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SOUTHWORKS renews Digital Hub support for further three years

Published

Jesus College is pleased to announce that its partnership with SOUTHWORKS - a global software development company which supports the College’s Digital Hub Fellowship and a range of Digital Hub activities – has been renewed for another three years. 

The partnership has been made possible thanks to the generosity of Alejandro Jack, associate alumnus of Jesus College and the Said Business School (Diploma in Global Business 2012), and his business partner Jonathan Halife. The duo founded the global software development company SOUTHWORKS in 2004, which works on high-profile digital projects for clients such as Microsoft, Discovery, 7-Eleven and Siemens.

The SOUTHWORKS partnership, which began in 2021, coincided with the completion of the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub at Jesus, and enabled the College to appoint a new Digital Hub Fellow tasked with building a programme of events in the space, specifically focused on how advances in digital technologies and methodologies are transforming learning and research, and our understanding of the world. 

Over the past four years, the SOUTHWORKS Digital Hub Fellow, Dr Janina Schupp, has delivered more than sixty events for the programme, including workshops, conferences, musical performances, exhibitions, and lectures, that each explores an aspect of life in the Digital Age. The programme has attracted a diverse variety of collaborators, including the wider University of Oxford research community, arts and cultural organisations, and technology companies. It has also seen one Jesus student-led event – the Oxford Synthetic Media Forum – spin-out to become an annual, and highly popular, commercial conference called the OxGen AI Summit. 

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“Through the curated Digital Hub programme, we have welcomed around five thousand attendees to Hub events since the beginning of this partnership, from all walks of life, professional backgrounds, and different stages in their academic careers. Like SOUTHWORKS, we believe that through knowledge exchange, skills-building, and digital and technological empowerment, people can accomplish great things. It’s been wonderful to bring like-minded people and collaborators from across disciplines and fields of interest together via the Hub programme; creating new bodies of research and networks across Oxford and beyond.”
Dr Janina Schupp
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In addition, SOUTHWORKS generously funded the SOUTHWORKS Digital Media Lab (SDML) at Jesus College, a dedicated space for the production of a range of digital media content, and digital media skills training. Featuring state-of-the-art podcasting and video production equipment, the SOUTHWORKS Digital Media Lab offers training and content creation support to College members. The space is home to the Jesus Access and Outreach Team’s popular ‘What? Why? When?’ podcast, which provides advice, encouragement and support to prospective Oxford students, and the College’s soon-to-launch ‘Green Room’ podcast which will feature a range of interviews with academic staff and students on topics as broad as new research discoveries, the life of a PhD candidate, and characters from the College’s over 450-year history. 

Dr Schupp added, “I am incredibly grateful to SOUTHWORKS for renewing their support of my role and the Digital Hub Programme. The next three years will allow us to expand our important activities further to ignite new collaborations with key partners, develop personal development opportunities for our current students, spark more research innovation and foster an inclusive community through flagship events.”

The extended partnership commenced in October 2025.