A busy year for the Richard Doll Society
The Richard Doll Society is Green Templeton’s student society for medics and those in medical and healthcare-related fields. Looking back over activities and events in 2025-26, outgoing RDS president Felix Radtke (DPhil Medical Sciences) called it ‘a busy and very rewarding year’.
As well as enjoying the ever-popular Christmas dinner and student supper, RDS members held an informal welcome event for incoming Year 4 medical students, and helped the college to host five Year 5 medical students from the Kawasaki Medical School, with a programme including tours of the college’s 13 Norham Gardens, former home to William Osler, and the John Radcliffe Hospital, shadowing at local practices, and an informal gathering with the RDS before a formal college dinner.
The society also organised regular study afternoons in the Osler Library at 13 Norham Gardens, offering students a chance to connect with the college’s heritage by reading and writing in a room where Sir William Osler and Sir Richard Doll used to work, and joined an Uncomfortable Oxford History of Medicine Walking Tour, focusing on the more difficult and less-told strands of medicine’s history in the city such as eugenics and colonial medicine.
As Felix explained, the tour worked well as an early counterpart to the conference theme later in the year: ‘Beyond Borders: Global Healthcare in Times of Crisis’.
This conference opened with Professor Kokila Lakhoo (Consultant Paediatric Surgeon, Oxford University Hospitals), who spoke on long-term partnerships in paediatric surgical training across Tanzania and the wider continent. She was followed by Dr Dennis Mazingi on research capacity development in paediatric trauma and injury prevention in southern Africa. A second morning session on medicine in conflict zones featured Dr Maysa Hawash (Toronto) and Dr James Smith (UCL), whose contributions were the most emotionally demanding of the day and, judging from feedback, sat with the audience long after the session closed.
The afternoon began with Simon Tiek of the Refugee-Led Research Hub, offering a dual perspective as a researcher, and as someone with more than a decade of lived experience in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. Green Templeton Associate Fellow Dr Meera Joshi then led a reflective workshop, which gave delegates space to process what had been a heavy morning; this was singled out positively in the open feedback. The day closed with a panel including Professor Kara Hanson (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) on the economics of health systems in conflict-affected and low-income settings.
A poster competition accompanied the conference, and the prize for best poster was awarded to Xavier J. Perez Roman for his poster Modelling dengue importation risk into continental Portugal via aviation networks. There was also an exhibition of photographs from Kakuma Refugee Camp, curated in collaboration with residents of the camp, and depicting everyday acts of care under conditions of acute scarcity: wards without electricity, makeshift theatres, and the practitioners and patients who keep services running anyway. The gallery was conceptualised and organised by Felix, and the photography work was performed by Kakuma residents and local photographers Joseph Lopir and Yanick Ruhimbasa in a collaboration spanning multiple months. It was developed in conversation with the Refugee-Led Research Hub at the University’s Refugee Studies Centre, and it complemented Simon Tiek’s afternoon session.
An image of Kakuma Refugee Camp from the exhibition
The conference and exhibition, Felix commented, was a reminder ‘that compassion and collaboration matter as much to global health as resources do.’
Felix thanked donors to the college for their generosity in supporting RDS activities, and wished all the best to 2026 president Oishee Ghosh (Clinical Medicine).
