Inaugural lectures at Imperial College London 2011-2012

Professor Nick Grassly discusses how we can make poliovirus vaccines more effective in the developing world in his inaugural lecture. For more information please visit

Professor Beate Kampmann talks about her experiences researching childhood immunity in Africa in her inaugural lecture. For more information, please visit

Professor of Tropical Paediatric Infectious Disease, Professor Kathryn Maitland, presents her inaugural lecture. Over 2 million children worldwide die each year from curable illnesses such as malaria and septicaemia (a bacterial bloodstream infection). The sophisticated levels of medical care in resource-rich countries have substantially increased the survival rates, but transferring these to sub-Saharan Africa is not always possible, as access to intensive care and the range of technologies is limited. Conducting clinical trials in Africa in real life situations can provide important advancements for these issues and global health but they also can result in unexpected and controversial findings. Recorded at Imperial College London on 08 Nov 2011 For more information please visit

Professor Helen Ward presents her inaugural lecture at the annual NHS teaching awards event. 'Hustling for health' refers to sex workers who apply skills developed through soliciting business in hostile environments to the struggle to access rights and healthcare. It also refers to a public health doctor using the skills she developed in medicine and political activism to raise money for preventative programmes in an Academic Health Science Centre, introduce radical educational programmes and smuggle more social science into a staunchly biomedical university. For more information please visit

A tale of stem cells, regenerative pharmacology and bone marrow biology from Professor Sara Rankin. Stem cells are often talked about in the context of stem cell therapies, which involve extracting and culturing the cells for injection back into the body to repair damaged tissues such as cartilage and bone. Making this approach widely available to patients is fraught with technical, regulatory and financial challenges, so finding alternative ways of harnessing the regenerative capacities of stem cells could be an attractive prospect. In this her Inaugural Lecture, Professor Rankin will present her work in discovering combinations of drugs that activate the stem cells in bone marrow without having to take them out of the body -- a new field of research known as regenerative pharmacology. For more information please visit Apologies for the glitches in this video, the file was corrupt and we have saved what we can....we are working on a better copy but for now this is all we have

Professor Fay Dowker presents her Inaugural Lecture. Two major scientific developments - relativity and quantum theory - have advanced our understanding of the physical world. However, despite their success in predicting experimental results, they remain revolutions in waiting. I will argue that the full potential of these discoveries will only be realised when they are brought together into a unified whole. The revolution that general relativity represents - the replacement of three-dimensional space with four-dimensional space-time as both stage and actor in the universe's grand play - has so far been only partially incorporated into the scientific practice of fundamental physics. Taking space-time seriously, as general relativity demands, means adopting the Dirac-Feynman 'sum-over-histories' approach to quantum theory and gives us our best chance of discovering a theory of quantum gravity, a framework for all of physics. For more information please visit