Oxford Mathematicians don't stop being Oxford Mathematicians when they leave us. Of course not everyone puts their experience to direct use and some may prefer to forget it, but what they all have in common is stories. And more than ever at this time, we need stories.
So we asked our Alumni how the current situation is affecting them. The response was overwhelming and very human. So here are a selection of stories. If you wish to contact any of them for support or sharing of ideas please email Dyrol (@email).
Alumni Stories:
Like many of the Alumni, Patricia Phillips is, in her own words, confined to barracks.
Alexandra Hewitt (Merton 1988) works for the Advanced Mathematics Support Programme (AMSP) where she is busy providing vital online support for teachers. She is also setting up virtual Church Services (in Zoom for those of us cursed/blessed by remote team working).
Jonathan Frank (Jesus 1990) is Director of Big Give, the largest charity match funding platform in the UK. In partnership with the National Emergencies Trust they are running an emergency COVID-19 campaign to double all donations to their appeal made through the platform
Adrienne Propp (Corpus Christi 2017) now lives in Washington DC, and is working at nonprofit nonpartisan think tank RAND Corporation working on a project with the state of Virginia assessing the existing models of COVID-19 and integrating them.
After working for 40 years for the NHS as Clinician, Researcher and Educator, Michael Venning (Balliol 1966) is pondering a return to action as a Maths teacher. But in the meantime he has just had his offer to return to the NHS accepted.
Jeremy Penwarden (Merton 1979) is Director of D MacIntyre and Son and is building a new business from the ashes of a hairdressing supply business, including sourcing a test kit for COVID-19 from China, which he would like to bring to market.
Kei Davis (1985) is working from home on a magnetohydrodynamics code for inertial confinement fusion modelling. He works at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the USA.
Zar Amrolia (Christ Church 1983) is Co-CEO of XTX Markets who have generously donated £20m to three charities in the UK, New York and Paris in their fight against COVID-19.
Kirill Makharinsky (St John's 2003) is CEO of Enki. They have a data course for teams that combines remote instructors with software to make it efficient and cost-effective.
Jonathan Farley (Lincoln 1991) is a Professor of Mathematics at Morgan State University. He has been turning his mathematical skills to figuring out smarter ways to allocate customer time in supermarkets in the era of social distancing.
Kevin Olding (Magdalen 2003), after a career teaching maths, now makes maths videos through his Mathsaurus website and YouTube channel.
Richard Cayzer (Balliol 1990) works to accelerate the data science capability of catastrophe threat modelling including pandemics through his range of contacts across financial services and law enforcement.
Kishor Kale (St John's 1983) has lobbied his local MP and local Liberal Democrat Prospective Parliamentary Candidate to ask for home-delivery volunteers to be given free FFP3 respirators and free training in their use.
Alok Gupta (Hertford 2006) is leading Data Science & Machine Learning for DoorDash (the largest food delivery company in the US). He heads a team of 20 statisticians, mathematicians, physicists & economists who are creating new algorithms and re-training models to keep up with the change in the market and updated delivery best practices.
John Hampson (Jesus 1992) works with data-collection and analysis, and in particular with large data-sets. He is working on a project for monitoring specifically the health situation of NHS employees which is currently lacking. John is looking for partners in the NHS and beyond to help him in the initiative.
P.S. The image above is of horses struggling with social distancing on Port Meadow where Tommy Gee (Brasenose 1942) remembers sailing Fairy Fireflies and Yorkshire Barrels during the Second World War.
Ilse Ryder (St Hugh's 1947) is turning the increase in time afforded by the lockdown into a return to Mathematics, pursuing an interest in number theory by an investigation of semi-primes.
Ronald Brown (New 1953), Emeritus Professor, Bangor University, has a website dedicated to his continued passion for mathematics, especially what has in the past seemed unfashionable.
Caroline Jackson (Queen’s 1989) works in the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government and leads a team who are supporting domestic abuse refuges to stay open during the pandemic. Those who work in the sector are expecting a rise in demand as the lockdown continues. Caroline is also doing some maths home schooling with her two boys.
Caroline Jackson (Queen’s 1989) works in the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government and leads a team who are supporting domestic abuse refuges to stay open during the pandemic. Those who work in the sector are expecting a rise in demand as the lockdown continues. Caroline is also doing some maths home schooling with her two boys.
Ronald Stamper (Univ 1955) is researching and developing technology for transforming traditional bureaucracies into CHIs or Collective Human Intelligences.
Tony Hill (Brasenose 1968) is working on his Diversity in STEM project, aiming to get more kids from disadvantaged backgrounds in to the subjects. He is looking at cost-effective ways to ramp up numbers and is in contact with Departments across Oxford and umbrella organisations across the education sector. He is keen to talk to potential partners.
Aaron Morris (St Anne's 2013) is joint founder of PostEra. PostEra uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to discover new pharmaceutical drugs. Its COVID-19 Moonshot project bringing together collaborators in Open Source to work on COVID-19 anti-virals.
