The Queen's College, Oxford University

Protecting honeybees through student-led innovation 🌼🐝

A student team at Queen’s is tackling a global threat to pollinators with an ambitious synthetic biology project designed to protect honeybees. Bringing together biology, biochemistry, chemistry, engineering, and biomedical science, the team is developing a treatment with the potential to be more sustainable than existing methods.

The project is particularly exciting because it sees first-year students getting involved in interdisciplinary research, showing how collaboration can lead to real-world impact.

The teams tells us more: https://ow.ly/OWGu50ZcHWF.

The College warmly congratulates Honorary Fellow Dr Hayaatun Sillem CBE (Biochemistry, 1994) on being made a Dame (DBE) in the 2026 King’s Birthday Honours. A richly deserved recognition of her outstanding leadership, innovation, and advocacy for engineering skills and diversity.

🔗 https://ow.ly/m21550ZcI8g
📷 Teri Pengilley, courtesy of Royal Academy of Engineering

🖌️A bus ticket, a stone-carved Queen, and the creative life of the College: these were among the starting points for new student-edited chapbook ‘Reginæ’.

The chapbook, supported by the Walter Pater Grant, brings together poetry, short fiction, watercolour, and experimental writing by members of Queen’s.

For its founding editor Parth, a graduate student reading for the Master’s in Public Policy, the format offered something more tangible than a PDF and more intimate than a magazine: an object to read, share, and keep as a piece of College life.

As Parth puts it, creativity at Queen’s “is there, mostly quiet, and a great deal of it asks only to be asked.”

🔗 Read more: https://ow.ly/EWll50ZcBh7

Delighted to welcome Duolingo Co-Founder Luis von Ahn to Queen’s today for an insightful conversation with Provost Paul Johnson.

🥬🍽️ How do we grow enough food for the future in a changing climate?

Researchers at Queen’s are part of a £6.7 million ARIA-funded project exploring how synthetic biology could improve the yield and resilience of staple crops.

The collaboration began over lunch at Queen’s, when a conversation across disciplines opened up an unexpected connection between medicine, biology, and industry. In our latest feature, Professor Chris O’Callaghan reflects on the interdisciplinary collaboration behind the project which brings together expertise to tackle one of the biggest global challenges of our time.

🔗 Read more: https://ow.ly/Ve5q50Z9Onw

🥳 🏆We are delighted that the Queen's College Translation Exchange (QTE) has been recognised at this year’s Vice-Chancellor’s Awards, winning in the Local Community Engagement category.

The award celebrates QTE’s outstanding work with schools across Oxfordshire, helping raise the profile of language learning and building inclusive, creative, and cultural connections to the University. Last year alone, student ambassadors, many of them from Queen’s, delivered Creative Translation workshops to more than 700 pupils in 16 local state schools.

Huge congratulations to the QTE team and to all of the student ambassadors whose energy and commitment made this possible.

🔗 Read more: https://ow.ly/vI3v50Z9MGT
📷 John Cairns Photography

After 25 years teaching preclinical medicine at Queen’s, Dr Laurence Leaver is retiring from teaching.

A GP as well as a tutor, Laurence has helped generations of students learn not just about medicine, but about people by listening carefully, asking good questions, and seeing the person behind the condition. We reflect on a career marked by insight, warmth, and a deep commitment to students.

🔗 Read the full feature: https://ow.ly/Or1z50Z9hcN.

Dr Leaver would be happy to hear from any former students and can be contacted via the College.

🎓 What is a university for?

For first-year Fine Art students Rosa and Maia, Queen’s has been more than a place to study. It has been a space to explore art’s psychological and political power and to ask how memory and identity might help us think differently about the future.

🖌️ 👩‍🎨Their exhibition, 'Emerging Unrealities', explores the shifting boundaries between the real and the imagined.

In this feature, Rosa and Maia reflect on art, friendship, and the role of universities as places where emotional and intellectual frameworks for understanding the world begin to take shape.

🔗 Read more: https://ow.ly/cPTm50Z7CFw

What does a Materials Science student do and where can it take you?

For first-year Queen’s student Nikhil, the answer includes tutorials, choir, late nights in the Beer Cellar… and a summer research internship in Tsukuba, Japan.

In our latest student profile, Nikhil reflects on how he didn’t need to worry about finding his community at Queen’s, the value of the tutorial system, and why Materials Science sits at the heart of some of today’s biggest technological challenges.

🔗 Read more: https://ow.ly/zXaq50Z4aq2

🎓 What should a university education prepare you for?

For Billy, a graduate student in Public Policy at Queen’s, the answer goes far beyond careers. From Tasmania to Oxford, he reflects on community, civic purpose, and why “the measure of a great university is ultimately the quality of human interaction it makes possible.”

In our latest student profile, Billy explores the conversations, friendships, and sense of shared responsibility that have shaped his time at Queen’s and Oxford, and why universities matter most when they challenge us to think deeply about the world and our place in it.

🔗 Read more: https://ow.ly/pLuf50Z4e1N