Advanced Studies Centre

The Keble Advanced Studies Centre will provide an exciting, new structure and facilities to promote the exchange of ideas between different academic specialisms. Its purpose will be to bring together expertise from across the world, especially through the stimulation of research clusters: collaborative relationships between researchers with different backgrounds but focused on common problems. Utilising the unique structure of an Oxford College to draw upon techniques, insights or models from one area of academic study and apply them to others, our research clusters will bring down disciplinary boundaries generating new ideas and innovative solutions.

Through some initial philanthropic gifts in support of our academic vision several research clusters are already developing in Imaging, Creativity and Networks.

Imaging

The cluster aims to develop improved imaging technologies to achieve this through multi-disciplinary collaborative science. The so-called theragnostic approach combines diagnostic and therapeutic methods that enable treatments to be targeted more effectively and in a more personal manner. An example would be the use of bioluminescent materials injected into the bloodstream to enable the effectiveness of cancer drugs reducing the blood supply to a tumour to be directly monitored. The bioluminescence aids in the imaging, because there is no such natural signal in our bodies. New advances in imaging science may change the way we think about our bodies and minds, pro

Imaging includes chemists, engineers, medical scientists, philosophers and physiologists with shared interests in developing ways of seeing and imaging the physical processes that happen inside a person or animal. The past two centuries have seen successive revolutions in how we visualise and understand the ways in which illnesses begin and progress in the human body. These range from staining biological samples with selected chemicals, to the development of microscopy and X-rays, to techniques such as MRI scanning today. Ideally, the pathophysiology of cells, tissues and organs in living organisms should be studied in real time, allowing diseases to be identified and imaged, and their treatment monitored using specific targeted therapies.

Networks

The Networks cluster offers exciting possibilities in understanding complex real-world problems and their underlying patterns in fields as diverse as finance, biology, engineering, ecology, social science or mathematics.

How may we better understand complex systems and the underlying network-like patterns that exist within them? Physicists, computer scientists, statisticians, biologists and economists within the Networks cluster are exploring these important questions using sophisticated statistical analyses and simulation methods, originally developed to understand quantum physics. These techniques can be applied to unravel the structure of communities, the intricate behaviour of complex networks, their resilience or robustness, and how they evolved to be optimized for specific tasks. In social networks, it can be used to describe the dissemination of ideas and opinions, in biology it can examine the spread of epidemics or the complex modularity of protein interaction networks in cells. Recent work based on studies of the dynamics of ecological food webs, within which infectious diseases can spread, has drawn important lessons for the ways in which financial networks of banks operate and sometimes fail, as in the recent global financial crisis. There are significant potential applications in many areas where understanding and predicting the behaviour of systems is important, such as the formation of congestion in road traffic networks or in identifying where potential faults in factory assembly lines occur.

Creativity

Through slightly unusual connections between specialists, we also hope to set up conditions under which creativity occurs, so that the cluster aims to both study creativity and to be creative.

Archaeologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, geographers and writers make up the Creativity cluster. All are interested in questions related to how humans create and how the creative process works. A common misconception is to see important creative ideas emerge from the work of a lone genius, but what of the influence of community, colleagues and wider social interaction? Is it possible to stimulate and encourage creativity and if so how best might it be done? In the past, what is the role of material culture and objects in shaping the brain and human behaviour and society?

Cluster members bring their insight from different disciplines to understand the nature of creativity and the creative process in terms of the origins and development of human cognitive processes, the mapping of the brain and its disparate parts and the artistic, political and anthropological aspects of the creative process. Creativity is a crucial aspect of the human condition and fundamental to understanding the human experience, both past and present. By bringing together thinkers in different disciplines the cluster hopes to develop a more detailed understanding of the process of creativity.

These initial groupings have grown from existing strengths within the College. When the facilities are established further groups will be developed both on a planned and spontaneous basis. We intend that the Keble Advanced Studies Centre will be a leading brand in innovative research.

Another significant donation has enabled us to establish the role of Interim Director of the ASC.  Dr Tom Higham has taken on this role and is driving the research programme forward while stimulating ideas for the development of additional collaborative clusters.

Research fellows

The Keble Advanced Studies Centre will also play a leading role in the appointment of world class young academics as research fellows to strengthen our research clusters and our teaching provision.

Senior Research Visitors

Another aim of the Keble Advanced Studies Centre is to support and subsidise the visits – of varying lengths, from a week to a term – of world-leading thinkers, who will be keen to promote collaboration across conventional academic boundaries especially in seeking to resolve global problems.

Such individuals may be established academics, but will also be drawn from the worlds of business, the professions, the arts and the media.