Medical Sciences Stream

The Medical Sciences Stream and the Natural Science Stream (including Oxford’s MPLS Division) will be joined together this year.

Friday 20 March (1:30pm to 9:00pm) and Saturday 21 March (9:00am to 5:00pm) - a Saturday only ticket is available for those that cannot attend on Friday

New College (Friday) and Jesus College (Saturday), Oxford

The Medical Sciences Stream includes all MPLS disciplines and welcomes those in the Natural Sciences. Those who register for this stream are also welcome to participate in the Natural Sciences Stream on Friday afternoon and vice versa. This stream is one of five disciplinary streams that make up Seeking Wisdom, the spring conference of Developing a Christian Mind. Past attendees are encouraged to come, listen to new talks, and take part in discussion with new attendees.

**Please note our eligibility criteria: This event is for University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes postgraduates, postdocs, academic staff. If you do not fit this criteria, are DCM Alumni, or in a continuing education program, please complete this form and we will review your request **

Friday 20TH March

Convenor: Ard Louis, Professor of Theoretical Physics

1:30 pm Registration in New College with coffee & tea

2:00 pm A Christian Defence of Theoretical Research - Bruno Cavalar, Research Associate in Computer Science.

3:30 pm Coffee & tea

4:00 pm Panel of Christians in the Sciences, Medicine and Engineering

Including Monique Andersson

Miriam Klein-Flügge, Associate Professor, Wellcome Henry Dale and ERC-UKRI Fellow, Oxford Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging

Samuel Cohen, Professor of Mathematics

and more to be announced.

The following events are held jointly with all streams at New College.

6:00 pm Prayer in New College Chapel

6:30 pm Drinks at the New College Bar

7:30 pm Dinner in the New College Dining Hall

Saturday 21st March: Spin-outs, Start ups and Tech entrepreneurship

Conveners: Ard Louis, Professor of Theoretical Physics; Adora Lovestrand, Principal, Sovereign’s Capital; Lord Lionel Tarassenko, President of Reuben College and Professor of Electrical Engineering; Mark Younger, Founder and Managing Partner, Acclimate Ventures; and Jakob Zeitler, Pioneer Fellow, Department of Statistics and Big Data Institute

9:00 am Registration in Jesus College with coffee & tea

9:05 am Prayer

9:30 am Session 3 - Andrew Godley, Professor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation, University of Sussex

10:15 am Startups, Scholarship & Sin - Ard Louis, Professor of Theoretical Physics

The modern scientific method arose not so much from faith in human rationality, but from suspicion of it.  Influenced by the Reformation’s emphasis on Augustinian thought, early figures such as Francis Bacon,  Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke  emphasised humanity’s talent for self-deception, which theology calls the noetic effects of sin. Their response was methodological: repeatable experiments, careful observation, and communal scrutiny, the precursors of peer review.  

These practices remain central to academic life, even if their theological motivations are largely forgotten. As Richard Feynman put it, “The first principle [of science] is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool… You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.’’ 

This talk revisits those theological insights, drawing parallels between modern academic knowledge production and contemporary startup culture.

11:00 am Coffee & tea

11:30 am Short Talks by Christian Entrepreneurs - Chaired by Mark Younger, Founder and Managing Partner, Acclimate Ventures, and Adora Lovestrand, Principal, Sovereign’s Capital

1:00 pm Lunch

2:00 pm Is Artificial General Intelligence compatible with a Christian worldview? - Lord Lionel Tarassenko, President of Reuben College and Professor of Electrical Engineering.

Machine Learning as a form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) first began to emerge about 40 years ago, but it has taken off as generative AI in the last 5 years, with Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini having hundreds of millions of users. This talk will explain in general terms how the main features of LLMs combine to give us the human-like chatbots with which we have become familiar.

There is now a race amongst big tech companies to go beyond generative AI and achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or super-intelligence. For many leading AI developers, this drive is only compatible with an atheistic worldview. However, this premise is being challenged by other AI researchers, whose views will be shown to be more compatible with the Christian perspective of the uniqueness of human beings. Ultimately our view of AI is conditioned by our understanding of what it means to be human, and I will argue that a Christian viewpoint is entirely consistent with a commitment to developing AGI.

3:00 pm Trying to Build Things that Matter - David Howey, Professor of Engineering Science

3:30 pm Coffee and Tea

4:00 pm Short Presentations by Entrepreneurs and Investors

Including: Daniel Weninger, Oxford Pastorate, “Collective Entrepreneurship by Mennonites in Paraguay”

Reuben Coulter, “Faith Driven Investor”  

5:00 pm Drinks Reception