Overview
This event is sold out. To be added to the waiting list, please call: +44(0)1223 761527 or email alumni-events@trin.cam.ac.uk.
Medicine is increasingly looking to technology for the next breakthrough in diagnosing and curing disease, and more broadly in assisting and improving well-being. To coincide with the University’s Alumni Festival, this year’s TrinTalk: Medicine and Technology, will feature global experts in their field who have made a breakthrough that has transformed medicine or whose research uses technology to advance what medicine can already achieve.
Tickets are priced at a reduced rate of £25 per person for alumni and guests and include lunch in Hall as well as tea, coffee, and drinks. Booking is available online.
We are delighted to have already confirmed three speakers who work on the cutting-edge of medicine and technology: Sir Gregory Winter (1970), Professor Sir Shankar Balasubramanian (e1994), Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald (e2002), and Dr Jem Rashbass (1980).
Knighted in 2004 for his services to Molecular Biology, Sir Greg is a scientist, inventor and entrepreneur. His talk, entitled “Bicycles as Magic Bullets”, will focus on his company’s efforts to develop ‘first in class’ medicines to treat cancer and other debilitating diseases.
Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald’s talk – “Cytosponge: Using Technology to Detect Cancer” – will draw on her research of using technology for the early detection of oesophageal cancer. Professor Fitzgerald was awarded the prestigious Westminster medal and prize for her first proof of concept work on the CytospongeTM or the ‘pill on a String’, which she has spent the last 20 years developing.
Knighted in 2017 for his services to Science and Medicine, Professor Sir Shankar Balasubramanian will present a talk on “Decoding Human Genomes on a Population Scale”. Professor Shankar is the Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and senior group leader at the Cambridge Institute. He works on the chemistry, structure and function of nucleic acids. He is a co-inventor of the leading next generation DNA sequencing methodology, Solexa (now Illumina), that has made routine, accurate, low-cost sequencing of human genomes a reality and has revolutionised biology.
Dr Jem Rashbass, who trained as a medical doctor at UCL, before working on graduate studies under Professor Sir John Gurdon in Cambridge, will discuss “The Challenge of Personalised Medicine”. Drawing on his vast experience over a 25-year career in healthcare data systems, Jem is the founder of a social enterprise, Health Data Insight C.I.C., which acts as an ethical information intermediary for health data.
Further biographical information is listed below as well as the day’s full programme. We very much look forward to seeing you at this year’s TrinTalk.