Pembroke College Cambridge

Plenary Lectures

On the Pembroke Cambridge Summer Programme we encourage you to develop your academic curiosity and benefit from the unique learning environment at Cambridge. This is why each year we hold a series of plenary lectures, given by eminent figures of University and public life, on a diverse range of topics.

The talks are open to all students on the programme and are followed by a Q&A session and drinks with the speaker.

Take a look at previous years' plenary talks and speakers:

 

What's the use of the Arts and How Can Politics Respond?

The Rt Hon Lord Smith of Finsbury PC MA PhD

What role can the Arts play in a divided, fractious and warming world? While human creativity may be unbounded, Arts industries are constrained by policy prescriptions, funding scrambles and political concerns. How can Politics expand the success and accessibility of the Arts world? 

Former Culture Secretary Lord Smith spoke about these pressing challenges and the importance of the arts for our lives, and the relationship between the arts and politics. Should governments and politicians be interested, and if so what can and should they do? What’s the value of the arts to society?  And are they at all relevant to politics?

 

The Rt Hon Lord Smith of Finsbury PC MA PhD

Lord Smith is the Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Lord Smith was educated in Edinburgh and then Pembroke College, Cambridge, achieving a double first in English (and later a PhD on Wordsworth and Coleridge) and was also a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard.  

From 1983 to 2005, he was the MP for Islington South and Finsbury. As Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport between 1997 and 2001, he restored free admission to national museums and galleries, established NESTA, the Film Council, Creative Partnerships for schools, and the Foundation for Youth Music, expanded funding for the arts and sport, championed the creative industries for the first time in Government, and began the switchover process for digital television.

Lord Smith was made a life peer in the House of Lords after standing down from the Commons in 2005. He currently sits on the crossbenches as an independent Peer. He has been Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, since October 2015.

 

Sowing the Seeds of Love

Professor Jason Arday FRSA

We find ourselves in ever-increasingly divisive times and this lecture presents an opportunity for us to collectively realign our concentrations towards how we build on bell hooks' mechanisms for creating spheres of love, community and solidarity. 

 

Professor Jason Arday FRSA

Professor Jason Arday is the 2002 Professorial Chair in the Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education. He was previously Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Glasgow in the School of Education, College of Social Sciences.

 

Professor Arday has also held the position of Associate Professor in Sociology at Durham University in the Department of Sociology and Deputy Executive Dean for People and Culture in the Faculty of Social Science and Health. He is a Visiting Professor at The Ohio State University in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and an Honorary Professor at Durham University in the Department of Sociology. He holds other Visiting Professorships at Coventry University, University of Northampton and Nelson Mandela University.

Professor Arday is a Trustee of the Runnymede Trust, the UK’s leading Race Equality Thinktank and the British Sociological Association (BSA). He sits on the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS) National Advisory Panel and the NHS Race and Health Observatory Academic Reference Group. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). 

 

Towards a Net Zero World

Professor Dame Clare Grey FRS

Developing and applying new tools to understand how materials for lithium and "beyond-lithium" battery technologies function.

More powerful, longer-lasting, faster-charging batteries – made from increasingly more sustainable resources and manufacturing processes – are required for low-carbon transport and stable electricity supplies in a “net zero” world. Rechargeable batteries are the most efficient way of storing renewable electricity; they are required for electrifying transport as well as for storing electricity on both micro and larger electricity grids when intermittent renewables cannot meet electricity demands. The first rechargeable lithium-ion batteries were developed for, and were integral to, the portable electronics revolution. The development of the much bigger batteries needed for transport and grid storage comes, however, with a very different set of challenges, which include cost, safety and sustainability. New technologies are being investigated, such as those involving reactions between lithium and oxygen/sulfur, using sodium and magnesium ions instead of lithium, or involving the flow of materials in an out of the electrochemical cell (in redox flow batteries). Importantly, fundamental science is key to producing non-incremental advances and to develop new strategies for energy storage and conversion. 

 

This talk will start by describing existing battery technologies, what some of the current and more long-term challenges are, and touch on strategies to address some of the issues.  I will then focus on my own work – together with my research group and collaborators – to develop new characterisation (NMR, MRI, and X-ray diffraction and optical) methods that allow batteries to be studied while they are operating (i.e., operando). These techniques allow transformations of the various cell components to be followed under realistic conditions without having to disassemble and take apart the cell. We can detect key side reactions involving the various battery materials, in order to determine the processes that are responsible ultimately for battery failure.  We can watch ions diffusing in, and moving in and out of, the active “electrode” materials that store the (lithium) ions and the electrons, to understand how the batteries function.  New battery designs for the grid will be discussed.  Finally, I will discuss the challenges in designing batteries that can be rapidly charged and discharged.  

 

Professor Dame Clare Grey FRS

Professor Dame Clare Grey FRS is the Geoffrey Moorhouse-Gibson Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. She holds a Royal Society (RS) Professorship.  She received a BA and D. Phil. (1991) in Chemistry from Oxford University.  After post-doctoral fellowships in the Netherlands and at DuPont CR&D in Wilmington, DE, she joined the faculty at Stony Brook University (SBU) in 1994.  She moved to Cambridge in 2009, maintaining an adjunct position at SBU.  She was the founding director of the Northeastern Chemical Energy Storage Center, a Department of Energy, Energy Frontier Research Center.  She was the director of the EPSRC Centre for Advanced Materials for Integrated Energy Systems (CAM-IES) and is an Expert Panel member of the Faraday Institution.

