The 24 Hour Inspire 2014!
5 pm Thursday 27 March – 5 pm Friday 28 March
Firth Hall, University of Sheffield
24 hours of lectures on life, the universe and everything, in honour and
celebration of Dr Tim Richardson (1964-2013), and in support of local cancer
charities
17.00
17.05
Programme – Thursday 27 March
Introduction and Welcome - Professor David Mowbray, Inspiration for Life
Making a difference through learning
When you realise that what you learn in your degrees can make a difference to people's lives,
magic happens. Professor Elena Rodriguez-Falcon explores how engineering students and
graduates have taken this philosophy and have made a real difference to the community in
Sheffield and beyond.
Elena is Professor of Enterprise and Engineering Education, and one of the first ten Principal
Fellows at the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA). Her main passion is to enable her students
not only to succeed but also to make people's lives better. To this end, Elena has worked with
numerous local organisations and vulnerable people, including St Luke's Hospice, Sheffield
Children’s Hospital, Woolley Wood School and children with cerebral palsy.
17.30
The Sheffield School of Law Innocence Project – the case of Susan May
Susan May’s story is one of terrible injustice and unequivocal resilience. An innocent woman,
convicted for the murder of her elderly aunt and forced to serve a life sentence for a crime she
did not commit. With poor legal defence, forensic error and failures in our justice system all to
blame - a miscarriage of justice can happen to anyone of us. In early 2013 Susan was diagnosed
with breast cancer and tragically died on 30 October 2013 fighting a battle against both her
conviction and her cancer. Although one of those battles we can no longer win, we can do our
very best to clear her name and quash the conviction she never deserved.
Claire McGourlay joined the School of Law in 2002. She was the first person in the Faculty of
Social Sciences to be promoted to Professor on a teaching-only career track. In 2008 Claire
received a University Senate Award for excellence in learning and teaching and in 2009 an Award
for Excellence in Inquiry Based Learning. Claire runs the student-led Innocence Project and comanages the FreeLaw Legal Clinic (http://lodgenews.group.shef.ac.uk/). In 2012 Claire was made
an Academic Fellow of Gray’s Inn.
Chris Musgrave and Elizabeth Adams are undergraduate students in the School of Law, and work
on the Innocence Project as the managers of the Susan May group.
18.00
Our men in Rome: spies, lies and secrets in the sixteenth century
Renaissance Rome was the Brussels of its day: Europe's central meeting point for diplomats and
politicos. Join us to hear about its intrigue and scheming. What went on in the Vatican's corridors
of power? How did one go about bribing a cardinal? And what was the sixteenth-century
equivalent of Ferrero Rocher?
Catherine Fletcher is Lecturer in Public History. After graduating in Politics and Communication
Studies she worked for the BBC’s Political Unit as a researcher and producer. She took up her
current post at Sheffield in 2012. Her first book, Our Man in Rome: Henry VIII and Italian
Ambassador, recounted the diplomatic shenanigans behind Henry VIII's 'divorce' from Catherine
of Aragon. It was described by the Sunday Times as a ‘glittering debut’. She’s currently writing
about Alessandro de’ Medici, duke of Florence in the 1530s, rumoured to be the illegitimate son
of an African slave.
18.30
Positive dyslexia
Positive Dyslexia is a new approach to dyslexia 'invented' at the University of Sheffield, which
takes as starting point Martin Seligman's core principle for Positive Psychology, that ‘curing the
negatives does not create the positives’. The Positive Dyslexia world-wide programme aims to
help dyslexic adults, students and children find their strengths and work to them. Although only
two years old, the programme has led to new ideas on 'assessment for dyslexia', the 'Big Six
Strengths' for dyslexia, and dyslexia as 'Talent Diversity'.
