February 2026
Amy Child (English and Creative Writing, 2024) has entered her debut novel 'The Vow of Elias Cassius' into the Libraro Prize 2026, where the winner receives a publishing deal with Hachette! You can get involved on Instagram.
Calvin Woodroffe (Industrial Economics, 2011) has launched an innovative new tool to help UK taxpayers better understand their finances, called PocketTax.
Val Wilkinson (Biology, 1982; Cert. Ed, 1983) contacted us with an update: "After 30 varied years as an accountant, most latterly 10 years as Director of Finance & Administration at Plumpton College, I left my successful career 13 years prematurely on health grounds.
"I moved to the Highlands, near my late husband’s village, and have spent several peaceful years there including learning Gàidhlig. I am still passionate about ecology, that was a great place to be. Still in touch with friends from Rutland Hall and from the excellent Botany field trip to Bavaria."
Rosalie Zobel (Physics, 1964) shared an update: "I will forever be grateful to the late Professor Bates for accepting me onto the Physics honours course. I had no school recommendation, because I had been living abroad in Aden for the years before A-Levels. The PhD turned out to be very valuable too, mainly because it was respected by all at a time when women in the professions often were not.
"I had a very interesting career in the emerging field of Information Technology from its very start. I got into IT by luck, because when I got married I lived in an area without many opportunities for physicists. I worked first for ICL in Stevenage, then CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Munich, Germany, AERE Harwell, and the telecommunications giant AT&T in both New Jersey USA and in Tokyo Japan. Along the way I learned to speak German and French fluently, and also some Italian, Japanese and Spanish.
"My final job was twenty years with the European Commission in Brussels, where I became a Director of a large part of the Information Society Technologies Programme, part of the Horizons Programme for science and technology. I was the first woman director of a technical programme, and was responsible over the years for EU funded projects in microelectronics, health IT, electronic commerce and business, multimedia, transport IT, e-government, IT security, and environmental sustainability IT. I was responsible for EU funding amounting to over €1 billion a year, and had a very stimulating and interesting job. I also managed to bring up my two children in parallel.
"I write this little autobiography to encourage young women, and also young men, to think of science and technology as a career. My career experience of working in six countries shows how flexible and interesting a science based career can be. IT jobs can be found everywhere, and combined with world travel were interesting and fun."