David Chivers, 1944-2026

We very much regret that Selwyn has lost David Chivers who died this week. We will miss him.

All who knew David will have their own fond recollections of a dynamic, passionate and congenial colleague. He came to Cambridge in 1963 and after his undergraduate studies undertook a PhD in Physical Anthropology, focusing on primates in the Malaysian rain forests. He supervised and directed studies externally for Selwyn before becoming a Bye-Fellow in 1988, then a Fellow and Tutor in 1989. He was promoted to a Readership in 2000 and a Chair in 2011. He was awarded the DSc degree in 2002.

David was a deeply committed Tutor who vigorously and enthusiastically stood up for his students. He was a resolute champion of the interests of “my vets”. On College Council, as Gardens Steward, as a Proctor, and as Acting Praelector, David brought a characteristic mix of forceful views and profound enthusiasm. Dozens of postgraduate students benefitted from his teaching and training, many of them attracted to Selwyn by his presence. David’s contribution to the academic development of generations of veterinary science students was outstanding. Highly esteemed in his field, his contacts were global. He played a leading role in numerous scholarly and conservation bodies from the 1970s through to present decade. As long as one did not claim his work on gibbons involved studying “monkeys” his bonhomie was near to limitless. If someone made that suggestion the rejoinder “they’re apes, not monkeys” came as quickly as it did forcefully. He remained a lively presence in retirement. The trimming of the Boston Ivy in Old Court was one of his favourite causes, brought up with undiminished passion at College Meetings. His love of Cambridge United sometimes ran to his receiving commentary into an earpiece at High Table or in Governing Body meetings.

David’s successor as Director of Studies in Veterinary Medicine, Dr Stuart Eves, comments that "He was fierce in protection of the veterinary course and his students. He always believed that his students could excel and would go on to do great things but he managed not to pass this on as pressurising expectation. He had such a strong personality but knew when a personalised approach was needed.”  Many old members will recall precisely that mix from their contacts with him.
 

Around 150 people came to hear historian Professor David Farber talk about American conservatism — and left with rather a lot to think about.

David, a visiting bye-fellow at Selwyn and Roy A Roberts Distinguished Professor Emeritus, traced the journey from Reagan to Trump: from free markets to tariffs, multilateralism to America First, small government to "I alone can fix it." He was as interested in what connects the two presidencies as in what divides them.

One moment landed with particular force during the event on 25 February. Reagan, David noted, signed legislation in 1986 legalising three million undocumented workers — the last major immigration bill the United States has passed. "Today," Professor Farber observed, "it would be considered like communism."

A lively Q&A followed, hosted by Keasbey Research Fellow in American Studies Dr Tom Smith, ranging across the failures of the Democrats, the fracturing effect of social media on political parties, and whether Trump is best understood as a conservative at all.

We are grateful to David for a thought-provoking evening, bringing expert analysis of the world's biggest stories and thought-provoking debate to our community.

A video of the event is available on YouTube by clicking here.

Above: Dr Tom Smith and Prof David Farbar and the some of the audience at the event on 26 February

A 2024 symposium was held at Selwyn to mark the 25th anniversary of a landmark statute in the law of contract, and the resulting edited collection is now in print.

The Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 at 25, co-edited by Selwyn’s Vice-Master Professor Janet O’Sullivan and her faculty colleagues Professor Louise Merrett and Mr Will Day was published in February 2026 by Hart Publishing.

The 1999 Act fundamentally changed English contract law. Before it the traditional common law ‘privity’ rule was that only the parties to a contract could gain enforceable rights from it, even if the parties expressly made the contract for the benefit of a third party. 

The Act changed that, giving third party beneficiaries the right to enforce contracts made for their benefit, if the statutory requirements are met.  Initially, the legal profession responded cautiously, tending to exclude the operation of the 1999 Act when drafting contracts. However by its silver anniversary it is a well-established aspect of the law of contract.

A symposium held at Selwyn in September 2024, generously sponsored by leading City of London law firm Slaughter and May, brought together a mix of academics, judges of the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal and High Court, barristers (including Selwyn fellow Sarah Fraser Butlin KC) and solicitors, to consider the theoretical and practical significance of the 1999 Act after 25 years.  Their papers became the chapters in this edited collection, which examines the operation of the 1999 Act in fields as diverse as employment, property, construction, shipping, insurance, banking and many other areas.

Overall, it is a seminal reference work for all practitioners engaging with the 1999 Act, as well as scholars and students of the law of contract.

