Inaugural lectures at Imperial College London 2012-2013

Professor Philippa Gardner's inaugural lecture. 10 Oct 2012 Imperial College London Tracking program footprints: guaranteeing what computers do We cannot yet guarantee what computers do. Our understanding of programs has not kept pace with their increasing complexity: software licences give no guarantees; simple program errors turn into major attacks; web apps make your browser hang; and concurrent programs are too difficult to write. Mathematical reasoning techniques could provide guarantees about what programs do. However, such techniques are only just beginning to scale to large programs. In this, her inaugural lecture Professor Philippa Gardner will talk about resource reasoning, whose pivotal concept is the idea of 'footprints'. A footprint identifies the essential memory used by a program, which can be separated from the untouched memory, enabling the reasoning to scale. Professor Gardner introduces abstract resource reasoning, focusing on abstract footprints such as sets and web

Professor David Dexter talks about his research into the causes of Parkinson's and his role in the UK Brain Bank at his inaugural lecture. For more information please visit

Professor John Dear (Mechanical Engineering) explains how research is helping us understand how materials and structures could fail under extreme conditions such as blasts. For more information please visit

Professor Dan Crisan gives his inaugural lecture. Stochastic analysis is the branch of mathematics that looks at understanding and modelling systems that behave randomly. For more information please visit

Surgeon Professor Thanos Athanasiou talks about the challenges facing cardiac surgery in the current economic climate in his inaugural lecture. For more information please visit

Downsizing the internal combustion engine may be the key to low carbon vehicles, says Professor Ricardo Martinez-Botas (Mechanical Engineering) in his inaugural lecture. For more information please visit

Physicist Professor Tim Horbury explains the science behind space plasmas and why understanding turbulence is so important. For more information please visit

Several metals, including iron, cobalt, copper and zinc, are naturally present in living organisms and play essential roles in a wide range of biological processes. In addition, some metal complexes have shown to be very successful therapeutic and diagnostic agents. Examples of these are platinum-based anticancer drugs, used in chemotherapy since the 1970s, and gadolinium-based MRI contrast agents for medical imaging. For several years Ramon Vilar and his team have been studying the chemistry of metal complexes in living organisms with the aim of developing new metal-based drugs as well as gaining a better molecular understanding of biological processes. They have a particular interest in studying how novel metal complexes interact with selected enzymes and DNA. For more information please visit

Professor Justin Stebbing explains how finding new signalling targets for drug treatments could help prevent cancer patients relapse. For more information please visit

Professor Ann Muggeridge delivers her inaugural lecture on getting the last drops out of the planet's ever-decreasing oil reserves. Today crude oil forms a major source of our energy, particularly for transport, and is projected to remain so for many decades to come. It is, however, as many of us are aware, a finite resource and will eventually run out. Not only this, but the carbon dioxide produced by burning oil makes it a significant contributor to climate change. This lecture explores how oil is recovered, focussing particularly on how much conventional oil is left behind by current recovery methods and the opportunities to exploit that remaining oil through new and emerging technologies. For more information please visit