In 1998 the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) proposed a provocative and challenging idea: the primary energy consumption of everyone in Switzerland could be reduced to 2000 watts per person per hour without negatively impacting their quality of life. In a referendum in 2008, 76% voted to make Zürich a 2000watt society by 2050, which would mean reducing the primary energy consumption by two-thirds. Is this remotely possible given that historically GDP and energy consumption scale linearly? And how does one go about this?

The event will be held in the Leonard Wolfson Auditorium.

About the speaker: Professor Kevan Martin is Emeritus Professor of the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, and CEO of the Nature Recovery Network in the UK. He has been interested and active in environmental issues for many years.

Arjune trained at the University of Oxford, studying at Corpus Christi College. In his first summer in Oxford he completed a placement with Professor Simon Shorvon at The Institute of Neurology which essentially initiated all that has followed. Having completed an intercalated degree in Physiological Science, including a dissertation with Professor Colin Blakemore, he went to clinical school in Oxford before beginning medical training initially in Oxford and then in London. In London, Arjune was trained predominantly at The Royal London Hospital and the National Hospital and undertook his PhD with the Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy at Queen Square, sponsored by the MRC and the Guarantors of Brain, studying the molecular basis of neuronal loss in refractory epilepsy. Having completed Specialist Training and a Locum Consultant Posting at The National Hospital, he then went to Sydney during 2012, predominantly to learn to read Video-EEG during an Epilepsy Fellowship with Professor Ernie Somerville. Arjune is now appointed as Consultant Epileptologist, Senior Fellow in Epileptology and Head of the Oxford Epilepsy Research Group. He has a very busy epilepsy practice and has pioneered novel clinical pathways, including the development of specialist multidisciplinary clinics such as ‘Epilepsy and learning disability’ and ‘Epilepsy and employment’. At a research level, Arjune has a broad portfolio of studies including autoimmune epilepsy and epilepsy genomics. His personal work is wholly multidisciplinary and integrates across three main areas – intersection of epilepsy and dementia; developing novel technologies to close diagnostic and treatment gaps; and implementation of culturally specific tools at scale. This applies as much in underprivileged settings as in the UK. A short video on one of the projects Arjune currently leads can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTtMFJzEz0w Arjune is very interested in guideline development to ensure optimal care is attained worldwide. He is Topic Advisor to the NICE Epilepsy Guidelines, 2022, has been appointed to the ILAE Standards and Best Practices Council and is part of the mhGAP Epilepsy Topic Expert Group for the World Health Organisation.

Research Interests

Mesolithic and Neolithic of western Europe; North American Northwest Coast and Plateau archaeology and ethnography; Siberian steppe hunter-gatherers and pastoralists; Caribbean prehistory; Japanese prehistory; complex hunter-gatherers; transition to agriculture; mortuary analysis; stable isotope analysis and dietary reconstruction; strontium isotopes and provenance/mobility; skeletal evidence of interpersonal violence; radiocarbon dating; Bayesian modelling; marine and freshwater radiocarbon reservoir corrections, especially in Europe, Siberia, the Caribbean and northern Chile. 

Pedro G. Ferreira is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford. He studied and worked at Imperial College in London, at the University of California at Berkeley and at CERN in Geneva. He has held visiting positions at University of Edinburgh, at the Albert Einstein Institute in Berlin and at Columbia University in New York. His area of expertise is cosmology where he has pioneered research in the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang, the nature of the dark Universe (such as dark matter and dark energy) and alternatives to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. More recently he has worked on gravitational waves and modern statistical methods for studying the large scale structure of the Universe. Pedro G. Ferreira has written extensively outside academia, writing for Nature, Science, New Scientist, Physics World, Physics Today, Scientific American, Sky at Night, CERN Courier, BBC Focus, The Guardian. His most recent book, “The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity” has been published in over 20 countries and was shortlisted for the 2014 Royal Society Winton Science Book Prize.