Lectures

Volta Lecture

Macromolecular NMR

Christina Redfield, Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Oxford and a world leader in the biological applications of NMis giving an advanced, postgraduate course on Macormolecular NMR.  The course is of special interest to Colleg students enrolled in MSc Courses in Chemistry, Biology, Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

The poster of the Course is available here. The main topics of the Course are the following:

[1] Basic concepts in NMR Spectroscopy
[2] Assignment of Protein NMR Spectra
[3] Assignment using 1H NMR methods
[4] Assignment using 15N and 13C Labeling
[5] Extracting Structural Information from NMR Parameters
[6] Structure Determination from NMR
[7] Protein Dynamics
[8] NMR of Nucleic Acids
[9] Protein-ligand interactions

Image: Typical two-dimensional NMR spectra.

 

 

Mathematical Topics in Fluid Mechanics and Applications

Ugo Gianazza, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pavia and former director of the Department of Mathematics is giving an advanced, postgraduate course on the Mathematics of Fluid Mechanics and its Applications in College starting on March 20th and continuing twice a week (Monday and Thursday) at 6.00 pm in Seminar Room 1 until the end of May. College students enrolled in MSc or PhD Courses in Mathematics, Physics, Engineering and Chemistry are welcome to join this lecture series.  The main topics covered by the course are listed below:

[1] Physics of the Navier-Stokes Equations
[2] Preliminary Analytical Tools
[3] Time-Dependent Navier-Stokes Equations in Bounded Domains
[4] Proof of the Leray-Hopf Existence Theorem
[5] Higher Integrability and Consequences
[6] Recovering the Pressure
[7] A Short Introduction to Partial Regularity
[8] Applications and Open Problems

The poster of the course is available here. The lecture notes of the course are available here.

Image: Courtesy of the University of Minnesota (https://cse.umn.edu/math/mathematical-fluid-mechanics)

 

 

Engineering a bacterium for therapy (A Buzzati Traverso lecture 2022/23)

11 April 2023. 
Luis Serrano Pubul, Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona.

At 5.00 pm on the 11th of April 2023 Luis Serrano Pubul will give the 2022/23 Adriano Buzzati Traverso lecture entitled Engineering a bacerium for therapy in the College lecture theatre. The poster of the lecture is available at this link.

Abstract
Engineering bacteria for treating human diseases presents new opportunities in therapeutics. Although lung diseases are among the top causes for mortality worldwide, there is no treatment for them based on a live biotherapeutic.  We have engineered a genome-reduced human lung bacterium, Mycoplasma pneumoniae (MPN), as a novel treatment for lung diseases encompassing infections, fibrosis and cancer. We found that expression of biologicals by engineered MPN has a limited physiological impact in mice due to its low expression capacity. To solve these issues, we use our protein design software FoldX and ModelX to increase the effective expression in MPN, and the activity in mouse lungs. This rational design strategy of combining synthetic biology with protein design is quite powerful to foster bacterial therapy.

Biography

Luis Serrano did his PhD at the CBM (Madrid, Spain) on Cell Biology. Then he spent 4 years in the laboratory of Prof. A.R. Fehrst (MRC, UK) working in protein folding. In 1993, he became Group Leader at the EMBL (Heidelberg, Germany) working in Protein Folding and design. Ten years later, he was appointed head of the Structural & Computational Biology programme at the EMBL and he started to work on Systems Biology. By the end of 2006 he moved back to Spain to lead a programme working on Systems Biology, where he was appointed vice-director before finally becoming the CRG director on July 2011. He is a member of the Spanish Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (SEBBM), member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), and member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Sciences (Spain). In 2003 he received the Marie Curie Excellence Award, in 2009 he was awarded the City of Barcelona prize (science category), an annual award organized by Barcelona City Council and in 2018 the Francisco Cobos award (http://fundacionfranciscocobos.org/).  In recent years he has won sixe prestigious grants from the European Research Council, three ERC Advanced Grants and three ERC Proof of Concept grants. He is Professor of ICREA. He has published more than 350 papers in international journals. He was involved in the creation of one of the first Spanish Biotech Companies (Diverdrugs) in 1999. He is also co-founder of Cellzome, EnVivo, TRISKEL, Pulmobiotics and Orikine biotech companies. He has been Director and Founder of the association of European Institutes of Excellence EU-LIFE (https://eu-life.eu/) and he was until 2020 the chair of the association of Spanish institutes of excellence, Severo Ochoa and Maria de Maeztu (SOMMa; https://www.somma.es/)

Image
An electron micrograph of M pneumoniae. Courtesy of María Lluch (Centre for Genoic Regulation, Barcelona)

The Evolution of Innate Immunity (M Fraccaro lecture 2022/23)

05 April 2023. 
Jules Hoffmann, University of Strasbourg.

At 5.00 pm on the 5th of April 2023 Jules Hoffmann will give the 2022/23 Marco Fraccaro lecture entitled The Evolution of Innate Immunity in Aula U Foscolo (trada Nuova 65). The poster os the lecture is available at this link.

