King’s College, Cambridge Annual Report 2012 Annual Report 2012 Contents The Provost 2 The Fellowship 5 Undergraduates at King’s 19 Graduates at King’s 23 Tutorial 29 Research 37 Library 41 Chapel 44 Choir 49 Bursary 52 Staff 55 Development 57 Appointments & Honours 62 Obituaries 67 Information for Non Resident Members 227 intrigued by the idea of having this new King’s hostel named after them or The Provost their family should contact me. At present the remaining costs are covered by the prospective surrender of the TCR lease and the sale of outlying houses used by graduates, money that could be used instead for the pressing needs of teaching, research, and student support. 2 Although previous reports of my demise 3 THE PROVOST proved to be exaggerated, I can now If you stand on the SW corner of the Market Place, opposite the wide (finally, definitely, and conclusively) report passage that leads past Great St Mary’s church to King’s Parade, the that this is the last occasion on which, as building immediately in front is the College’s completely refurbished Provost, I introduce the College’s Annual THE PROVOST Market Hostel. The old rendering has now been stripped back to the brick, Report. As I write, the election of my which blends well in colour with the chapel behind and Great St Mary’s successor is well advanced and it will be opposite. Then, looking further south, Market Hostel changes texture with known long before this is read. the new part built in the Sixties, which many of you will remember, either from the row caused by its building or from having lived there. After that, One of the pleasures of the position is the looking still further south away from the Market, there is the interruption chance it has offered to meet so many of St Edward’s church before we can see the next King’s hostel (now called non-resident members. It has been my Spalding) sitting over the entrance to the Arts Theatre. This view from the privilege not just to hear about your Market is terminated by our new building, currently polythene sheathed as Professor Ross Harrison highly varied lives but also to discover the the work has already commenced. Being at the corner, it will have the warm feeling that so many of you have reverse view back to the Market as well as the view down Benet Street to the towards the College. It is still your college now just as much as it was when A staircase part of our main buildings. you were in residence. We were grateful then for your concern as students to make this a special place; we are grateful now for your continuing help, With the Arts Theatre probably producing a new restaurant unto the energy, and ideas. pavement, Jamie Oliver’s opposite and two new upmarket restaurants under the new King’s hostel, this part of Cambridge will be the restaurant quarter of One thing that has happened since I last wrote is that we have managed to Cambridge. Or, with the Arts Theatre, the Corpus theatres and the bookshops, acquire the freehold of the bank at the corner of Benet Street where it turns the arts and restaurant quarter. Or, more simply, the King’s quarter, where we north towards the Guildhall and Market Place. The ground floor will be have an almost continuous set of rooms in urban space, between shops and used commercially but we are converting the upper floors into a new hostel streets, balancing the lawn-fringed cathedral or country house buildings on to replace the considerably more distant and inconvenient Tennis Court the other side of King’s Parade. We are quiet, contemplative, aesthetic, Road. This has been made possible by the gifts of King’s Members to whom musical, spiritual; we are also busy in the bustling world. I appealed for help in seizing the special opportunity. We have also been aided by the interest free loans of other non resident members to help us Two years ago, when we had a relative upturn, I incautiously wrote about schedule the payment. Incidentally, the donation book on this project is not that summer’s tripos results. This meant that I was caught with continuing yet closed and anyone who would like to offer substantial support or is the theme in my last year’s introduction, when I had to report that the forward march of King’s was (naturally, only briefly and temporarily) halted. I am pleased to report that this summer’s results were better. The The Fellowship details can be found elsewhere in the Report. What is more significant is that I can’t remember so cheerful and confident an annual July meeting of the College Council, when the results are carefully analysed. As well as a 4 pleasing overall result (where, as usual, we concentrate on the final year), Fellows moving on 5 THE FELLOWSHIP there are many individual success stories which do not show in the The following Fellows left their Fellowships in King’s in the last year: statistics, but were highly satisfying not just to the students concerned but • DR STEPHEN ALFORD also their supervisors. • DR ROWAN BOySON THE PROVOST This remains a very special educational system, increasingly verging on the • DR CHRIS BROOKE unique. I would like to pay tribute to the dedication of the tutors, directors of studies, and other supervising Fellows who put so much care into making • DR GUI CARMONA it work. They do this on top of maintaining Cambridge as a great research • DR SUBHAJyOTI DE university, one of only two in Europe in the international top ten. They do it for, and with, love. It takes hard work, imagination, and intellectual • DR VICTORIA HARRIS stimulation on both sides to make our special supervision system work; the • DR ANDRAS JUHASz magic is that it still does in spite of all the increasing pressures on academics in a modern major university. • DR WALID KHALED • DR JESSICA LEECH I now conclude this run of prefaces and therefore finally sign off on one of my more minor duties as Provost. As I’ve said in previous years, I do hope that • DR EUGENE LIM you enjoy these descriptions of King’s, both living and dead. I’m aware that the current preface sounds more cheerful that some of my previous • DR JENNIFER REGAN-LEFEBVRE introductions but you can put that down to the fact that I’m leaving. Farewell. • DR JAKE ROWBOTTOM Ross HaRRison • DR BRIAN SLOAN new Fellows DR Clément mouHot (Fellow, Mathematics) Clément Mouhot studied mathematics at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, where he received his PhD in 2004. He then worked as a CNRS researcher at Université Paris-Dauphine and Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He visited the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of Cambridge in 2009-2010 and in October 2010, he joined Cambridge as a reader in mathematical physics in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Statistical management and directing business services in the Royal Navy Mathematics. His main area of research is the kinetic equations of statistical Headquarters. He left the Royal Navy in 2007, having served in a number of physics, at the interplay of partial differential equations, functional analysis warships, and in overseas operations in the Falkland Islands, Diego Garcia, and stochastic processes, and motivated by the mathematical understanding of Gibraltar and Andros Island in the Bahamas. irreversibility and entropy. Other academic interests include history and 6 philosophy of science, mathematical economics, and popularisation of science. Philip and his family then moved to New zealand and he took up an 7 THE FELLOWSHIP appointment within the New zealand Defence Force as Supply Chain mR niCk Cavalla (Extraordinary Fellow) Manager to the Royal New zealand Navy, and subsequently as the Navy’s Nick Cavalla read Mathematics at King’s College, graduating in 1981. He Director of Programmes. He returned to the United Kingdom in October then began a career in finance, which led eventually to his appointment in 2011 in support of his wife, Stella, who is currently pursuing post-graduate THE FELLOWSHIP 2007 as the first chief investment officer of the University of Cambridge, studies in the Faculty of Education. responsible for the management of the central endowment fund. Nick is also one of the external members of the King’s Investment Committee, A keen skier and squash player who also enjoys outdoor activities, he has two contributing to the oversight of the College’s investments. grown-up daughters and Benjamin, aged six. Between 1997 and 2007 Nick was employed by Man Group plc. As CIO DR Felix FisCHeR (Fellow, Computer Science & Mathematics) of one of the investment divisions of the company, he was responsible Felix Fischer was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Engineering for finding, and carrying out due diligence into alternative investment and Applied Sciences and an affiliate of the Center for Research on managers, and arranging and monitoring investments. Previously Nick was Computation and Society. He received his doctorate in Computer Science from a director of GNI Limited and the portfolio manager of a systematic fund LMU Munich in 2009 for work on the computational complexity of solution that invested in foreign exchange markets. His earlier career included concepts in restricted classes of strategic games. His research is more generally periods working for County NatWest Investment Management and Touche concerned with computational aspects of preference aggregation and strategic Ross & Co, where he qualified as a chartered accountant. He is a member behaviour, and with strategic aspects of computation.