In the heart of the old university town, opposite the Bodleian Library and the temple-like Clarendon Building, lies the Oxford Martin School. A more beautiful location is hardly conceivable. Many people have already come into contact with research from here – many without knowing it, for example with the Corona data collected on "Our World in Data".
Philip Plickert
Business correspondent based in London.
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This is the name of the most important publication of the Oxford Martin School. Over the past three years, data collection on corona incidences and vaccination rates has become the central reference for the media and decision-makers. The portal recorded almost a hundred million visits in the second Corona year.
The founder, Max Roser, a German economist and statistician, has already made a name for himself by researching long-term trends in global living conditions such as poverty, infant mortality and life expectancy. "Our World in Data" is a huge treasure trove of data on almost three hundred topics. In the past three years, the number of scientists involved has grown from six to almost thirty. It is all the more astonishing in what a small office this data collection is coordinated.
A narrow, modest room with a glass wall on a covered courtyard, not much larger than half a garage. But the whole historic building that the Oxford Martin School moved into a decade and a half ago is impressive. It was built in the 1880s. It used to house the Indian Institute, where officials for the subcontinent were trained during the colonial period. In the 1960s, the Faculty of History moved in, and in 2006 the new Oxford Martin School, which is a very unique and interdisciplinary research institution.
"Solutions, solutions, solutions"
"James Martin, the founder, has always said the 21st century will be either the best or the worst century ever," says Ian Goldin, who was the founding director of the Martin School. "How the story turns out depends on getting the right people together to research the problems. James Martin's motto was: "Solutions, solutions, solutions." This is still the approach today: top-level research that should bring tangible results to solve humanity's problems. About 200 scientists are currently working on more than thirty projects on global problems such as food shortages and poverty, climate change, epidemics and resistant bacteria.
The projects almost always involve scientists from different disciplines who come from different faculties. "We consider interdisciplinarity to be essential. It makes it possible to explore world problems with several dimensions," emphasizes founding director Goldin. Max Roser sees the cooperation between different disciplines as unique here: "There is a lot of talk about interdisciplinarity, but often it is more marketing than reality." The Martin School actually manages to bring together scientists from across the entire university in one place. "Our World in Data", for example, involves economists, climate researchers, numerous computer experts and programmers, several neuroscientists and political scientists. "It's extremely interdisciplinary," says Roser.
Three to five million pounds annual budget
James Martin (1933 to 2013) was an early computer visionary. He foresaw a connected world two decades before the Internet came along. His book "The Wired Society" was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1978. With investments in computer companies, as a consultant, speaker and author of more than a hundred books, Martin acquired a fortune, which he then generously gave away.