Jules Hoffmann and his colleagues discovered in 1996 the role of theToll receptor in immunity. Toll had been discovered a several years earlier by Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard as a gene involved in determing the antero-posterior polarity of the early embryo of D melanogaster. The discovery of the role in immunity of the Toll pathway by Juls Hoffmann and the subsequent work by Charles Janeway at Yale have revolutioned the field of immunity and for his Jules Hoffmann was awarded a share of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Biography

Jules Hoffmann was born in Luxembourg in1941. He studied Biology at the University in Strasbourg, the University from which he also earned his doctoral degree in 1969. After a period of study and research in Marburg, Germany, J Hoffmann returned to Strasbourg where he worked throughout his whole scientific career serving as a director of a research laboratory of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). He has also served for a number of years as a professor at the University in Strasbourg.

Marco Fraccaro
Marco Fraccaro (26 September 1926 - 2 April 2008) was a distinguished geneticist and Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Pavia for over thirty years. Born in Pavia, he attended the local Liceo Classico Ugo Foscolo with and the Medical School of the University of Pavia where he graduated in 1950. After a few years at the local Institute of Pathological Anatomy he moved to Lionel Penrose in the Galton Laboratory at UCL in 1954 with a fellowship from the British Council and, a year later, to Jan Book’s laboratory in Uppsala where he stayed until 1958 during which time he met his future wife Inga. In 1960, he moved to the newly formed MRC Population Genetics Research Unit in Oxford under Alan Stevenson where he continued his work on cytogenetics that he had initiated in Uppsala. He returned to Pavia in 1962 where he started a highly successful and productive laboratory with funding from NATO and EURATOM and where he took up the Chair of Human Genetics, which he held until 2001.

Throughout his research Marco Fraccaro focussed primarily on sex chromosome abnormalities, especially the genetic abnormalities responsible for abnormal physical and sexual development, but he contributed to several other areas of Genetics such as the distribution in the population of specific types of congenital malformations and the effect of radiation on chromosomes of cells. Marco Fraccaro was deeply attached to Pavia and Oxford and there was hardly a conversation in which he failed to mention the life and history of these two cities. His love for Oxford was also expressed in a small book of quotations (Oxford for strangers of all sorts) which he published in 1997. From 1971 until 2002 he was Master of Collegio Cairoli, one of the University Colleges at Pavia. He run the College informally and effectively and made Cairoli a place of learning and debate for students and staff. He also made it into a meeting point for modern visual arts by organising a successful series of exhibitions of modern artists that will enrich the College for years to come. Marco Fraccaro has been one of the defining personalities of the University of Pavia in the second half of the 20th century and the lecture aims to recognise his interests in Science and the Arts and his intellectual legacy.


Image
A mutant fruit fly killed by fungus due to the absence of a functional Toll gene and anti-fungal immunity.


 




Engineering somatic cells to cure inherited congenital disorders and neoplasia (M Fraccaro lecture 2021/22)

11 May 2022. 
Franco Locatelli,
Ospedale del Bambin Gesù, Rome

At 5.00 pm on the 11th of May 2022 Franco Locatelli will give the 2021/22 M Fraccaro lecture entitled Engineering somatic cells to cure inherited congenital disorders and neoplasia in the lecture theatre of Collegio Cairoli.  The poster os the lecture is available at this link.

F Locatelli is the director of the Department of Paediatric Haematology and Oncology of the Ospedale Bambin Gesù in Rome and since February 2019 he serves as Chair of Consiglio superiore di Sanità, the main advisory board if the Italian Ministry of Health on matters of Public Health. He also chaired more recently until the 30th of March 2022 the Covid-19 'Comitato Tecnico Scientifico' of the Italian Ministry of Health. More details about F Locatelli's academic career are given below.  The Marco Fraccaro is given each year by a distinguished medical scientist in order to commemorate the life and work of Marco Fraccaro, a pioneer in medical genetics and medical research and professor of Medical Genetics at the University of Pavia from 1962 to 2001. The lecture is organised jointly by Collegio Cairoli, the College which M Fraccaro directed from 1971 to 2002 and Collegio A Volta. Further details of M Fraccaro's life and work are also given below.

