News Articles

Selwyn will be staging a debate on Britain’s membership of the European Union on Friday May 27^th. It will take place in Chapel, and will feature leading speakers from the ‘Remain’ and ‘Leave’ campaigns. The chairman will be the BBC broadcaster, James Naughtie. Introducing the case for ‘Remain’ will be alumnus Sir Stephen Wall, a former British permanent representative to the EU and an adviser on foreign and European affairs to John Major and Tony Blair; and his opposite number for ‘Leave’ will be Simon Heffer, the journalist and historian who is one of the featured commentators in ‘Brexit: The Movie’. Also speaking for ‘Remain’ will be Belinda Brooks-Gordon, a Liberal Democrat county councillor; and Selwyn graduate student Gen Simpson. For ‘Leave’ we will be joined by David Campbell-Bannerman, Conservative MEP for this region; and former Selwyn graduates’ president Josh Maher.

The event is open to Selwyn students, staff, Fellows, alumni and members of our Friends programme. It starts at 6 for 6.30pm, and will finish by 8pm. Alumni and Friends can book a place online here http://www.selwynalumni.com/eventscalendar; and others should RSVP to the Master’s assistant. There will be a vote on the night to gauge opinion within the College. To register to take part in the referendum itself, click this link: https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote.

We’re deeply saddened to hear of the death of Sarah Corp, who studied at Selwyn from 1994-97. She went on to become one of the best television news producers of her
generation. We offer our condolences to Sarah’s husband Charles and to her family and friends.

The Vice-Master, Michael Tilby, who was Sarah’s Tutor at Selwyn, said: ’Sarah made her mark at Selwyn as both a fine student of history and a devoted member of the
Chapel Choir. The College takes great pride in her distinguished career and feels immense sadness that it should have been brought to such a premature end.’

The funeral will be held at All Saints’ Blackheath on Friday 27 May at 11am, and all are welcome to attend.

This is the tribute video to Sarah, broadcast by Channel 4 News:

The College has admitted its first three Fellow Benefactors. This is a new category of recognition for our major supporters: people who have been exceptionally generous in their donations to Selwyn. Their benefactions go towards strengthening our teaching and to supporting new generations of students, through bursaries, scholarships and outreach. We’re enormously grateful to them for helping Selwyn look to the future with great confidence.

An admission ceremony took place in the Master’s Lodge on Tuesday May 10^th, followed by dinner in Hall. Pictured together in the College garden are our inaugural Fellow Benefactors. They are from left to right: Katya Speciale, Jim Dickinson and Robert Martin.

2016 is seeing an American presidential election campaign like no other. The populist Donald Trump, who has never held elective office, is leading the Republican field and the Democrats are on the verge of nominating their first ever woman candidate for President. How much of this is a reflection of the legacy of the man currently occupying the White House, Barack Obama? And how will history judge the achievements of the first African-American President?

Professor Theda Skocpol of Harvard University is one of the most distinguished academic observers of American politics, and she will be giving Selwyn’s Ramsay Murray lecture on Friday May 6^th. It’s titled “The Obama Impact: transformation and reaction in US politics”. The lecture takes place in the Law Faculty on the Sidgwick site, starting at 5.30pm, and all are welcome.

 

You can watch last year’s Ramsay Murray lecture – given by Bridget Kendall, now Master-elect at Peterhouse – here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjSoK1hidww

Selwyn is delighted to welcome Sophie Wilson as its latest Honorary Fellow. Ms Wilson, a Selwyn alumna who began her university studies in 1975, has had a remarkable career as a computer scientist and software engineer; and she was installed into the Honorary Fellowship at a ceremony in Chapel on Thursday April 21st. These are her achievements:

Sophie Wilson began building microprocessors when fifteen years old. During her pre-university gap year, she designed and built systems counting translucent drops of liquid and detecting spun fibre machinery breakdowns; in her first vacation she developed a cow-feeder which released personalised amounts read from electronic tags; and immediately after graduating she launched the first of her personal computer and microprocessor designs. She designed the Acorn System 1, she personally coded the operating system in binary before designing and implementing Acorn Assembler, Acorn BASIC and Atom BASIC (which eventually led to BBC BASIC).

She and Steve Furber took less than a week to design and implement the prototype of the BBC Microcomputer, Acorn thereby clinching the contract for the world-leading Computer Literacy Project. They refined it over the same summer, with Sophie designing the operating system and writing the BBC BASIC interpreter and over the next fifteen years she designed and implemented BBC BASIC versions 1 to 6 for a succession of chips, including the 6502, NS32016 and ARM. The BBC project succeeded beyond its begetters' wildest dreams: the ensuing decade saw over a million BBC micros sold and used in thousands of UK schools.

