The Queen's College Record 2020

Reports and College Activities
Peter Robbins (Physiology)
As for many people, the COVID-19 pandemic changed
my immediate research plans. Major therapeutic
approaches to COVID-19 include development of
vaccines, immunomodulation to make the disease less
severe and antivirals. However, we have been intrigued
by the very low blood oxygen levels that can develop
in patients who otherwise do not appear particularly
unwell. These low levels of oxygen have proven more
resistant to therapy with high oxygen than perhaps is common in other diseases. This
type of hypoxia arises from the development of ‘shunt’ blood flows in the lung, where
the blood never gets close to the gas and so cannot pick up oxygen in the normal way.
From my physiological interest in the lung, I was aware of an old French drug called
almitrine that can preferentially constrict the blood vessels in the lung through which
shunt flow occurs. Thus this drug could give us a way of increasing oxygen levels
in the blood that higher levels of inspired oxygen are not able to treat. It could also
provide a means of treating patients in low income countries that do not have the
infrastructure to provide oxygen. A medical charity called LifeArc has given us a grant
to pursue a trial of using almitrine in hospitalised patients, and at the time of writing,
the almitrine is being manufactured. It is also true at the time of writing that the number
of cases of COVID-19 in the UK are now too low for us to be able to undertake the
trial. I find, for the first time in my life, that I fervently wish to continue to be unable to
undertake a piece of research that I have planned.
Anna Seigal (Mathematics)
An academic highlight of the year for me was being
awarded the Richard C. DiPrima prize from SIAM (the
Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics) for
contributions of an early career researcher in applied
mathematics.
My research in the past year has focused on some
algebraic and statistical directions. On the algebraic
side, my paper on ‘Ranks and Symmetric Ranks of Cubic Surfaces’ was published
in the Journal of Symbolic Computation, and a follow-up project on ‘Ranks and
Singularities of Cubic Surfaces’, with UC Berkeley undergraduate student Eunice
Sukarto, was accepted for publication in Le Matematiche. I had an enjoyable visit to
TU Münich in February to work with my collaborators Carlos Améndola, Kathlén Kohn,
and Philipp Reichenbach on a project that connects the pure mathematical area of
invariant theory to statistical applications in the context of parameter estimation.
26 The Queen’s College | College Record 2020