Rod Nicolson is Professor of Psychology at the University of Sheffield. He has lectured in the
Psychology Department since 1976, and has fulfilled many roles including Head of Psychology,
Director of the Institute of Work Psychology and Dean of the Faculty of Science. He was granted a
Senate Award for Excellence in Leadership of Teaching and Learning in 2008, and was recently
shortlisted by the students as one of the University's most inspiring lecturers. Rod’s lifelong
interest is in learning, and his work focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of learning and learning
differences, and how to help students learn effectively.
19.00
Footprints of the Big Bang
When we look at the most distant galaxies we can observe, we are seeing the universe as it was
when it was only 700 million years old - only a twentieth of its current age. When we look at the
cosmic microwave background, we see the universe when it was just 380,000 years old, and
studying
the
abundance
of
certain
light
isotopes
gives
us
information about what happened just a few minutes after the Big Bang. But last week, the
BICEP2 experiment at the South Pole announced a result that, if it survives the intense scrutiny
that it will endure over the coming months, takes us right back to the period of inflation, just a
tiny fraction of a second - about 10 trillionths of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second! - after the
big bang. Dr Susan Cartwright tries to explain what this evidence is, how it was obtained, and
what it means for our understanding of the very early universe.
Susan Cartwright is a particle physicist who arrived in Sheffield in 1989, after time spent in DESY,
Hamburg and SLAC, California. Her current interest is neutrino physics, specifically the T2K (Tokai
to Kamioka) neutrino oscillation experiment in Japan, which aims to improve our understanding
of neutrinos - a topic which may eventually help us to understand where the antimatter went.
19.30
Human selves/robot selves
What is the self? Combining perspectives from psychology and artificial intelligence, and using
insights from research on robotics and immersive virtual reality, Tony Prescott will try to show
how these new technologies are helping us to answer age-old questions about who we are. Hel
addresses questions such as: What is the human self? Could a robot have a self? Do I need a body
in order to have a self? Could I project myself into another body?
Tony is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology, and Director of the
Sheffield Centre for Robotics (http://www.scentro.ac.uk). His research focuses on using robots to
model human and animal intelligence and on developing useful assistive robot technologies. He
is currently funded by the European Union Framework programme to develop autobiographic
memory systems for humanoid robots, and to investigate human-robot relationships. Having cofounded the Living Machines international conference series he is now editing a book for Oxford
University Press about future bio-inspired technologies entitled The Handbook of Living
Machines: Research in Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems. For a recent blog piece see
http://theconversation.com/super-intelligent-machines-arent-to-be-feared-15709
20.00
Narrative, illness and the importance of uncertainty: a personal account
How do we make sense of our lives in times of great suffering? How might we discover reasons to
hope and continue when we live with chronic illness, trauma, dispossession, loss? With reference
to insights drawn from the arts and humanities, as well as social science, this personal account
sets out a (fragmented and incomplete) ethics and practice of survival.
Brendan Stone is Professor of Social Engagement and the Humanities, in the School of English. He
has worked extensively with people who live with severe and enduring mental distress (or mental
illness), and with organisations which provide support, drawing on understandings of narrative
and power as well as his own experiences of living with illness.
20.30
Life’s a risky business: why we all need to think like a statistician
The ability to understand data and evidence is becoming increasingly important in today’s datadriven world. Jenny Freeman discusses some elements of statistical literacy and what are the key
questions to ask when presented with data and evidence. She provides a brief overview of why it
is important that we all start to think more statistically, illustrated by some recent, and not so
recent examples, and by the end you will be just a little clearer on what are the key questions that
you should ask when presented with statistics. You should be more confident and less
bamboozled than when we started.
Jenny Freeman is Associate Professor of Medical Statistics at Leeds University. She worked at
Sheffield for nearly 20 years and prior to that, at the London School of Hygiene. She has been an
academic statistician for almost all of her career, with the exception of time out to study for a
degree in Embroidery. She has received several awards for her teaching, including two Senate
Awards from Sheffield and the Keith Boddy Prize from the Institute of Physics & Engineering in
Medicine for the best educational article in their journal, SCOPE. Jenny has been involved with
the Royal Statistical Society for many years and is currently vice president for external affairs.
