On 14 May 2018, Professor Leighton gave the 44th annual Maurice Lubbock Memorial Lecture, the most prestigious lecture in Oxford University’s engineering calendar. View video of the lecture here.
The lecture is open to academics and local schools, and before the lecture, Professor Leighton spent the day meeting the schoolchildren who were to come to the lecture, and answering their questions both informally and in a theatre interview setting. He also met with the final year students and presented 12 prizes for their work, the winners having been judged as such on the day by a panel.
In his lecture, Professor Leighton stressed the importance of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work, especially as it relates to combatting AntiMicrobial Resistance.
The vote of thanks was given by Prof Constantin Coussious who read out a quote he had read and felt was apt, using Prof. Leighton’s own words: “We need to work with rigour, imagination, and wonder, unconstrained by the artificial boundaries set in place by discipline names, or the history of projects in which we have previously worked, or the tendency of sponsors to believe they can pick winners, or above all by the belief that we must jump to solutions when we have not yet perceived the real problem. Then, when we eventually do find a solution, we must have the will to push it through all the way to help others, and not simply publish in the expectation that someone will finish the job for us.”