Research co-led by Selwyn Fellow, Professor Charlotte Summers, has found that a mental rotation treatment that involves playing Tetris can significantly reduce intrusive memories, often called flashbacks, in healthcare workers traumatised during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Charlotte, an intensive care doctor, worked with clinical psychologist Professor Emily Holmes on a randomised controlled trial involving 99 NHS staff. Participants who used a short Tetris-based intervention had ten times fewer flashbacks than those receiving standard care or a placebo. After six months, 70 per cent were completely free of intrusive memories.

The intervention works by asking participants to briefly recall a traumatic memory, then play Tetris — the visual demands of the game create interference that disrupts how the memory is stored in the brain.

The research, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, has been described by Wellcome's Digital Mental Health Innovation Lead, Tayla McCloud, as "accessible, scalable and adaptable across contexts." 

The Wellcome Trust has featured the findings on their website.

Three Selwyn scientists talk about why they chose their field - and what makes them want to stay in it

Dr Carrie Soderman | Fellow and Post Doctoral Research Associate in Earth Sciences

I've wanted to study Earth Sciences ever since a family holiday to the Lake District when I was ten. I remember reading a geology guide and being amazed that scientists could tell there had been volcanoes nearby hundreds of millions of years ago.

Twenty years later, I now research the rocks that formed beneath those ancient volcanoes. Using crystals as tiny time capsules, I combine fieldwork, geochemistry and computer modelling to uncover their hidden histories—specifically why some contain the metals crucial to our modern technology. 

From sharing my research with the public to conducting fieldwork in remote places like Greenland, I am really proud to be a woman in science!

Maya Juman (2022) | Fourth year PhD student, Department of Veterinary Medicine

I've always been interested in the natural world. Science is detective work: asking the right questions and solving mysteries.

I spent a lot of time at the American Museum of Natural History as a kid. At 16, I did a research internship there, studying snake evolution. My supervisor was in a very male-dominated field but very proudly feminine. She just did it her own way. That's when I thought: I could be like her.

I graduated from university in 2020 and took what I thought would be a summer off as a contact tracer. It turned into two years of COVID response work. That led me back to wanting to do research, but with a newfound interest in pandemic prediction and prevention. I decided to study bats, as they host interesting pathogens that can make other animals, including us, very sick—often without getting sick themselves.

After my PhD, I’ll continue studying wildlife disease during a research fellowship in Cambridge. I'm lucky to have received so much support in my career, and I’m committed to paying it forward through mentorship and outreach. I consider it a responsibility to make science as accessible and fun as possible.

Elisabeta Darie (2024) | Second year Physical and Natural Sciences student

Science has given me a way to describe and rationalise so many things that I once took for granted.

At university, I've discovered just how satisfying the synergies between subjects can be. The sciences often tend to be compartmentalised into physical, chemical, biological, geological, etc. But the real beauty is that they all ultimately blend and feed into each other, and each discipline allows you to inspect the problem from a different perspective, using a unique toolkit.

I have strong motivations to work within climate science and policymaking. I'd like to be a scientist in a public-facing role, something that brings together creativity and communications. I knew that science was the field for me when I saw just how confident and enthusiastic researchers at the forefront of change were.

Working in an environment where you carry so much responsibility, but also such a vast bank of knowledge of theories and ideas with real, tangible implications, is something I find particularly enticing. Studying science expands your creative, analytical, and communicative skillset, and cooking up pretty chemicals in chemistry labs is cool too!

A routine archaeological training excavation led to an extraordinary discovery, with one of our students, Grace Grandfield, among those at the centre of it.

Archaeology student Grace was going into the final week of her four-week placement at Wandlebury Country Park near Cambridge when she and fellow students uncovered a burial pit containing the remains of around ten young men, dating to about the 9th century AD.

Alongside four complete skeletons, the team found body parts grouped together — including clusters of skulls and a stack of leg bones — pointing to extreme violence and possibly execution. Some remains show clear signs of decapitation, while others appear to have been bound before burial.

Speaking on Radio 4's PM programme aired on Wednesday, 4 February 2026, Grace described how powerful the experience was.

"In the first three weeks, we didn't find much. The dig leaders thought to make it more exciting we would recover a part of a skeleton which had been found the year before. And everything just came from there,” said Grace.

“It was an Anglo Saxon Viking burial pit, which there had just been kind of a lot of bodies dumped in there, in not the most gracious manner. It's so different from what you learn in class, and I don't think anything we learned about the realities of human remains, or archaeology could have prepared you for actually being the person who's putting together the pieces of this really gruesome puzzle. 

“I was working with our osteologist, and she mentioned the fact that they were between kind of 17 and 20, and that's just, that was the same age as me. And that made it feel a lot more real that - even though it was a thousand years ago - these are people with whom I've got things in common with. 

Archaeologists believe the burial may be linked to conflicts between Saxons and Vikings, at a time when Cambridgeshire lay on a contested frontier between rival kingdoms. One individual, exceptionally tall for the period, also shows evidence of trepanation — an ancient surgical procedure — suggesting attempts to treat serious medical conditions.