21.00
Poems on walls
What role can art play in our cities, beyond that expected of it as an object? In what ways can art
as a critical methodology and practice inform the ways in which we represent, inhabit and plan
our cities? How might voices and epistemologies from the arts be integrated and amplified at
planning and policy level? Amanda Crawley Jackson makes the case that there is a place for art in
our cities beyond driving tourism and ‘regeneration’; beyond public art commissions, sanctioned
street art and poems on walls.
Amanda is a senior lecturer in French Studies. Her research focuses on continental thought,
theories of space and contemporary visual arts from the French-speaking world. She has curated
a number of exhibitions in the city and is the director of the Furnace Park project in Shalesmoor.
21.30
Fundamental Physics and the Dimensionality of Space
Everyday experiences tell us that space has three dimensions: up-down, left-right and forwardsbackwards. But is that really so? According to some speculative ideas in fundamental physics,
space has more than three dimensions. Professor Carsten van de Bruck explains why there might
be more than three spatial dimensions and how we can test this idea with experiments.
Carsten was educated in Germany and studied at the Universities of Bochum and Bonn. He was a
postdoctoral researcher at Brown University, Cambridge and Oxford before moving to a
lectureship at Sheffield. Carsten works in the field of cosmology, the study of the universe as a
whole. He is interested in the question whether there are extra spatial dimensions and what the
implications for the big bang theory are. His other field of interest is 'dark energy', which is the
phenomenon that the expansion of the universe is accelerating instead of slowing down.
22.00
What language is like
Richard Steadman-Jones is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English, and a historian of ideas with
a particular interest in how people in the past (and sometimes the present) have thought about
language – what it is, how it works, and what we do with it. He often works on ideas about
language in contexts of cross-cultural interaction: colonial settings, travel, and the experience of
exile. How did the agents of colonial powers think about the languages of the colonies? How do
political exiles feel about having to speak the language of the host nation? In thinking about these
issues, he uses a wide range of source material including technical works on language,
autobiography, fiction, and philosophical writing.
22.30
Spinny science: physics, feminism and pole dancing
When one thinks of pole dancing, rarely does physics come to mind. However, Dr Matt Mears
explores questions such as ‘Why don’t they fall off?’ and ‘How can they spin so fast and
gracefully?’ (Disclaimer - grace is not guaranteed in this talk). Matt also takes a look at some
peculiarities of spinning systems, with some visual demonstrations, and examines a simple
equation from the media: Pole Dancing = Sexual Exploitation of Women. But once again, he will
be using physics (mostly …).
Matt joined the University of Sheffield as an undergraduate in 2002 followed by a PhD with
Professor Mark Geoghegan in 2006. After this he took the obvious decision to try to link physics
with fertility, with some interesting results. In 2012 he became a teaching fellow and joined the
department as a permanent member of staff in 2014. Matt likes to keep busy as chair of the LGBT
staff network, is a keen baker and carpenter (not at the same time), obsessed with tea (that was
last year’s talk) and tries to be a pole dancer (this year’s talk).
23.00
Is mind reading with MRI possible?
Aneurin Kennerley is an experimental physicist who came to Sheffield in 2002. He completed his
PhD in neuroimaging techniques – specifically functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and
optical imaging spectroscopy (OIS) - and became an MR physicist for the Department of
Psychology. His research concerns the mathematical/biophysical modelling of neuronal activity to
the Blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) fMRI signal for investigation of brain function.
Aneurin is an amateur mentalist and is currently combining this hobby with thought identification
using MRI: Is it really possible to read minds?
Follow Aneurin on Twitter: @MagneticDr_K
23.30
Mozart’s Requiem: facts, legends and ghosts
Simon looks at the colourful reception of Mozart’s Requiem, which the composer was working on
in the run up to his death in December 1791 and which he died before completing. The facts
known about the work are few and far between. As a result, writers have embroidered elaborate
fictions and quasi fictions, which have informed and continue to inform in important ways our
understandings of the work.
