magazine - Somerville College - University of Oxford

8 | Somerville Magzine
Four generations
and an FRS
(l – r)
Liz, Angela and Florence Mclean
Congratulations to Angela McLean on becoming a Fellow
of the Royal Society – but also to her family on achieving its
fourth consecutive generation of Somervillians.
Long gone are the days when Mary Somerville, as a
woman, could not be a full and participating member
of the Royal Society. Since then Somerville has
produced a bevy of FRSs to be proud of, ranging
from Dorothy Hodgkin, Nobel Laureate, and her
pupil, Margaret Thatcher, to more recent members
of Somerville’s Governing Body, Professors Louise
Johnson and Carole Jordan. So there was great delight
in College when the most recent Somervillian election
to Fellowship of the Royal Society, Professor Angela
Mclean, was announced in May 2009.
Angela came up to read Mathematics at Somerville in
1979 and her current work in epidemiology includes
producing the fi rst mathematical models of the
evolution and emergence of vaccine-resistant strains
of infectious agents.
Angela works in the Zoology Department and at All
Souls, where she is Senior Fellow in Theoretical Life
Sciences. Her work focuses on the spread and evolution
of infectious diseases. In Zoology she is one of the
two directors of the Institute for Emerging Infections,
a founding Institute of the University’s James Martin
21st Century School. The mission of the Institute is to
understand the underlying processes that drive the
emergence and spread of novel human infectious
diseases. The institute is staffed by a multi-disciplinary
team of biologists, mathematicians and clinicians who
are studying recently emerged infections and using the
knowledge thus gained to anticipate challenges that
will be posed by novel emerging infections in the 21st
century. In order to understand how infections change
as they spread the research simultaneously considers
events inside infected people and transmission
between people. This makes it different from most
research in infectious disease, which is either about
infected individuals (immunology and virology) or about
infections in communities (epidemiology).
Angela is also involved in giving scientifi c advice to
the UK government. She sits on advisory boards at the
Department of Health and at Defra where she is able
to share her expertise in infections, risk and
mathematical modelling.
Angela’s arrival as a fresher in 1979 was by no means
her first introduction to Somerville; she comes from a
Somervillian dynasty. With the arrival in October 2009 of
her niece, Florence McLean, to read Medicine, her family
can claim four consecutive generations of Somervillians.
First of the family group was Angela’s grandmother,
Mathilde Hunter (née Bugnion), universally known
as “Thilo”, who came up from Switzerland in 1917 at
the age of 21. Her year included Cicely Williams and
Winifred Holtby. Janet Vaughan FRS, though not in
this intake, overlapped them forming a strong cohort
of medics. At this time Somerville was evacuated to
Oriel, the Somerville buildings being taken over by
the Radcliffe Infi rmary for War wounded. Young lady
undergraduates went chaperoned to tutorials with male
tutors. They asked permission of each other before
addressing a new acquaintance by her Christian name.
Thilo, who had attended an English sixth form before
starting university studies in Switzerland spoke English
with extreme fl uency, but some of the nuances still
escaped her, as, when, confronted by a beetroot salad
in Hall, she innocently enquired, “What is this bloody
mess?” Having left professional life on the arrival of
her third child in the 1930s, she was then catapulted
in 1940 into the position of Head of Clinical Chemistry
at the University Hospital of McGill in Montreal, a
position which she held throughout the war. There
she (a native French speaker) presided over a team
of French Canadian technicians who would not speak
French to her because, being a “boss”, she merited
communication only in English. Such, at that time, was
the gulf between the social classes in French Canada.
ANGELA MCLEAN
(1979, Mathematics,)
and LIZ MCLEAN
(Hunter, 1950,
Physiology)
to understand
how infections
change as they
spread