Dr Mark Pottle gained his BA in Modern History at Sheffield in 1984, and undertook doctoral research at Wolfson College. Since completing his DPhil in 1988, Pottle has edited the Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter in three volumes (1996-2000); written and revised numerous articles for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; and edited a series of First World War texts for publication. 

From 2010, Pottle helped Henry Hardy to complete his edition of the letters of Wolfson’s Founder President, Isaiah Berlin, co-editing Building: Letters 1960-75 and Affirming: Letters 1975-97.  The latter work, published in 2015, brought this project to an end, but he continues as the Isaiah Berlin Legacy Fellow at Wolfson, seeking creative ways of encouraging an interest in Berlin’s remarkable life, and his endlessly fascinating works. Pottle also continue to write on the First World War, and his latest project is an edition of a memoir entitled Gunner on the Somme.

Professor Douglas Abraham is Emeritus Professor of Statistical Mechanics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College. His work has appeared in Physical Review Letters, European Physics Letters, Communications in Mathematical Physics, Physical Review, and Journal of Statistical Physics.

Abraham has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Studies, a Marie Curie Professor of the EU, and a Visiting Miller Professor at UC Berkeley. He also served on the selection panel in Basic Sciences for the Premios in “Frontiers of Knowledge” of the Fundación BBVA, Madrid.

Professor Andrew Briggs is the inaugural holder of the Chair of Nanomaterials at the University of Oxford. His research interests focus on materials and techniques for quantum technologies and their incorporation into practical devices. Current hot topics include vibrational states of nanotubes and charge transport through single molecules in graphene nanogaps. He has nearly 600 publications, with over 16,000 citations. In February 2016 Oxford University Press published his book with Roger Wagner entitled The Penultimate Curiosity: How science swims in the slipstream of ultimate questions.