Robert Christie (Magdalen 1962) is Treasurer of the Fishbourne Village Volunteer Squad. They provide services to the people living in the Parish including shopping, picking up prescriptions, dog walking and telephone chats with the lonely. We suspect there are many more like him.
Nick Taylor (St Catherine's 2014) is taking a break from his PhD in Mathematical Epidemiology in Cambridge to work with colleagues on an interactive model designed to illustrate (rather than accurately predict) the effect of how various control strategies applied today might impact different countries' number of infections, hospitalisations, ICU bed requirements and deaths.
Dominic Elliott Smith (St Catherine's 2001) asks if there are any forums, slack chats or groups etc. which have been setup to discuss the ongoing pandemic amongst alumni groups?
Ethel Heyes (St Hilda’s 1960) is long retired from a career in computing and has been volunteering with Citizens Advice for 30 years. During lockdown she is taking calls from home on Citizens' Advice's telephone service, Adviceline.
Tom Collins (Keble 2005-08) is now a Lecturer in Music Technology at the University of York. During lockdown he has got involved in an AI Eurovision Song Contest (have a listen) "using the maths and stats that I learned at Oxford."
Keiann Yeung (Univ 2010) is working at City Mental Health Alliance Hong Kong as Business Development Lead, working on a weekly COVID-19 bulletin which aims to combat misinformation and offer support around COVID-19’s impact on individuals' mental health in the workplace.
Jin Ke (Ying) (Somerville 2011) is a secondary school maths teacher in Oxfordshire who is working from home and trying to keep students busy including developing a “Zoom Escape” activity where people can collaborate online with friends to “escape” their home virtually.
Dave Blake (Exeter 1978) works as PA to an Archdeacon in the Diocese of Lichfield, and is involved with drawing up lists of Cemeteries and Crematoria within and just outside the Diocese, plus lists of retired Clergy (under 70) who might be willing to help out with the expected glut of Funerals. He is also trying to interpret the varying advice over how many people can attend a funeral (the consensus is a maximum of 10 people).
John Harris (Magdalen 1978) now specialises in digital cartography and is using the spare lockdown time to do voluntary work on a Green Spaces web mapping application for a Monmouth Climate Action group.
Richard Chapman (Wadham 1968) is a long retired actuary, but in this lockdown has resurrected his interest in number theory and in Goldbach's Conjecture in particular.
Brian Reade (Wolfson 1993) is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants and an essential worker in Jersey's Finance Industry. He is currently living in a hotel room to shield Italian in-laws, while plotting COVID-19's progress with interest and nostalgia for his PhD in population dynamics of infectious diseases.
Rachel Harrison (New 1979) is Professor of Computer Science at Oxford Brookes University where she is currently re-writing lectures and assignments to make them suitable for online learning, and planning research to help defeat the Covid-19 virus via software and AI.
Richard Pinch (Christ Church 1977) is Vice-President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the UK professional and learned society for mathematics. He is currently working with the other officers and staff to explore ways in which the IMA can deliver services and support to its members and the mathematical community online.
Richard Pinch (Christ Church 1977) is Vice-President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the UK professional and learned society for mathematics. He is currently working with the other officers and staff to explore ways in which the IMA can deliver services and support to its members and the mathematical community online.
Chris Rimmer (Pembroke 1989) has been software developer, house husband, and is now a maths LSA (Learning Support Assistant) at a secondary school. With the enforced isolation, he has continued his passion for economics by adding a video to his YouTube channel about an economic model based on balance sheets and net worth for studying the effects of individual actions (such as QE) on the whole economy.
Abhav Kedia (Exeter 2013) is working with a non-profit and doctors to develop an application to enable antibody testing in India.
Juan Jimenez (Lincoln 1994) is a Software Development Manager for a multinational company working in the automotive industry. His evening non-paid job is working for kin-keepers, a start up trying to help the ageing population live longer on their own. He has recently made a YouTube video to help with the data gathering challenges posed by COVID-19 and is looking for support.
Jacob Armstong (St Catherine's 2012) worked as a Data Scientist for Oxford University in infectious disease epidemiology, and is now pursuing a DPhil in Computer Science in Oxford. However, given recent events, he's working with his old team again studying and integrating the NHS’s COVID-19 data into the UK Biobank (a health research resource covering the entire medical histories of 500,000 participants, available to researchers globally).
Vlad Margarint (St John's 2015) is a Postdoctoral Fellow of Mathematics at NYU Shanghai. Together with a NeuroScientist he met in Oxford he has coordinated a project which translated the South Korean Guide on COVID-19 from English to Romanian. The work has been used by the Romanian Government and hospitals and relevant groups around the country.
John Hampson (Jesus 1992) works with data-collection and analysis, and in particular with large data-sets. He is working on a project for monitoring specifically the health situation of NHS employees which is currently lacking. John is looking for partners in the NHS and beyond to help him in the initiative.
Not bad at all. Well done all of you. Have you got a story?
P.S. The image above is of horses struggling with social distancing on Port Meadow where Tommy Gee (Brasenose 1942) remembers sailing Fairy Fireflies and Yorkshire Barrels during the Second World War.