ’s College Alumni website at http//www.alumni@christs.cam.ac.uk If Alumni would like to engage more actively in joining the Committee please contact me or our Secretary Isabel Huang Doran.
Finally, it was with great sadness that we heard of the premature death in a road traffic crash of Dr Mike Timmons (m.1967) who was a successful plastic surgeon, a speaker at our CCMAA conferences and strong supporter of our work. We sent our condolences to his family.
Dr Tony Jewell
President
UPDATED CCMAA CONFERENCE TIMETABLE
Christ’s College Medical Alumni Association
& Christ’s College Medical Society
Saturday 18th April 2020
Yusuf Hamied Lecture Theatre, Christ’s College, Cambridge
11.15: Meeting of the CCMAA steering committee (Room Z3)
13.00: Arrival & Registration
13.30-13.45: President’s Welcome & Announcements
Dr Tony Jewell (m. 1969) - CCMAA President
13.45-14.15: Tim Heymann Memorial Travel Prize Award – Student Presentations
2018/19 prizewinner: Natalie Weller (m. 2013)
2019/20 prizewinner: TBC
Session 1: Prevention, Health and Wellbeing
Chair: Dr Isabel Huang Doran (m. 2004) – Fellow & CCMAA Secretary
14.15-14.55: Protecting health: the HPV story
Professor Margaret Stanley OBE (Fellow)
Emeritus Professor of Epithelial Biology, Department of Pathology
15.00-15.40 Protecting health: Changing minds about changing behaviour
Professor Dame Theresa Marteau DBE FMedSci (Fellow)
Director, Behaviour and Health Research Unit, Department of Public Health & Primary Care
Associate Fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy
University of Cambridge Institute of Public Health
15.40-16.00: Tea & Coffee
16.00-16.15: Preventing brain injuries and their sequelae
Dr Judith Allanson (m. 1980)
Consultant in Neurological Rehabilitation, Addenbrooke’s Hospital
16.15-16.30 Prevention and NHS England
Dr John Barber (m. 2003) NHSE Medical Leadership Fellow
Session 2: Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Women at Christ’s
Chair: Dr Julia Chisholm (m. 1980), Consultant in Paediatric and TYA oncology, Royal Marsden Hospital
16.35-16.45 Introduction to Debate: Experiencing gender discrimination in Clinical Practice and Research –
Dr Julia Chisholm
Conference debate and voting on propositions
Panel: Dr Judith Allanson, Professor Dame Theresa Marteau, Professor Margaret Stanley, Ms Isabelle Zou (m. 2017)
17.45 Summary & Close
Dr Tony Jewell (m1969)
19.00 Drinks Reception in the Fellows’ Garden (OCR if wet)
19.30 Dinner in Hall
Speaker: Dr Andrew Sharkey (m. 1979)
DRESS CODE LOUNGE SUIT OR SIMILAR
CCMAA eNewsletter Spring 2019
Welcome to the May 2019 Christ’s College Medical Alumni Association (CCMAA) newsletter. The CCMAA is the alumni part of the Christ’s College Medical Society (CC Med Soc) and we work closely with the medical student members. A date for your diaries is Saturday April 18th 2020 when we host our next bi-annual conference and dinner in College. We will also have a CCMAA Committee meeting at 11 am before the Conference.
We are in the process of planning the event and would welcome ideas from students and alumni. Please remember, though, that we do like to get speakers who are either current members of the College or Alumni. We want the event to engage medical students and have therefore chosen the weekend before term starts in the hope that the timing will enable better attendance by them. It will mean, however, that the College will not have rooms available to stay overnight.
There have been a couple of key events, which we have organised since our last bi-annual Conference held in April 2018.
The first was a talk on ‘Medical Negligence- ethics and the law’ given by Robert Weir QC (m. 1988) on the 11th October 2018. Robert is a Barrister at Devereux Chambers in London and specialises in personal injury and clinical negligence matters. Amongst other roles he has been Chair of the Personal Injuries Bar Association and is an arbitrator for the Personal Injury Claims Arbitration Service. He has won numerous awards including the Eclipse Proclaim Personal Injury award’s outstanding case of 2015. This related to the case of X v Dartford NHS Trust & Gravesham (2015) 1 WLR 3647 Court of Appeal which accepted Robert’s submission to change the approach to anonymity in approval hearings.
Robert studied Medicine at Christ’s but switched to Law and after graduating did an MA in Law at Kings College, London. He was called to the Bar in 1992 and took Silk in 2010. When asked why he switched from medicine to the law he says that he ‘was too squeamish and it is a lot easier being a lawyer and talking than a doctor and doing’. His talk in College was well attended by medical students, a Christ’s law student and Alumni. We were grateful to the Master Jane Stapleton who attended the talk, and gave us the benefit of her academic and professional contribution in the field, and also joined us at High Table in College for dinner.
The other main event was the visit to the Francis Crick Institute in London on the 16th November 2018. The visit was facilitated by our Patron, Prof Sir Keith Peters, and hosted by Prof Sir Richard Treisman (m. 1974) who is Research Director at the Institute and Honorary Fellow of Christ’s College. The Institute is a unique partnership between six of the world’s leading biomedical research organisations – the MRC, CRUK, the Wellcome Trust, UCL, Imperial CL and KCL. It is a biomedical discovery research centre dedicated to understanding the biology underlying health and disease. It was formed in 2015 and brings together 1500 scientists and support staff in a modern, state of the art, building in London near St Pancras station.
The joint visit was fascinating and we heard from four clinical researchers who gave us an insight into why they had chosen this career path and what research area they were involved with. We were also able to have a guided tour of this wonderful modern building, designed to encourage cross fertilisation between the various disciplines and research groups. There was a real enthusiasm communicated by the young researchers and a palpable ‘buzz’ as we visited the Institute. Thanks to Prof Keith Peters who joined us for the visit and had played a crucial role in the concept and planning of the Institute.
Since our last newsletter Dr Isabel Huang-Doran (m. 2004) has become our Secretary. Isabel is a relatively new Fellow at Christ’s and her academic research interest is in reproductive biology. She is a Clinical Lecturer in Endocrinology in the Wellcome/MRC Metabolic Medicine Centre at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. We are delighted that Isabel has agreed to support this work.
Dr Tony Jewell (m. 1969)
President
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