This exhibition showcases some of the most recent additions to the University of Dundee Museum Collections. Focusing on art and design, it also features objects relating to medicine, nursing and other aspects of the University’s history. 

Among the highlights are:

• A major painting by Dundee artist David Foggie
• Artworks acquired from graduating students at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD)
• Art and design work by notable DJCAD alumni including textile designer Raymond Honeyman and wildlife artist Keith Brockie
• Original comics art including pieces from manga comics and 2000AD
• An embroidered cushion cover by Celtic Revival artist Nell Baxter
• Medical instruments used by Scotland’s first female university professor, Margaret Fairlie
• Models and badges relating to nursing training in Dundee and Kirkcaldy

The exhibition is open Monday-Friday 9.30am-7pm (last entry 5pm). 

Find out more about the University of Dundee Museums

Header image: Model of Paramecium from the D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum (photo by Catherine McIntyre)

Main image: Detail of textile design Daffodils by Raymond Honeyman, 1976

Can you believe it has been 20 years since we graduated from the University of Dundee! To mark this milestone, we are thrilled to invite you back to Dundee for our 20-year reunion weekend.

We’re planning an exciting programme of events and can’t wait to reconnect with everyone. We have a few details to confirm, but here’s what we have lined up so far so you can save the date:

• Friday, 19th June 2026: Welcome Drinks Reception (Evening, Venue TBC)
• Saturday, 20th June 2026: Nostalgic Tour of the Fulton Building at 12:00
• Saturday, 20th June 2026: Reunion Dinner and Party (Evening, Venue TBC)

How you can get involved

Our first goal is to reconnect with as many Civil Engineering 2006 graduates as possible. While our focus is on the 2006 cohort, anyone who studied alongside us but graduated in a different year is more than welcome to join!

Here’s how you can participate:

1. Complete the Expression of Interest Form below: No financial commitment is required at this stage.
2. Save the Date: Mark your calendars for June 2026!
3. Spread the Word: Share this web page with any fellow alumni you’re still in touch with.
4. Share Your Memories. We’re creating an online Yearbook and would love your old photos, articles, and memories.

Next Steps

The University of Dundee Alumni Relations team is kindly providing administrative support for this event. Feel free to send any questions to them, and they will forward them to our organising committee. As we finalise details and costs, we’ll share more information with you. By completing this form, you agree that the Alumni Team can contact you regarding this event. 

We can’t wait to celebrate this special occasion with you back in Dundee later this year! 

Register your interest

In 1974, V.I. Arnold showed in a classical paper that the energy of a magnetic field is bounded from below by its total magnetic helicity. His inequality contains a constant C, which is the smallest possible eigenvalue of the curl operator in the magnetically closed domain. The corresponding eigenstate is a state of maximum helicity for a given energy.  

However, the original formula by Arnold was derived for simply connected and magnetically closed domains. This severely restricts the range of applications. We explore how one can extend Arnold’s result to other domains and boundary conditions, what the corresponding maximum helicity states look like and the relation between helicity and the Calabi invariant. 

Venue: Fulton G20

In this talk, we discuss advanced theoretical frameworks, largely rooted in many-body physics, that enable first-principles calculations of real materials and provide insight into their electronic structure and emergent properties. 

Focusing on transition-metal oxides, materials of central importance for applications ranging from battery cathodes to superconductivity and oxide-based electronics, we highlight a regime where strong electron–electron interactions play a decisive role. In this strongly correlated setting, standard one-electron approximation–based theories break down. 

We demonstrate how many-body methods overcome these limitations and allow macroscopic physical properties to be understood directly from the underlying atomistic electronic structure.

Venue: Fulton G20

Large linear problems are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Prime examples are models of diffusion or wave propagation within complex heterogeneous materials. Iterative Krylov subspace methods tend to be used to numerically invert all but the most trivial systems. Problem-specific preconditioning transformations are often used as a catalyst for efficient convergence. Indeed, the convergence of many common methods hinges on the availability of an adequate preconditioner. 

Here, I introduce a split-preconditioning method that can be applied to a relatively broad class of non-Hermitian problems. While it proved to be effective with the most common iterative methods, it stands out for its guaranteed monotonic convergence with the Richardson iteration. The memory-efficiency of this method makes it particularly attractive for large wave problems. This enables us to solve vector-Helmholtz problems in computational domains exceeding 10⁷ cubic wavelengths.

