Futuremakers

Content warning: Please be aware that this episode refers to topics such as suicide, suicidal ideations, methods of suicide and overdose. In Episode 9 of the series, Professor Belinda Lennox sits down with Professor Seena Fazel , Professor of Forensic Psychiatry at the Department of Psychiatry and Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist.  Here, they discuss Oxford’s long history of suicide research, and...

Content warning: Please be aware that this episode refers to topics such as suicide, suicidal ideations and depression. In the eighth episode of the series, Professor Belinda Lennox speaks to Ben West, mental health campaigner, best-selling author and social media influencer.   In 2018, Ben unexpectedly lost his brother to suicide. In this conversation, Ben shares his journey as a campaigner for m...

In the seventh episode of the series, Professor Lennox is joined by Cynthia Germanotta and Dr Claudia-Santi F. Fernandes  from Born This Way Foundation , and Professor Mina Fazel from Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry, to examine how to best help support the mental health of young people. Cynthia Germanotta is President and Co-Founder of Born This Way Foundation and Global Goodwill Ambassador for...

In Episode 6 of the series, Professor Belinda Lennox is joined by Benjamin Perks, from UNICEF, Sabine Rakotomalala, from the World Health Organization, and Dr Jamie Lachman , Dr Isang Awah and Stephanie Eagling-Peche from Oxford’s Department of Social Policy and Intervention. Here, they discuss the impact of trauma on mental health, how to protect children during a crisis and the resources develop...

In Episode 5 of the series Professor Lennox sits down with Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Director of the Wellbeing Research Centre , Fellow at Harris Manchester College and Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science at the Saïd Business School . During their conversation they look at recent research findings from the Wellbeing Research Centre that examine the role of the workplace in overall...

In Episode 4 of the series Professor Lennox is joined by Sir John Kirwan (known to most as JK), a former New Zealand rugby player and co-founder of workplace wellbeing technology platform Groov.  They discuss how JK’s own experiences with depression informed his extensive mental health advocacy work and led to the founding of Groov , with a mission to impact mental wellbeing globally by helping bu...

In the third episode of the series Professor Lennox sits down with Professors Cathy Creswell and Polly Waite to talk about how anxiety affects young people and the complex picture that makes up the risk factors for developing mental health disorders. They also look at the effective new treatments being developed, and the work being done to make them as accessible as possible. Cathy Creswell is Pro...

In the second episode of the series Professor Lennox is joined by Professors Marian Knight and Fiona Alderdice to examine how mental illnesses impact women and families in the postnatal period, and the power of speaking out. Professor Marian Knight is the Director of Oxford’s National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit (NPEU) and Honorary Consultant in Public Health with Public Health England. Professor...

Episode 1: Brain injury and rehabilitation In the first episode of the new series, host Professor Belinda Lennox talks to Jenny Clarke, CEO and co-founder of the charity SameYou . SameYou’s vision is to transform the way brain injury survivors and their loved ones are supported through emotional, mental health and cognitive recovery services, and was founded following Jenny’s daughter Emilia’s exp...

Peter interviews the Oxford scientists working at the forefront of research into Disease X - a pathogen which the World Health Organization added to their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases in 2018 to represent the hypothetical cause of our next pandemic... This episode is part of our History of Pandemics season - follow Professor Peter Millican as he talks to researchers from around the wor...

Peter begins the final episode of the series in 2014, at the onset of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Whilst that pandemic officially ended in 2016, this virus has caused a brutal outbreak nearly every year since. After his discussion at the start of the series about whether Ebola may have been the disease that caused the Plague of Athens, has Peter arrived back where he started?   This episode...

In the ninth episode of our History of Pandemics season, Peter leaves the perils of influenza behind, only to discover an entirely new virus: HIV. Many of you may remember the emerging panic that became the media narrative around HIV and the disease it can lead to, AIDS, and in this episode Peter follows the story from the beginning, with medical experts who’ve worked on the front line of this pan...