Biography

F Locatelli graduated in Medicine and Surgery ate the University of Pavia, where he also obtained the specialization in Pediatrics and Hematology. He is currently the Head of the Department of Paediatric Haematology and Oncology, IRCCS Bambino Gesù Children’s Hospital, Rome and Full Professor of Pediatrics at the Sapienza, University of Rome, Italy. He leads the largest programme of childhood allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) in Italy and was recently appointed President of the Italian Higher Council of Health (Consiglio Superiore di Sanità), the technical scientific advisory body to the Ministry of Health. In 2005, he also received the Gold Medal for merits in public health by the President of the Italian Republic. F Locatelli is an expert in haematological and oncological malignancies of childhood. He has been the President of the Italian Association for Pediatric Hematology-Oncology from 
2004–2006, and served as chairman of the EWOG-MDS consortium from 2005 to 2011. Currently, he coordinates the national protocols for children with newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukaemia and relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL). He has implemented in Italy the first-in-human academic studies on children with CD19+ lymphoid malignancies using 2nd-generation retroviral chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells and on children with GD2+ neuroblastoma. Professor Locatelli is also involved in the development and validation of gene therapy approaches in patients with thalassaemia and sickle cell disease and he has extensive experience in running Phase I/II clinical trials. He is the author or co-author of 1.030 peer-reviewed articles published in international journals and he has an overall impact factor above 5000 and an H-index of 97 (Scopus source).


Marco Fraccaro
Marco Fraccaro (26 September 1926 - 2 April 2008) was a distinguished geneticist and Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Pavia for over thirty years. Born in Pavia, he attended the local Liceo Classico Ugo Foscolo with and the Medical School of the University of Pavia where he graduated in 1950. After a few years at the local Institute of Pathological Anatomy he moved to Lionel Penrose in the Galton Laboratory at UCL in 1954 with a fellowship from the British Council and, a year later, to Jan Book’s laboratory in Uppsala where he stayed until 1958 during which time he met his future wife Inga. In 1960, he moved to the newly formed MRC Population Genetics Research Unit in Oxford under Alan Stevenson where he continued his work on cytogenetics that he had initiated in Uppsala. He returned to Pavia in 1962 where he started a highly successful and productive laboratory with funding from NATO and EURATOM and where he took up the Chair of Human Genetics, which he held until 2001.

Throughout his research Marco Fraccaro focussed primarily on sex chromosome abnormalities, especially the genetic abnormalities responsible for abnormal physical and sexual development, but he contributed to several other areas of Genetics such as the distribution in the population of specific types of congenital malformations and the effect of radiation on chromosomes of cells. Marco Fraccaro was deeply attached to Pavia and Oxford and there was hardly a conversation in which he failed to mention the life and history of these two cities. His love for Oxford was also expressed in a small book of quotations (Oxford for strangers of all sorts) which he published in 1997. From 1971 until 2002 he was Master of Collegio Cairoli, one of the University Colleges at Pavia. He run the College informally and effectively and made Cairoli a place of learning and debate for students and staff. He also made it into a meeting point for modern visual arts by organising a successful series of exhibitions of modern artists that will enrich the College for years to come. Marco Fraccaro has been one of the defining personalities of the University of Pavia in the second half of the 20th century and the lecture aims to recognise his interests in Science and the Arts and his intellectual legacy.


Image
A CAR-T cells attacking a breast cancer cell. Courtesy of Marco Davila, Moffitt Cancer Centre.


 




ElectroCardioGraphy

The Basic ElectroCardioGraphy Course is a 6 hours course offered to the students of Volta by Sergio Leonardi, a young professor of Cardiology at the University of Pavia. The Course will span three dates: January 26th, February 10th and February 24th 2022. Lectures will be held in English in the College lecture theatre at 6.00 pm. All medical students of Collegio A Volta, of both the Golgi and Harvey Course are warmly invited to attend the course.  The poster of the Course is available here.