Venue: Fulton G20

I will give a gentle introduction to C*-algebras, focusing on concrete C*-algebras attached to discrete groups. I will then explain a celebrated theorem by Kalantar and Kennedy that connects C*-algebra theory and geometric group theory. Explicitly, their theorem says that the reduced C*-algebra of a discrete group G is simple (meaning that {0} is the only proper, closed, two-sided ideal) if and only if the action of G on its Furstenberg boundary is free. Finally, I will mention recent joint work with Kevin Aguyar Brix, Kang Li, and Eduardo Scarparo where we extend the Kalantar–Kennedy theorem to parameterise maximal ideals in reduced group C*-algebras of discrete groups.

Venue: Fulton G20

Please contact [email protected] if you wish to join online.

This presentation is premised on two elements: one conceptual the other empirical, both of which stand in contrast to current assumptions about corporate responsibility for sustainability and the way in which accountability for corporate action may be discharged. 

Conventionally, corporate responsibility for social/environmental/sustainability impacts has been determined by a mixture of direct regulation (addressing corporate behaviour) alongside any voluntary responsibilities that a corporation takes on over and above formal legal minimums. The resulting combined standards for action include actions to be taken as well as not taken. While notions of corporate responsibility focused on financial matters, in the last 30- or 40-years corporations have voluntarily made commitments to achieve outcomes beyond minimum standards that they perceived that they had direct control or leverage over realising. 

The rationale for going beyond minimum compliance was predicated on different aspects, including corporate leaders’ ethical aspirations, notions of wider social contract responsibilities as well as activities driven by concern about reputation/focused on fitting within norms of behaviour. Alongside this changing landscape of responsibility, accountability norms have also evolved to include more expansive reporting of matters that relate to these ever-widening responsibilities. During the presentation I will argue that the notion of the Anthropocene disrupts the idea of an expansion of both corporate action and discharge of accountability through reporting of outcomes (Bebbington et al., 2020). Of particular focus is the need to develop what we frame as ‘corporate biosphere stewardship’ because the combined impacts that corporate action creates is systemic in character requiring notions of responsibility (and related accountability through reporting) on the combined impacts of cohorts of corporations focused on particular kinds of impacts and/or impacts in particular locations.

Prior work (Bebbington et al., 2024a, b, c) has been undertaken to characterise the capabilities that would be required for corporate biosphere stewardship to be created, namely:

1. a robust way of connecting corporate activities to the biosphere which includes the conceptual acceptance that corporations are embedded in and not separate from the biosphere as well as the development of traceability systems to identify biosphere interactions;
2. corporate managers possess a values-based orientation to be biosphere stewards that is founded on valuing the biosphere beyond business exchanges along with an extension of responsibilities beyond corporate boundaries (with a sense of how to exercise agency to leverage their power beyond corporate boundaries);
3. the reformation of a various ‘markets for responsibility’ (e.g. capital markets) so they can support corporations who wish to become biosphere stewards; and
4. developing inter-corporate coalitions to achieve stewardship ambitions (see Sobkowiak, forthcoming).

The presentation will explore these elements and make the case for a step change in corporate responsibilities and associated reporting.

References

Bebbington, J., Österblom, H., Crona, B., Jouffray, J., Larrinaga, C., Russell, S., Scholtens, B. (2020). Accounting and accountability in the Anthropocene. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 33(1), 152-177.

Bebbington, J., Blasiak, R., Larrinaga, C., Russell, S., Sobkowiak, M., Jouffray, J-B. and Österblom, H. (2024a). Shaping Nature Outcomes in Corporate Settings. Philosophical Transactions B. 37920220325.

Bebbington, J. and Iszatt-White, M. (2024b). Corporate Biosphere Stewardship. In Leadership as Stewardship: Honouring Our Past While Ensuring Our Future. Izsatt-White, M. (ed). Edward Elgar Publishing: Cheltenham.

Bebbington, J., Larrinaga, C. and Michelon, G. (2024c). A socio-ecological approach to corporate governance, 360-371. In Handbook on Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility, Magnan, M. and Michelon, G. (eds). Edward Elgar Publishing: Cheltenham.

Sobkowiak, M., Bebbington, J., Blasiak, R., Folke, and Österblom, H. (forthcoming). Accountability in collaborative settings: understanding inter-corporate sustainability initiatives. Accounting Forum