Endorsements
Updates
Brian Foster and Jack Liebeck
"We are delighted to give our strong support to the East London Science School. In our rapidly changing world, a good education in science has never been more important. While the exciting developments in physics, for example at CERN with the LHC, make it easy for people like us to attract the attention of young people, it is essential that these people should have access to a high-quality education to build on the interest that these headlines generate, otherwise their initial enthusiasm will evaporate. Given that our popular lectures build on Albert Einstein's fascination with music, we also passionately believe in the importance of education in the Arts. For these reasons we are delighted to support the proposal for an East London Science School, which will open doors to pupils in East London that have for too long been closed."
Biographies
Jack has recently been appointed Professor of Violin at the Royal Academy of Music and is Artistic Director of Oxford May Music Festival, a festival of music, science and the arts founded in 2008.
Brian currently holds the following posts:
- Professor of Experimental Physics in the University of Oxford since 2003
- Professorial Fellow of Balliol College
- Head of Subdepartment of Particle Physics 2004 -
- European Director of the Global Design Effort for the International Linear Collider 2005 -
It would be impossible to do credit to Brian's achievements on this website. You can read more about him here. I met Brian when he was putting on his lecture about Einstein and his passion for music with Jack - Einstein's Universe. This was a terrific experience for the students and staff who witnessed it. I only hope we can convince Brian and Jack to do something like it for us in the future.
Conrad Lichtenstein
I strongly support your plan to establish the East London Science School. The previous Labour government were planning to abolish iGCSEs in science believing them to be elitist, yet we must be striving for providing all with equal access to excellence in science. Many children love science and have been short-changed by curricula focusing on the social issues of science without providing the solid framework science that gives them something to build on.
Biography
Professor Conrad Lichtenstein is Chief Scientific Officer of Population Genetics Technologies (PopGenTech) Ltd – a biotech start-up founded in 2005 with seed funding from The Wellcome Trust to develop novel technology, conceived by Nobel laureate Professor Sydney Brenner, to sample large populations to identify the genetic variation responsible for human disease and drug response. Conrad was Chair of Molecular Biology at Queen Mary, University of London from 1996-2005. Conrad's research group was the first to successfully apply RNAi to engineer resistance to virus infection in genetically modified plants. He is committed to the public understanding of science and has written on genetic modification issues and other topics for the broad-sheets and magazines.