Recent honours/awards include the Société Chimique de France, French-British Prize (2017), the Solid State Ionics Galvani-Nernst-Wagner Mid-Career Award (2017), the Eastern Analytical Symposium Award for Outstanding Achievements in Magnetic Resonance (2018), the Italian Chemical Society Sacconi Medal (2018), the Charles Hatchett Award, IoM3 (2019), the RSC John Goodenough Award (2019), the Richard R. Ernst Prize in Magnetic Resonance (2020), the RS Hughes Award (2020), the Körber European Science Prize (2021) (for her contributions to the optimization of batteries using NMR spectroscopy) and the ACS Central Science Disrupters Prize (2022). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Electrochemical Society, and the International Society of Magnetic Resonance, a Foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received a DBE in 2023. 

Her current research interests include the use of solid state NMR and diffraction-based methods to determine structure-function relationships in materials for energy storage (batteries and supercapacitors), and conversion (fuel cells).  She is a cofounder of the company Nyobolt, which seeks to develop batteries for fast charge applications.  

 

Can the bugs in your gut help defend your brain?

Professor Menna Clatworthy

There is some evidence that diet and the bugs (the microbiome) that live in the gut can affect brain function, influence mental health and alter outcomes in brain diseases - but the mechanisms of how this happens are unclear. We have been exploring whether and how immune cells in the gut communicate with the brain and its defence membranes (the meninges).

 

Professor Menna Clatworthy

For more information on Professor Clatworthy’s work please see her page on the Cambridge Cardiovascular website and the Clatworthy Lab page.

 

Tricks with DNA

Professor Gos Micklem

You are probably familiar with DNA as being the stuff of genetic inheritance and that over the last few decades it has become much cheaper and easier to read it. However we are going through a similar revolution in our ability to write (synthesise) DNA, and this is leading to all sorts of other applications.

 

Professor Gos Micklem

Professor Gos Micklem carried out PhD and postdoctoral research in molecular biology before switching to computational biology at the Wellcome Sanger Institute just south of Cambridge. He followed this with four years in a successful biotech start-up company before returning to the University of Cambridge. Since 2000 his group has worked on many collaborative large-scale data integration and bioinformatics projects. From 2004-2021 he was Director of the Cambridge Computational Biology Institute (CCBI) and from 2005-2014 he co-organised the Cambridge team for the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) undergraduate summer competition in synthetic biology, with the team winning the grand prize in 2009.

 

Parseltongue: An Application of Linguistics

Professor Francis Nolan

Parseltongue, in the Harry Potter books and films, is the fictional language which allows humans and snakes to speak to each other. No samples of the language are offered in the books, and so when the producer of the second Harry Potter film decided to include a scene with Parseltongue he needed the spoken language to be created.

This talk will discuss the creation of fragments of Parseltongue, including what the rationale was for adopting particular phonetic and other features. In presenting Parseltongue I will mention for comparison two other ‘conlangs’ (constructed languages) and show how the creation of a made-up language draws on all levels of the analysis of human languages.

In the case of Parseltongue some imaginative reasoning is also needed based on how snakes might shape the shared language. The process constitutes a somewhat unusual application of linguistic knowledge, one which touches on both the differences and the underlying commonalities found in human languages.

 

Professor Francis Nolan

Francis Nolan is Professor of Phonetics in the University of Cambridge. Phonetics is where the cognitive structures of language meet the physical world of sound. Francis Nolan’s research interests range over phonetic theory, prosody, connected speech processes, and speaker characteristics (including their use in forensics), all of which he covers in his undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. He has supervised students doing projects on languages as diverse as Welsh, Estonian, Korean, and various Chinese languages.

His interest in prosody led to the IViE project (Intonational Variation in English) which surveyed the intonation of urban areas in the British Isles, and to the PVI (pairwise variability index), a metric which has been widely used to quantify the rhythm of different languages and dialects. His DyViS project provided as one of its outputs a database of 100 accent-matched speakers which has been much used in developing and testing methods of speaker identification.

Francis Nolan is a member of the Council of the International Phonetic Association, a founder member of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics, and has served as President of the British Association of Academic Phoneticians.

 

'A Million Alien Gospels': The Surprising Story of Religion and Thought about Extraterrestrial Life

The Revd Dr Andrew Davison

The confirmation, in 1995, of planets around stars other than our own Sun catapulted the science of astrobiology to new prominence. Today, almost twenty-five years on, new extra-solar planets are discovered almost every day, and significant steps are being make in the task of thinking about their capacity to harbour life.

In recent years, interest in this field has also stirred among scholars in the arts, humanities and social science: theologians and scholars of religion among them. Dr Davison will set out some of the science, and chart the surprisingly long and intricate story of discussion of life elsewhere in the universe by Christian thinkers.

In its current form, the conversation goes back to the mid-fifteenth century. He will draw parallels with other religious traditions, and close by considering some neglected themes among the implications of life beyond Earth for religious belief. 

 

The Revd Dr Andrew Davison

The Revd Dr Andrew Davison is the Starbridge Lecturer in Theology and Natural Sciences in the University of Cambridge, and Fellow in Theology and Dean of Chapel at Corpus Christi College. His exploration of the implications of life elsewhere in the universe for Christian theology, Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine, to be published next year, will be the most extensive study yet written.