Churchill College’s postgraduate community came together to celebrate and share their research in the annual Conference on Everything. Over 20 postgraduate students took part in a poster competition, alongside a series of flash talks, featured student talks, podcast interviews and a keynote lecture from Churchill Fellow Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, entitled “Can we trust academics? Trustworthy communication of evidence in a polarised world.”
Posters and talks were wide-ranging, covering all disciplines, with winners picked from each category after being assessed by a panel of judges. It was a highly competitive field, with topics ranging from quantum computing to the influence of science-fiction on space flight.
The judging panel included Churchill College Master, Professor Sharon Peacock; Dr Alastair Lockhart, Senior Postgraduate Tutor; David Collins, Cahir O’Kane, Andrea M. Oyarzún-Aravena, David Spiegelhalter, and Tara Windsor.
(L-R) Dr Iain Bratchie, Taylor Simonian, Nathan Rignall, Professor Sharon Peacock, Chuyi Guo, Andrew Krapivin, Chris Tomy
Winners were:
- Taylor Simonian: Best Flash Talk: Identifying the Role of Insulin-like Growth Factor Binding Proteins -5, -6 and -7 in Early Brown Adipogenesis
- Nathan Rignall: Top Poster in Physical & Computational Sciences: Live Software Updates in a Real Time System
- Chuyi Guo: Top Poster in Social Sciences: Welfare Trap and Replication Dilemma: An Analysis of Social Media Platform Practices in Rural China
- Andrew Krapivin: Top Poster in Physical & Computational Sciences: Optimal Bounds for Open Addressing without Reordering
- Chris Tomy: Top Poster in Biomedical & Life Sciences: Interpretability-driven Deep Learning on Raman Spectra for Cancer Diagnosis.
- Jocelyn Andrews: Top Poster in Biomedical & Life Sciences (not shown in photo): Understanding ovarian cancer risk through the lens of reproductive and general biological aging genetics
Awards for the winners were supported by Dr Iain Bratchie (U76).
Taylor Simonian’s talk highlighted that an increasing number of studies have suggested that the browning of white adipocytes and brown adipose tissue (BAT) activation can protect against obesity. The main goal of her research is to increase the number of mature brown adipocytes in obese and diabetic patients to achieve strong benefits upon BAT activation. Work has led to the identification of specific members of the insulin-like growth factor binding protein (IGFBP) family, including IGFBP-5, -6 and -7, as potential regulators of brown adipocyte differentiation.
Nathan Rignall’s poster reflected his research focusing on live software updates, proposing that the process of updating software can happen during operation, with no downtime or impact on the intended task. Focusing on the aerospace sector, he investigated existing dynamic software update solutions, critically analysing each implementation to develop an optimised design for integrated modular avionics systems.
Chuyi Guo’s poster identified that while the development of rural e-commerce is a key part of Chinese governmental policy to advance the rural digital economy and promoting rural culture, existing studies of rural e-commerce lack non-Western perspectives and neglect institutional overlaps between rural communicators and media systems. Critical evaluations of socio-economic impacts remain scarce. Her research examined the “short video + live commerce” model in rural China through the lenses of Innovation Scope, Scalability Potential and Socioeconomic Sustainability.
Andrew Krapivin’s work disproved a longstanding conjecture by Andrew Yao that “Uniform Hashing is Optimal”. He showed that, even without reordering elements over time, it is possible to construct a hash table that achieves far better expected search complexities than were previously thought possible. By splitting the table into several pieces of differing sizes, the task of inserting elements into an open-addressed hash table delivers better performance.
Chris Tomy showed how machine learning on multispectral Raman imaging can be applied to classify tissue samples, avoiding the need for staining or manual inspection. His project explores the ProtoPNet (prototypical part network) architecture designed for interpretability. After identifying prototypes from the training set, inputs can be classified at test time against similarity scores with these prototypes. He adapted the segmentation task into patch classification, and hypothesized that the ProtoPNet architecture can be modified to generate a segmentation mask, using upsampling.
Jocelyn Andrews’ work addressed a need to understand the genetic risk factors contributing to epithelial ovarian cancer disease onset. Drawing on the data of various genome wide association studies (GWAS), a form of genetic case-control or cohort study which provides comprehensive genome-wide coverage to identify genomic variations associated with specific phenotypic outcomes, her analysis identified significant genetic correlation between plasminogen activator inhibitor 1 (PAI1) levels and high grade serous ovarian cancer.
The event was organised by the MCR’s Academic Officers, Theo Nelson and Nishka Khendry. The MCR is the body which represents postgraduate students at Churchill College.
Many departments were robustly represented, with displays for both the Churchill College Alumni Office and Bill Brown Creative Workshops located outside of the main hall. The Churchill College Archive Centre set up a well-attended special exhibition to celebrate International Women’s Day.
Alastair Lockhart, Senior Postgraduate Tutor said, “The Conference on Everything has become an annual and eagerly anticipated fixture in the College calendar. The MCR do a fantastic job in putting this event together. We’re so proud of our postgraduates and the amazing work they are undertaking.”
