Professor Julia Yeomans, Fellow in Physics at St Hilda's College, has been awarded an Advanced Grant of 1.5 million Euros from the European Research Council.  ERC Advanced Grants allow exceptional established research leaders to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk projects that open new directions in their research fields.  Professor Yeomans will investigate questions that combine hydrodynamics and statistical physics, such as how bacteria can mix a fluid or the design of super-water-repellent surfaces.

February 2012

Dr Kathy Wilkes (1946 - 2003), former Fellow at St Hilda's, has had a plaque of honour erected in the centre of the ancient Croatian town of Dubrovnik.

The plaque in front of the church of St George in Pile was unveiled on Wednesday 1 February 2012, in memory of her longstanding friendship and courageous support during the 1991-5 aggression.

St. Hilda's College is delighted to announce its History Essay Prize Competition for 2012.  The College invites competition entries from students in the first year of sixth form in UK schools.  Prizes of £350, £200 and £100 will be awarded to the best three essays.  The deadline for competition entries is Friday 20th April 2012.

For further particulars, please see the History page (http://www.st-hildas.ox.ac.uk/index.php/undergraduate/history.html) (you should scroll to the end).

In a letter published by the Guardian (14 January 2012, p. 53), Dr Selina Todd,Tutorial Fellow in History at St Hilda's,  writes:
‘As an Oxford admissions tutor, I recognise some elements of Jeevan Vasagar's examination of the Cambridge admissions system (G2, 11 January 2012), but not the division drawn between "good" and "poor" schools. Some of us welcome applications from comprehensive school students, not because these candidates can do well in spite of their school, but because their education offers them an excellent foundation for university. Many comprehensives offer imaginative lessons, encourage independent study, and provide an unparalleled social education. Being educated alongside pupils from a wide range of backgrounds gives these candidates the ability to negotiate cultural and social difference in debate, and the confidence to relate abstract or scholarly theory to the wider society in which they live. They also know that academic success is founded on hard work and effort, not on family background and wealth - the criteria for entry to private schools - or the innate "talent" that selective schools claim to identify. Most importantly, comprehensives still provide far more students with the opportunity to do A-levels and apply to university than do private or state selective schools. They therefore send us candidates who would never otherwise have had the chance of a university education, but who go on to excel. Any weaknesses with comprehensive schools are due to the lamentable lack of government investment in them. It is a tribute to their teaching staff that their students continue to shine.'

Rosalyn Falconer, a third year chemistry undergraduate at St. Hilda's, has won the first prize for her poster presentation of a project funded by the EPSRC Vacation Bursary Scheme.  Rosalyn's Poster was entitled "The effect of solvent and time on the polymerisation of amino-boranes by rhodium catalysts".  The poster described work that Rosalyn did during a 6 week research project over the summer in Professor Andrew Weller's research group in the Chemistry Research Laboratory.

October 2011

St Hilda's Biomedical Engineering DPhil student, Mattias Heinrich, has just won one of the prestigious Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) Young Scientist Awards at the 2011 MICCAI Conference in Toronto for his paper titled: "Non-local shape descriptor: a new similarity metric for deformable multi-modal registration".  The MICCAI Conference is the most important conference in the field of medical image analysis.