Welcome to the 2024 edition of the Selwyn

We hear about what’s happening in the world through the media. These days, social media platforms compete with the longer established brands – and we have never had more information at our fingertips. Pretty much everything known to humankind is available on our phone. But whether we know or understand more as a society is debatable, and that provides the main theme of our opening pages in this magazine. 

Selwyn is lucky to have among its alumni two of the biggest figures in world media: David Thomson who chairs the Thomson Reuters organisation, and Tim Davie who has served since 2020 as Director-General of the BBC. They both write exclusively for us, with David focusing on how his early years were shaped by his family with its ground-breaking newspapers and Tim setting out the case for the BBC in a fragmenting world. They are supplemented by a robust defence of the values of journalism by Paul Bascobert, the President of Reuters News. 

Of course, none of this explosion of media would have been possible without the pace of change in technology. Again, we have a report from the frontline. Alumna and honorary fellow Sophie Wilson is one of the most distinguished computer scientists of our age, and she has written specially for this magazine about the question we probably all have: what on earth is coming next?

We have supplemented Sophie’s fascinating piece with two examples of the research being done by college fellows at earlier stages of their careers. Carrie Soderman writes about earth sciences, while Mathias Nowak explains how he captured the universe from the prosaic location of the fellows’ garden at the back of the college. 

That ties in neatly with our cover picture for this edition. It shows the night that the Aurora Borealis came to Cambridge, providing an exceedingly rare light show across the city and much of the United Kingdom. The pleasure of this magazine is that we can give a proper showing of some of the photographs taken around the college, and we’re appreciative of all the contributions that are published online throughout the year and in print here. 

Later in the magazine, you will find our regular feature on fellows and their work. This year we feature the vice-master, who is a distinguished lawyer, along with a theologian and an engineer. It’s a reminder that the academic work of the college, which is world leading, is done by people from a multiplicity of different backgrounds. Novelty is no longer particularly novel. Jörg Haustein discusses his background in East Germany, and he is our first fellow from there; just as we also recently installed our first fellows from Chile (maybe even the first ever from South America) and Syria. Ours is a diverse community that offers a model of how we can work together for the benefit of the United Kingdom and the wider world. 

If you enjoy what you read here, please also keep an eye on our website and our social media platforms where we feature daily updates about life in Grange Road. We have a variety of outlets, including a wide range of videos on YouTube, and plenty of pictures on Twitter/X, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. We’re in the media business too…

Magazine Editors Thisath Ranawaka (tr491@cam.ac.uk), Roger Mosey (rm725@cam.ac.uk)

Print Design Smith (www.smithltd.co.uk)