The Queen's College Record 2023

Reports and College Activities
Credit: John Cairns
Conor O’Brien (History)
This summer saw Queen’s say goodbye to most of our
pandemic crop of undergraduate historians, who, I’m glad
to say, did amazingly well, with a bumper number of firsts
announced in July 2023, despite all the disruption those
students had to put up with. I’m particularly interested in
this year group because I arrived at Queen’s as a tutor at
the same time that they arrived as students. Hopefully their
excellent results bode well for me!
Certainly, I was glad to see a number of articles published arising from my larger work
on early medieval Christian political thought: ‘The Christianization of Late Antique
Political Discourse: Reflections on the Irish Evidence’ appeared in Journal of Late
Antiquity, 15 (2022), while ‘The Origins of Royal Anointing’ was published in Studies in
Church History 59 (2023) only a few brief weeks after the first anointing of a monarch
in many decades. I was very pleased that this article won the Ecclesiastical History
Society’s President Prize (the second time I have won this prize); it is now free to
read online via the Cambridge University Press website.
Chris O’Callaghan (Medicine)
In the laboratory, we have used a single cell multiomic
approach to study the effects of oxidised low density
lipoprotein cholesterol (‘bad’ cholesterol) on the human
immune cells involved in atherosclerosis. Using this
experimental approach, we studied thousands of cells and
determined, for each cell individually, which genes were
expressed by analysing their RNA, and what changes in
their genome programming alter their behaviour by analysing their DNA configuration.
This has generated very interesting data and new hypotheses about disease
mechanisms that we are starting to test. My colleagues and I were pleased to be
awarded a large five-year grant to study further metabolic aspects of cellular function
in atherosclerosis. I published a clinical trial testing whether a set of interventions,
largely based on simple technology, can empower people with kidney disease to
reduce their salt intake—it can and it’s cheap, so we aim to roll this out more widely.
Over the last few years I have had the privilege of editing a textbook of medicine,
Medicine for Finals and Beyond, and was pleased to see this in print and in use
by students.
18 The Queen’s College | College Record 2023