Course Synopsis
This 6-hour course aims to provide medical students the knowledge and skills necessary to perform systematic analyses of the normal ECG, of the most common normal variants, of the diagnostic principles of myocardial ischemia and infarction, and of the most important arrhythmias. Finally, rapid ECG interpretation in patients with acute cardiovascular disease will be discussed.

Biographical Sketch
Sergio Leonardi studied Medicine and Cardiology at the University of Pavia from 1999 to 2008) and worked at the Duke Research Institute in Durham, North Carolina from 2009 to 2012 and was awarded a Master of Health Science (MHS) degree by Duke University in 2012. He is a member of staff of Policlinico S Matteo since 2012 where he heads the Cardiovascular Clinical Research Centre from 2021 and a member of staff of the University of Pavia since 2018. He lectures undergraduate and graduate medical students at the University of Pavia on pathophysiology, diagnosis and management of patients with cardiovascular diseases and has an innovative and extensive research programme in clinical cardiology. He has contributed to a number of major clinical studies and has an outstanding record of published work in top medical journals (New Engl Med J, Lancet, etc).

Image
Courtesy of Digirad.




 

From Black-Hole Singularities to Cyclic Cosmology

20 January 2022. 
Roger Penrose, Wadham College and Institute of Mathematics, University of Oxford

At 6.00 pm on 20th January 2022 English mathematician and Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose will give a lecture entitled: From Black-Hole Singularities toCyclic Cosmology.  The lecture will be online and is accessible through this link.

Sir Roger Penrose, a member of Wadham College and the Institute of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, has made fundamental contributions to mathematcs and physics through his work on black holes and developed a new and attractive theory on the origin of the universe.  He has written extensively and reached out to the lay public with a number of books including: The emperor's new mind (1989),  The nature of space and time (with S Hawking, 1996), The road to reality (2004) and Cycles of time (2010).  The poster of the lecture can be downloaded here. A short biography of Sir Roger's and a synopsis of the lecture are available below.


Biography

Sir Roger Penrose, was born in England, in Colchester, August 8, 1931. He studied Mathematics at University College London (BSc) and at the University of Cambridge where he was awarded a PhD  degree in Pure Mathematics for his work in algebra and geometry and where he carried out further research after his PhD as a Research Fellow of St John's College.

In 1964 Sir Roger was appointed as a Reader at Birkbeck College, London and two years later he was promoted to Professor of Applied Mathematics there. In 1973 he was appointed Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford where he is currently the Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics.
 
His research interests include many aspects of geometry, having made contributions to the theory of non-periodic tilings, general relativity theory and to the foundations of quantum theory.
Sir Roger was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London (1972) and a Foreign Associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences (1998). He has received numerous Prizes for his contributions to Mathematics and Physics including the Wolf Foundation Prize for Physics (jointly with Stephen Hawking for their studies of the universe); the Dannie Heinemann Prize from the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics; the Royal Society Royal Medal; the Dirac Medal and Medal of the British Institute of Physics; the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society; the Naylor Prize of the London Mathematical Society; the Albert Einstein Prize and Medal of the Albert Einstein Society; the 2006 Communications Award of the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics (JPBM) in the US and the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2020.


Synopsis
The “singularity theorems” of the 1960s, demonstrated that large enough celestial bodies, or collections of such bodies, would, collapse gravitationally, to what are referred to as “singularities”, where the equations and assumptions of Einstein’s classical theory of general relativity cannot be mathematically continued. These singularities are normally expected to lie deep within what are now referred to as black holes, and would, themselves, not be observable from the outside. Nevertheless, their presence is regarded as fundamentally problematic for classical physics and it is argued that a quantum theory of gravity would be needed to resolve the issue.

Similar arguments (initiated by Stephen Hawking) apply also the “Big-Bang” picture of the origin of the universe, showing, again, the inevitability of a “singular” structure of such an initial state. However, a puzzling yet fundamental distinction between these two types of singularity is found, deeply connected with the 2nd law of thermodynamics, according which the “randomness” in the universe increases with time. It is hard to see how any ordinary procedures of “quantization” of the gravitational field can resolve this problem,

Nevertheless, a deeper understanding of the special nature of the Big Bang can be illuminated by examining it from the perspective of conformal geometry, according to which the Big-Bang singularity becomes non-singular, this being quite different from the situation arising from the singularities in black holes. In conformal geometry, big and small become equivalent, which can only hold for a singularity of the type we seem to find at the Big Bang. This situation is also relevant in relating the extremely hot and dense Big Bang to the extremely cold and rarefied remote future of a previous “cosmic aeon”, leading to the picture of conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) according to which our Big Bang is viewed as the conformally continued remote future of a previous cosmic aeon. It turns out that there are now certain strong observational signals, providing some remarkable support for this highly non-intuitive but mathematically consistent CCC picture.