The find is now the most significant discovery made during years of student training digs at Wandlebury, highlighting the real-world impact of undergraduate fieldwork. Further scientific analysis, including ancient DNA, is underway to learn more about who these individuals were and how they met their deaths.

Grace’s experience also features in the BBC’s Digging for Britain aired on Wednesday 4 February 2026. 

Read the full University of Cambridge story here: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/wandlebury-training-dig-burial

Joan Hillier has gifted a collection of cartoons by her late husband, Dr Tony Hillier, Selwyn Fellow in Physiology, to the college.

Dr Tony Hillier (1942-2014) was a fellow from 1971 to 1998, thereafter an emeritus fellow. After undergraduate studies at Trinity College, he came to Selwyn for his PhD. Following a brief period at Trinity as a research fellow, he returned here for the rest of his academic career. During his time at Cambridge he was a cartoonist. After his retirement he became known as a metal sculptor, with pieces still standing in Histon.

Joan's gift of these early cartoons is a generous way to preserve Tony's creative work. While the artwork was on show at the College, we invited Joan in to say thank you for her generous donation.

 Picture of staff and fellows by Gloria Morey-Picking

We are very deeply saddened to share the news of the death of Emma Sumner, a fifth-year doctoral student in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. 

She died in hospital of natural causes on Tuesday 27 January. Her family were with her.

Emma was a talented and valued member of Selwyn College, and her loss is deeply felt across our community. We held an informal service in Chapel attended by her friends, fellows and staff to remember Emma and light candles in her memory on 28 January.

We established a book of condolence for people to add their thoughts and memories of Emma, which was given to her family. A service of thanksgiving was held at Selwyn College on 20 February.
 

A new book examining quantum technologies as they move from research into commercial reality has been co-authored by Selwyn Fellow, Professor Chander Velu.

Quantum technologies harness the physics of sub-atomic particles to achieve what would otherwise be impossible. Microprocessors in our computers and MRI scanners already rely on quantum physics. However, newer quantum technologies by manipulating unexploited quantum phenomenon are creating capabilities in a wide range of applications like computing and communications.

The Business of Quantum Technologies: From Theory to Innovation Strategy examines applications in healthcare, financial security, climate monitoring, and transport among others. Chander, Professor of Innovation and Economics at the Institute for Manufacturing, wrote the book with Keith Norman and Christopher Noble from Oxford, Yuzhen Zhu from University of East Anglia, and Fathiro Putra from Bandung Institute of Technology.

The open-access book explains how organisations might adopt quantum computing, communications, sensing, imaging and timing technologies. 

• Quantum computing enables faster computation to address challenges such as climate resilience, financial stability, new drug and materials discovery. 
• Quantum communications provide the basis for more secure communications and protection of sensitive data. 
• Quantum sensing allows for better detection of faults in hard-to-reach infrastructure below ground level such as gas pipelines or improved navigation of autonomous vehicles. 
• Quantum imaging provides the basis for more precise health care applications such as brain imaging. 
• Finally, quantum clocks would enable more accurate timing for optimising and providing resilience to critical national infrastructure such as transport, financial services and energy systems. 

The book aims to provide an intuitive explanation of the technology with an emphasis on the conceptual frameworks to better understand the economic and managerial implications. In doing so, the book explores how strategy and business model innovation needs to be formulated to enable the adoption and integration of quantum technologies in organisations, and highlights the related policy issues.

As Chander notes: “The time is ripe for scholars, managers, and policy-makers to work together to enable quantum technologies to address grand societal challenges, while contributing to productivity and economic growth in a responsible and sustainable manner.”

This comes as the UK government has invested over £1 billon in the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme (NQTP) and has emphasised quantum technologies as a key driver for economic growth as part of its modern industrial strategy. Global investment reached $33 billion in 2025 and could potentially generate close to $100 billion in revenue by 2035.

The book is available here: The Business of Quantum Technologies

Novelist and poet David Dabydeen (1974) has been nominated for the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. The nomination was submitted by a group of European and Chinese scholars. 

Born in Guyana, David’s work has focused on history, memory, and the legacies of slavery and colonialism. His publications include poetry, fiction, and critical writing, and his first poetry collection, Slave Song, received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

He told us: "I owe a massive debt to Selwyn College , which, fifty years ago, gave me space to write.  I am very glad to have dedicated my last novel to Sir David Harrison, who was Admissions Tutor in 1974."

David, an honorary fellow of Selwyn College, has held senior academic posts at the University of Warwick and has also served as Guyana’s Ambassador to UNESCO and to China. His nomination recognises a body of work that has made a sustained contribution to world literature.