Inaugural lectures at Imperial College London 2013-2014

What links gas molecules, charged particles, bacteria and fish? Hear how partial differential equations help us understand their collective behaviour. Professor José Antonio Carrillo de la Plata's inaugural lecture For more information please visit

Inaugural lecture given by Michael Huth, Professor of Computer Science, Department of Computing, Imperial College London The twenty first century has already been defined by cyberspace, powering a technology and information revolution that will have a profound impact on societies, industries, and the public sector. Smartphones, augmented reality glasses and 'thinking' robots are examples of how we will feel the influence of cyberspace on what we do and who we are. Although cyberspace has the potential to provide huge benefits to society, its infrastructure was designed in the last century with different applications in mind. We are now aware of security issues that could jeopardise our personal savings, make our private data public or in extreme cases even cost us our lives. So when can we trust online interactions?In this lecture I will explain how we gather the evidence required to trust and control interactions online, and how we use advances in automated reasoning to validate these

Plastic electronics are set to revolutionise the ways we learn, communicate, shop and entertain ourselves. Thomas Anthopoulos, Professor of Experimental Physics, Department of Physics at Imperial College London gives his inaugural lecture. Recorded on 26 Mar 2014 for more information please visit

Professor Sheena McCormack (Medicine) discusses the trials and tribulations of HIV prevention in her inaugural lecture. Approximately 7,000 people catch HIV every day, twice as many as can be treated using current resources. Sheena McCormack joined the global effort to find new strategies to prevent HIV in 1994, assessing first the potential of a candidate vaccine and then that of candidate vaginal gels. One of these gels, PRO2000/5, progressed through to the last stage of clinical testing, but turned out not to reduce HIV. In 2010, researchers in the field were finally rewarded when two trials revealed that significantly fewer people caught HIV amongst participants taking a drug usually used to treat people who already have the virus. Although the results of later trials have been inconsistent, there was enough evidence for the US drug authorities to licence Truvada as a daily pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in 2012. The priority now is to promote HIV testing and embrace the range of

With so much relying on autonomous machines such as aerial vehicles and remote submarines, verifying that their software actually works is crucial. We have long relied upon automatic systems for many mundane tasks in our lives. But much more sophisticated adaptive systems, or fully autonomous systems, have been under development and testing for the past few years. We will shortly be able to build automobiles that can drive themselves, robot babysitters that can look after our children and the elderly, and intelligent buildings that can anticipate the needs of their inhabitants. As machines occupy a greater part of our lives, should we trust these machines to do no harm? In this talk Professor Alessio Lomuscio will survey the novel, logic-based model checking techniques he developed with collaborators at Imperial and abroad, report on the progress they have achieved in the past 10 years, and try to suggest an answer to this question. For more information please visit

Modelling how molecules build structures is important to many industrial processes. One of the greatest achievements of the 20th century was the foundation of atomic theory - the understanding that the macroscopic behaviour of matter is a direct consequence of the forces that act between atoms and molecules. The advent of the computer age paved the way for in silico modelling of these interactions, and computer simulation emerged as a scientific tool of unprecedented potential. In this lecture Professor Erich Muller will explore the origins of molecular dynamics simulations, from the first applications to solve Newton's equations of motion for simple model systems to current systems for studying the spontaneous self-assembly of complex fluids. From reducing paint drying times to desalinisation of seawater, molecular simulation provides invaluable insights to the behaviour of industrially and biologically important fluids such as liquid crystals, amphiphiles and macromolecules. For more

Scientifically viewed, the heart is a chemically powered, electrically controlled, mechanical pump, but the way in which it performs is nothing short of amazing. Heart structure and function are tightly interrelated in ways that we are still discovering. Cardiac muscle hosts a multitude of complex regulatory mechanisms that allow the heart to perform even after transplantation into another body and multiple feedback mechanisms provide the heart with an astonishing ability to adapt to the body's constantly changing demand in blood circulation. This happens during every heartbeat and roughly a million times during every ten-day period of our life. Given the importance of cardiac activity, it is surprising how many aspects of the heart are still poorly understood. This lecture will show that linking scientific observations of structure and function from sub-cellular scales to the whole body is essential in driving fundamental research and clinical application. Professor Peter Kohl from th

Human prehistory is defined by materials: stone, bronze and iron. Today materials underpin almost all modern technologies. In the silicon age, computer simulation has established itself as a powerful tool both for developing existing materials and for inventing new ones. First-principles simulations, based on solving the equations of quantum mechanics from scratch, provide the capability to predict how materials will behave before they have even been made. However in spite of advances in computer hardware, traditional calculations become prohibitively expensive for more than a few hundred atoms. In this lecture Professor Peter Haynes describes the development of computational methods that are dramatically more efficient, enabling calculations on much larger scales. He also describes the implementation of this research within ONETEP -- a general-purpose code employed by a growing community of academic and commercial users -- and its challenges and opportunities. Professor Peter Haynes,

Inaugural Lecture - Jeremy Chittenden, Professor of Plasma Physics and Co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies in the Department of Physics, Imperial College London Nuclear fusion powers the stars and could be an almost inexhaustible source of clean, renewable energy on Earth. Are we getting close at last? For more information please visit

Inaugural lecture - Professor Ulrik Egede. Rare and fleeting particles called beauty mesons could be the key to understanding the nature of dark matter in the universe. For more information please visit