Chaplaincy Chats-Durham-Science and Faith-Season 4 Ep1

Chaplaincy: Durham University

Ep 1 – Broadcasts on February 19 (Saturday) at 8:00pm, February 20 (Monday) at 5pm, and February 23 (Thursday) at 12:30am

The second leg of the RME Faith Journeys in Science’s tour got off to a great start at Durham University’s Catholic Chaplaincy on October 23rd. After our round of events at parishes in England, we will be visiting Catholic University Chaplaincies across the UK. Our goal was to unveil how science and faith have interacted in the lives of Catholics working in some capacity in the fields of science and religion. At Durham, we had a very interesting conversation about making use of scientific data without losing your soul, how faith influences your professional conduct, among other topics.

Our panel of speakers included Dr Gavin Jarvis, Dr Aleksandra Svalova and two students from the chaplaincy: Ola and Francesca (left to right). Ola is an Engineering student and Francesca is a Physics student.

Dr Gavin Jarvis was born in Liverpool. He attended St Mary’s College, Crosby before heading to Queens’ College, Cambridge where he studied Veterinary Medicine and completed a PhD in platelet pharmacology. Subsequently, he has worked in both industry and academia including four years in drug discovery at AstraZeneca: the project eventually resulted in the approval of the antiplatelet drug ticagrelor (Brilique®). He has taught pharmacology and statistics to medics, vets, pharmacists and scientists at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Belfast and is currently Associate Professor of Analytical Pharmacology at the new Medical School at Sunderland University. In addition to his research on platelets, he has a long-standing interest in bioethics and has published several papers on human embryonic mortality. He is a Governor of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, a Catholic bioethics research institute serving the Church in the UK and Ireland. In his spare time he sings, especially in comic operettas!

Dr Aleksandra Svalova has remained in Newcastle University since the start of her undergraduate studies in Statistics in 2010. She has a PhD in Petroleum Geochemistry and Natural and Environmental Sciences (2014-2019). Subsequently, re-joined the Statistics department in 2019 as a research associate and became a lecturer in 2022. Dr Svalova is interested in statistical surrogate models with applications to engineering/scientific problems.

Listen on your podcast platform of choice: https://anchor.fm/scienceandfaith1

We thank ECLAS for their generosity to make our tour to universities possible.

If you would like to get in touch, email: scienceandfaith@radiomariaengland.uk

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