Image
A computer model of a black hole. Courtesy of https://www.shutterstock.com/images.


 




RNA Vaccines

22 April 2021. 
George P Smith, University of Missouri, Columbia

At 6.00 pm on 22 April 2021 George P Smith will give a lecture entitled: RNA Vaccines for Pandemic Threats (subtitle:Promise of the technology and economic justice in its development. The lecture will be online and is accessible through this link.

George Smith is Curators' Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.  He was born in Norwalk, Connecticut in the United States. He obtained a degree in Biology at Haverford College in Pennsylvania (1963) and a PhD in Bacteriology and Immunology at Harvard University (1970). After completing post-doctoral research at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he moved to the University of Missouri in Columbia where he remained there for the rest of his career excpet for two years at Duke University (1983–1984).

George P Smith adapted fundamental principles of evolution (diversity and selection) to laboratory science and specifically to protein engineering.  He developed a strategy - phage display - that enables rapid selection of protein varian for specific functions or new functions and for this work he was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2018.

The poster of the lecture is available here.

Image
Image: People queuing for food aid during the Covid pandemic in Pretoria, South Africa (20 May 2020, Reuters)

Ut Pictura Poesis et Poesis Pictura

15 April 2021. 
Patrick Boyde, St John's College, Cambridge

At 6.00 pm on 15 April 2021Patrick Boyde will give a lecture entitled: Ut Pictura Poesis & ut Poesis Pictura (subtitle: Simbiosi e interazioni tra Dante e i grandi artisti toscani all’epoca dei Comuni). The lecture will be online and is accessible through this link.

Patrick Boyde is Professor Emeritus of Italian at Cambridge University and Fellow Borderer of St John’s College at Cambridge University. He is a also a Fellow of the British Academy (1987), a Member of Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and a Honorary Member of the American Dante Society.  He received Gold Medals from the City of Florence (1995) and the Italian Republic (1998) and the title of ‘Commendatore Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana’ from Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, then President of the Republic for for outstanding contributions to Italian Culture.

Patrick Boyde has researched the work od Dante Alighieri from new theoretical perspectives at the crossroad of literature, philosophy and figurative arts. He published 5 books on Dante : Dante's Lyric Poetry (with Kenelm Foster, in two volumes), Oxford 1967; Dante's Style in his Lyric Poetry, Cambridge 1971 (translated in Italian as Retorica e stile nelle liriche di Dante, Napoli, Liguori editore, 1979); Dante Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos, Cambridge 1981 (translated in Italian as L'uomo nel cosmo: Filosofia della natura e poesia in Dante, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1984); Night Thoughts on Italian Poetry and Art, Cambridge 1985; Perception and Passion in Dante's ‘Comedy’, Cambridge 1993 (translated in Italian as ‘Lo color del core’. Visione, passione e ragione in Dante, Napoli, Liguori editore, 2002); Human Vices and Human Worth in Dante’s ‘Comedy’, Cambridge 2000, work that received the Sapegno Prize in 2002. The titles in bold are known among the scholars as Parick Boydes’s ‘trilogy’. Patrick Boyde is widely regarded as one of the major scholars of Dante’s work of all times.

The poster of the lecture is available here. The video of lecture is available here.

Image
Dante's Inferno (canto XVIII) from La Divina Commedia Illustrata da Sandro Botticelli. Engraving on parchment, painted in ink and partly colored. At the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) in Berlin.


Patient Assessment

The Systematic Approach to Patient Assessment Course is a 10-14 week interactive webinar series offered by Volta alumni Henriette Wa Katolo and Kesav A Vijayagopal and aimed at preparing medical students for assessing patients and become confident in taking histories, choosing relevant investigations, formulating differential diagnoses, and initiating management plans. The sessions will be highly interactive in nature and focus on clinical cases.

Henriette Wa Katolo and Kesav A Vijayagopal are currently carrying out postrgraduate training at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital in Dublin (HWK) and at the Wirral University Hospital in Wirral, a metropolitan borough of Liverpool. The poster outlining the scope of the Course is available here. College students interested in attending the Course may contact ....................... who will act as a point of liaison with Henriette and Kesav.

The dates and times of the meetings are detailed below.

 

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