The Queen's College Record 2023

ACADEMIC DISTINGUISHED VISITOR
Prof James Unwin
The College now aims to appoint one academic and one
non-academic Distinguished Visitor each year. Such
visitors are leading figures from academia and throughout
the public and private sectors. During their residency, it is
expected that they contribute actively to the intellectual life
of the College at all levels: undergraduate, postgraduate,
fellowship, and Old Members. Visitors typically give a short
lecture or presentation to the College community, and they
write a brief piece about their time in the College for the
College Record – this is the first such piece. The period of
residency marks an important part of a lifelong connection
to the College.
Reports and College Activities
In the academic year 2022-2023, our academic Distinguished Visitor was Prof James
Unwin, Assistant Professor in Physics at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Here
Professor Unwin tells us about his time at Queen’s.
Oxford is a special place and I return whenever I can. The breadth and depth of
expertise at Oxford are largely unmatched anywhere in Europe, making a research
visit always enlightening. Moreover, the university’s college system affords the rare
opportunity to meet people outside one’s own narrow field of research focus. Such
cross-disciplinary communication is not only fascinating but has been shown to lead
to significant discoveries.
In the first half of 2023, I had the great honour of being the inaugural Distinguished
Academic Visitor at The Queen’s College. The experience was both delightful
and productive. As older members know well, but younger members may not yet
recognise, Queen’s is a rather hidden gem within Oxford. It is among the oldest, most
beautiful, and friendliest colleges I have had the pleasure of being associated with,
and I was grateful for the opportunity to count myself among its members for a time.
I arrived at Queen’s shortly after the pandemic ended. Life was returning to normal,
and both Fellows and students were embracing it wholeheartedly, which was
wonderful to witness. Like many, my workflow had been greatly disrupted by the
lockdowns, so my time in Oxford served as a perfect incubator for restoring my
research program to its former pace. I am a theoretical particle physicist by training
and my main research focus is currently on topics relating to dark matter. Although
technical, I will attempt to offer a glimpse into these ideas.
Pioneering physicists of the 1960’s discovered the mathematical equations that
describe the fundamental constituents of the universe. This mathematical structure
College Record 2023 | The Queen’s College 23