Message from the Master

Back to all

Written by:

Mary Hockaday

Posted:

28 May 2025

Happy 675th Anniversary! Our actual birthday, which we date to the signing of our Founding Charter, is in November. But we are marking our whole anniversary year.

In the last edition, we shared some of the pillars of our 675th Anniversary Campaign and inside this edition, you can find updates on all our anniversary and campaign events.

I very much enjoyed meeting alumni in New York, Washington, Hong Kong, Singapore and San Francisco. Our origins are, of course, as a law college. We held a splendid event in London with a great range of law alumni as we celebrated our legal heritage. You can read about our thriving student Law Society inside. We remain very ambitious for the subject at Trinity Hall, and I want to thank all our law alumni who support students and the College. Bishop Bateman would be impressed.

We now roam broadly with Fellows and students in every field. I very much enjoyed reading Five Minutes with Dr Sofia Lövestam, Research Fellow in Biochemistry, and about PhD researcher Abdullah Hasan Safir’s work with ethics and AI.

Unusually, mid-year, we’ve welcomed three new Fellows, in Physics, Chemistry and a Visiting Fellow in Engineering, exploring the opportunities AI brings to agriculture. But it is with great sadness that we feel the loss of Dr Isabelle McNeill, much-loved and respected Fellow in MMLL, who died of cancer in February. She is greatly missed.

We awarded the first Trinity Hall Prize in Student Journalism to the News and Features winners. We held the first of our ‘Spotlights: Space’ series of events with Honorary Fellow, Professor Jo Dunkley (1997), giving the first Thouless Lecture. She made astrophysics accessible even to a former English student and I’m looking forward to next term’s panel discussion.

The other pillar of our College community is of course our staff. Vicky Mills in our Admissions Office knows more about our students than many Fellows. She’s deeply involved in the admissions and induction process and is a familiar and welcoming face to all our students.

But perhaps the most important feature of this term has been having ‘the wall’ back. You may have seen that repairs were necessary to the brick wall at the end of Latham Lawn and the Fellows’ Garden – the river takes its toll. It’s only when something is missing for a few weeks that you realise how much it’s loved. The students have been overjoyed to sit out again, whatever the weather, enjoying the terrace or dangling their legs over the River Cam. As good a place to reflect on 675 years as any.

Back to all

Trinity Hall from the back gate etching by Gertrude Hayes