She and Furber co-designed the 32-bit RISC Machine processor powering Acorn's A series and the first Apple Personal Digital Assistant and virtually every mobile phone and tablet in the world today. She designed the ARM RISC instruction set with a view to making software developers’ lives easier and supported it with high speed instruction set simulators, thereby significantly influencing the subsequent cumulative 20 billion sales. She single-handedly designed and implemented the ARM second processor operating system; and co-designed the ARM3, ARM610 and ARM 700 processors and the ARM7500FE single chip computer. In 1990, she created Acorn Replay, Archimedes software-only multimedia realisation. This was in several aspects superior to Apple’s Quicktime, and in 1992 brought her the International Learning Person of the Year Award. She led the customisation of Acorn designs to provide the Network Computer which Oracle commissioned.

By 1999, Sophie Wilson had developed the basis of a SIMD LIW processor which became known as Firepath. To exploit this in the emerging ADSL wired broadband market, she and six others successfully launched Element 14 as an Acorn management buy-out. Sophie lead the design of the instruction set for Firepath, wrote the entire Architecture Guide and assisted with the development of superfast, flexible signal processing software. Within two years, Broadcom bought Element 14 for $450m and went on to win 75% of the world’s Central Office digital subscriber exchange business. Broadcom currently ship Firepath processors in DSL and other applications. Sophie is now a Senior Director, Fellow and Distinguished Engineer at Broadcom and continues to develop the Firepath processor.

Sophie is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Fellow of the Women’s Engineering Society. She is also an honorary fellow of the Computer History Museum and was a finalist in the 2013 European Inventor of the Year in the lifetime achievement category.

We congratulate her on adding an Honorary Fellowship at Selwyn to this impressive list.

All 31 Cambridge colleges were represented at a dinner in Singapore on Monday April 11th and at a similar event in Hong Kong on Wednesday April 13th to mark the latest stage of the University's endowment campaign – which aims to raise £2 billion to maintain our global reputation for teaching and research. There was a strong presence of Selwyn alumni, along with the Master and the Development Director. The photograph below shows some of the Selwynites and Cambridge colleagues at the Hong Kong launch, with Roger Mosey (4th from left) and Mike Nicholson (2nd from right).

The following day there was a lunch at the Hong Kong Club and also an evening reception for Selwyn alumni, hosted by Sir David Li (SE 1961).

For the Singapore even Harry Oxer (SE 1951) flew in specially from Western Australia - a five-hour flight away. Our photo shows Robert Martin (SE 1984) who is now CEO and managing director of BOC Aviation, based in Singapore.

The Master, Roger Mosey, hosted drinks in Perth, Western Australia, on April 6th for our community there. Alumni who
attended, pictured from left to right, are:

Philip Raymont (SE 2000, Education); Stephen Adams (1976, Medicine); Roger Jennings (1965, Natural Sciences); James
Walters (1997, Theology); Harry Oxer (1951, Medicine) Rob Ross (1992, Chemical Engineering); and Peter Chong (2001, Business
Administration).

There was a large turnout for Selwyn's MA degree ceremony on Saturday April 2nd, which was made up mainly of those who arrived at the College to start their undergraduate courses in 2009. The graduands gathered in Old Court on a glorious Spring day and then processed to the Senate House for the awarding of their degrees.

Later in the day, there was a dinner in Hall. Our photo shows law graduates with Fellows Professor John Spencer (third from left) and Dr Janet O'Sullivan (sixth from left).

There are more details about the Cambridge MA on the University website: http://www.cambridgestudents.cam.ac.uk/your-course/graduation-and-what-next/cambridge-ma

Cambridge won this year’s men’s Boat Race for the first time since 2012. There was particular pleasure at Selwyn because the victorious boat included our undergraduate Felix Newman, who is reading Engineering; and he took the crucial Bow position for the University. He is the first Selwyn oarsman in the Boat Race for 26 years, though the College had a female Blue last year with Hannah Evans in the historic first women’s race on the Tideway. We believe Felix is the first Selwynite to be in a winning men’s crew since 1971.

Felix began his rowing career at Abingdon School, and he came to Selwyn in 2013. As well as his sporting activities, he is a scholar of the College. The photo below shows him in action (facing the cox and wearing sunglasses) in the Selwyn boat at last year’s May Bumps.

There’s more, including video highlights, on the BBC Sport website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rowing/35908187

A Selwyn PhD student, Rashmi Becker, has been leading a project to capture photographs of people across the UK with learning disabilities and autism. Rashmi, who was also an undergraduate at the College, is behind a book and exhibition depicting images of people with a learning disability. It challenges negative perceptions by highlighting their everyday moments and their milestones in life – from leaving school to getting married.

The book was undertaken with Jerwood Photography prize winner Polly Braden, who spent two years travelling the country photographing people and capturing their stories. As well as helping to turn this into a beautiful book, Rashmi worked with the National Media Museum in Bradford to host a major exhibition in their main gallery which will run until mid-April. The picture (below) shows Rashmi, left, at the opening of the exhibition.

Rashmi will be continuing her PhD in Cambridge’s Department of Psychiatry, where her research focuses on improving care for people with a learning disability.