Peter arrives in the twentieth century, during the last years of the Great War, to a pandemic which you may have read a lot about during the early coverage of our current COVID-19 outbreak. After the Black Death, the so-called ‘Spanish’ Flu has one of the most famous monikers of any pandemic, but does it deserve such notoriety?   This episode is part of our History of Pandemics season - follow Pro...

In this episode, Peter discusses a controversial outbreak... So-called 'Russian' Flu is either the first influenza pandemic we’ll be discussing, or it wasn’t the flu at all. It was either a disease which emerged from and then devastated the country it was named after, or an outbreak which the Russian people barely noticed at the time. It either deserves its place as the seventh pandemic we’re cove...

Peter makes it to the nineteenth century to discuss the achievements of John Snow - a man who either played a central role in the history of epidemiology, or was just one of many trying to tackle that centuries’ foremost threat; cholera. Peter discusses Snow's role, water pump handles, and how we may very well still be experiencing this devastating pandemic today.   This episode is part of our His...

We'll be publishing the second half of our History of Pandemics series next week; featuring episodes on Cholera, the pandemic that wasn't, the so-called Spanish Flu, HIV/AIDS, and the West African Ebola outbreak. In the meantime, here's a short message from Oxford's Professor Sir John Bell on the importance of learning from past pandemics.  Please do continue to enjoy our first five stories, from...

Welcome to the eighteenth century, at a point when Europe is going through another major smallpox outbreak, a disease that by this point has been plaguing populations around the globe for centuries. Peter will discover why milkmaids may be to central to the story of vaccination, how smallpox features in popular contemporary literature and what Napoleon thought of an English physician called Edward...

In the final plague episode of the series, Peter talks to his guests about the last major outbreak of this horrific disease in seventeenth-century England. Along the way they dispel some myths – for example it wasn’t the Great Fire of London that finally defeated the disease – and he drops in on one of the outbreaks most famous commentators – Samuel Pepys. Stay tuned to the end for a bonus convers...

Peter arrives in the fourteenth century and meets history's most notorious plague outbreak. The Black Death is a gruesome name well-matched with a grim disease, and as you'll find out, it's not just the name which has survived to the modern period...  This episode is part of our History of Pandemics season - follow Professor Peter Millican as he talks to researchers from around the world about som...

Welcome to the Eastern Roman Empire in the sixth century. This time, Peter discusses a plague that historians and medical experts agree was likely the first plague pandemic humanity experienced. You may not have heard much about the emperor Justinian I, or why he’s got a plague outbreak named after him, but by the end of this episode you’ll hear just how devastating and long-lasting this pandemic...

Join Peter in 5th century Athens, a crowded city in the midst of a siege, where a devastating disease had just erupted. Our guests discuss whether this really was plague, the breakdown in law and order that began to emerge, and how the historian Thucydides survived the disease that hit his city. This episode is part of our History of Pandemics season - follow Professor Peter Millican as he talks t...

Just before our third season starts we talk with Dr Peter Drobac, a global health physician and Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, and Dr Aoife Haney, Research Lecturer in Innovation and Enterprise, about the social, economic and environmental changes that may well be heading our way after our current pandemic.  Coming soon... Follow Professor Peter Millican as he talks to r...

Originally recorded back in September 2019 at the AI@Oxford Conference held at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, this 'live' episode sees Prof. Millican joined by: Mitchell Baker (Chairwoman, Mozilla Foundation); Mike Wooldridge (Professor of Computer Science, University of Oxford); Safiya Omoja Noble (Associate Professor, University of California Los Angeles), and; Jim Wilkinson (C...

Climate migration hit the headlines in January, when the United Nations made a landmark ruling about the legal rights of those displaced by a climate crisis. The UN High Commission for Refugees has warned that millions of people could become climate refugees in the coming years, and meanwhile, tensions over scarcity are stoking fears of conflict. With temperatures and anxieties rising, how do we p...

The world is getting hotter, drier, and more crowded. By 2050, there will be ten billion humans across the globe, while at the same time there may be far less land suitable for growing food. There's also a growing awareness that our diet and food choices can have a significant impact on our carbon footprint: while innovations like lab-grown foods may provide lower emission options, and new technol...