Bash The Bug (@BashTheBug) / X

Dot Nagy, one of our DPhil students, has written a great blog post about how she and others have got the rest of us in the Unit thinking more about how to reduce the environmental impact of our research.

Dorottya Nagy writes about the experiences from the Modernising Medical Microbiology (MMM) Unit research group on engaging wet lab, computer lab, and office teams on the sustainability agenda.

We have to keep most of our biological samples at -80°C which is much colder than the -20°C you'll find (hopefully) inside your freezer in the kitchen. This does require a lot of electricity. Valentina put in an application to the Freezer Challenge and we came 19th out of 115 teams and won a Recognition Award! By increasing the temperature slightly on our freezers we estimate we will save 48kWh each day which is enough to boil an astonishing 436 litres of water.

Throughout the past three days doing work experience at MMM we’ve learnt about the different roles within the department, their responsibilities and contributions to research. After being briefed a…

This year, our group has achieved Silver in the Green Impact award - a sustainability scheme which supports teams who want to improve their sustainability efforts. As part of the scheme, you are given a toolkit with lots of different activities to complete which encourages people to think more about their environmental impact. Each task is assigned a point value, and you need to collect a specific number of points to achieve Bronze, Silver, Gold and Beyond Gold.

We ran a session at the Philosophy in Pubs Oxford group in April 2024, discussing where the moral lines can and should be drawn around the use of data about us. Who does the data really belong to? What are legitimate uses of it? What are the factors that make people uncomfortable? And are they justified? We had a very interesting discussion with around 16 people from the local Oxfordshire area, covering questions such as “Does the idea of the public good ever outweigh an individual's right to control how their data is used?”, “Is it correct that any data that is “about” us also "belongs" to us, even if we did not create it, nor have any use for it ourselves?”, and “Does it change things if the data is completely anonymised or is there still a general rule about self determination that applies?”

This is the third year that the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) held its Showcase at the popular Westgate Shopping Centre in the centre of Oxford. Like last year it was held jointly with the NIHR Oxford Health BRC. Our research software engineers had redesigned and rewritten our dance mat game so now you took on the role of a doctor firing different coloured antibiotics at incoming bacteria.