Girton College's annual Hammond Science Communication Prize competition is now open for submissions.
The competition aims to emphasise the importance of scientists being able to communicate their ideas to others - the talk must have scientific content and the contest is open to all undergraduate students at Girton College, University of Cambridge.
The central theme for the 2025 Hammond Science Communication Prize is 'Extinction'.
Extinction - A Global Challenge?
The complete elimination of animal or plant species is what most commonly springs to mind when we hear the word 'extinction' and it conjures up concepts of climate change, over-hunting, introduction of non-native species, industrialisation and loss of habitat. To the non-biologist however, extinction has a host of other meanings: the extinction of light when it passes through a medium and loses some of its intensity; the extinction coefficient in maths and engineering; extinction in psychology whereby a learned behaviour gradually diminishes over time. We invite you to think about extinction in its broadest terms - maybe even considering ‘extinction rebellion’ - and how it relates to the Girton Talks theme: ‘Global Changes and Challenges in the 21st Century?'
Six to eight entries will be selected to progress to the competition presentation evening which will take place on Monday 3 March 2025 at 8pm in the Stanley Library, Girton College. We hope you will support this venture, and help us to put together a fun, entertaining and educational evening.
The judging panel look forward to reading your abstracts!
2023-24 Prize Winners: 'Connection'
Scarlett Morine (2022, English Literature)
The title of Scarlett’s entry was ‘Bats, Buboes and Boogieing: the Lesser-Spotted Connections in Pandemics’: an investigation into the literary depictions of the Black Death, the Dancing Plague, and the Great Influenza, and the odd links between them. Scarlett looked at a couple of trivial – and quite weird! – connections between the plagues. Firstly, that all three are followed by ‘poxes’, and, secondly, that literature has, overwhelmingly, pointed to women as the cause of evil and ill-health.
Charlie Owen (2023, Natural Sciences)
Charlie’s entry looked at parasite-host relationships, their coevolution, their importance in ecosystems, and how they will be affected by global heating. I ended with the crucial message that we should put more emphasis on the importance of parasites in conservation.
Chloe Ou (2022, Medical Sciences)
Chloe’s entry explored how the brain’s functions allow us to build emotional connections with others, the key to empathy. Neurons known as ‘mirror neurons’ are the part of the brain that is activated as a mirrored response to the emotional activation of another’s brain. Activated mirror neurons in the observation of others’ behaviours underlie mimicry and learning, more importantly, their activation by seeing others’ emotional responses allows us to form emotional connections. The shared neuronal activation explains the ability to form emotional connections with others. If mirror neurons are not activated, humans may not be able to empathise with others. This is important in understanding the behaviours of psychopathic offenders, as they struggle to empathise with the pain of others.
Filip Twarowski (2022, Medical Sciences)
Filip’s talk was about how bacteria display a lot of the useful features found in modern computers and how modern technology means that applying computing/engineering principles to biological cells has great potential to create "biological computers".
2023-24 Finalists
Thomas Coates (2023, Economics)
In economics and some other social sciences, there has been a longstanding desire to microfound behaviour, to reduce the connections within an economy to the aggregation of many individuals following optimising behavioural rules.
The question posed, is what elements of connection- between agents themselves, and between them and economic outcomes, does this programme of research elucidate, and what does it obscure? Clearly, connections between individuals explain the functioning of society and the economy, but how does this connection manifest? Is it purely embodied in decentralised bargaining between agents culminating in price formation and distribution? Can this body of research extend atomistic models of behaviour successfully to traditionally “non-market” areas- politics, family etc.?
Alternative views posit that connection is something which cannot be captured through microfounding. This could be because the methods used to extrapolate microfounded data are inadequate- for instance the case of the long-derided Representative Agent model. In this case, is microfoundation simply incomplete and will improve as research continues?
Or is there something fundamentally misjudged in the ontological choice to model connection through individual behaviour? Some views stress emergent properties at higher levels of aggregation, others argue that attempting to situate human connection in an open world at the atomised level will always fail to capture social reality. In this talk, whilst the incompleteness of the microfoundations project is accepted, it is stressed that it is unlikely that connection can ever truly be captured through this lens, with severe consequences for economic theory, prediction and policy.
Michael Mak (2022, Engineering)
Why do paleontologists dig? Because science is about uncovering the truth and there is truth in our rocks. Although the non avian dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago, their time on earth has not been lost. Deep beneath our feet lie the remains of the prehistoric world, a world where titanic battles were waged by dinosaurs over food, mates and territory, a world which had only just begun to see the emergence of flowering plants and a world so similar yet so different to our own. Although we cannot directly observe this forgotten realm, modern scientific techniques have gifted palaeontologists with the ability to glimpse into this distant past. Through analysing the soil and air composition of the time we can reconstruct their habitats while fossilised flora and fauna and even preserved footprints and fecal matter show us how the dinosaurs, moved, survived and interacted with their environment. However, only by connecting the dots and looking at all this evidence collectively, can we begin to recreate a world lost to time, a world buried beneath our feet, a world ruled by the dinosaurs.