Professor Simon Keefe is J R Hoyle Chair and Head of Music. He is the author or editor of eight
books since 2001, mostly on Mozart and eighteenth-century music. His monograph Mozart's
Requiem: Reception, Work, Completion (Cambridge University Press, 2012) won the Marjorie
Weston Emerson award from the Mozart Society of America for the best book published in 2011
or 2012.
00.00
Programme – Friday 28 March
How much electricity do solar panels really generate across the UK?
Sheffield Solar is the UK photovoltaic industry’s leading scientific data resource. Using data
collated from owners of solar panels across the UK, Lisa discusses the real-world generation
potential from installations, and explains the pros and cons of solar panels and how to know if an
installation is working as expected.
Lisa Clark, Business Operations Manager for the Sheffield Solar Project, is an applied
mathematician and physicist, with considerable experience in industrial problem solving. She
started her professional career as an academic in theoretical physics (Inflationary Cosmology),
gaining a PhD in 2004. She now specialises in renewable technology (solar photovoltaic panel
research) and sustainability, with a focus on strategic projects and political implementation.
00.30
Reality is in the eye of the beholder: using eye-tracking to understand how we see
the world
Our brains are very good at tricking us into thinking that we see and perceive everything in the
world around us. However, this really isn't the case. We only take in a small sample of the
information and our brains fill in the gaps. Eye-tracking can help us to understand what
information our brains actually receive. Megan will use a mobile eye-tracking device to
demonstrate what is really in the eye of the beholder!
Megan Freeth is a lecturer in Cognitive Psychology. She came to Sheffield as a research fellow in
2009. Her research is mainly based around improving understanding of autism, using the
methodologies of eye-tracking and EEG. She is a member of the Sheffield Autism Research Lab:
http://autismresearchlab.group.shef.ac.uk
01.00
The X lecture: the ‘love’ life of insects
Insects are the most diverse group of organisms on the planet and they showcase the full range of
evolutionary responses to sexual selection in some very extra-ordinary ways. In this ‘X-rated’
lecture Professor Mike Siva-Jothy takes us from the function of beautiful and elegant courtship
displays through to the ins and outs of some pretty gruesome mating behaviours. Most
importantly, the stories he shares illustrate the potency of selection on mating and how it
ultimately drives a battle between the sexes.
Mike studied Zoology at UCL in the early ‘80s, and then did a PhD on dragonfly mating behaviour
and physiology in Oxford. After a post doc in Japan, he came back to the UK and secured a
lectureship in Sheffield in 1990. He is still in the department he joined a quarter of a century ago,
but is now Head of Department. His research is focused on how insect behaviour and physiology
are driven by sexual selection.
01.30
Physics on my iPod
Nigel says ‘This is little more than an excuse to combine my love of physics with my love of music.
I'll play songs on my iPod that reference physics, ranging from a beautifully poetic reference to
optical reflection to a deeply pessimistic view of nanotechnology leading to the end of the world
and stopping along the way for some Higgs Boson Blues. Between songs we'll look into the
physics and consider the extent to which physics has been fairly represented in the pursuit of art.’
Professor Nigel Clarke is Head of the Physics & Astronomy department. He rejoined Sheffield
University in 2011 after nearly twenty years trying to be a materials scientist and then a chemist
at various other northern institutions. He’s a theoretical physicist who is occasionally allowed to
do experiments and who enjoys thinking about stuff that is soft or stretchy.
02.00
The music of a physicist
Music is an activity that helps many of us to relax between bouts of furious calculation or rushing
about. One of Ed’s favourite music genres is Blues, which he has been playing for many years on
the Piano. Ed says ‘this 'talk' is in fact an opportunity for you to see a different side of the guy who
normally teaches relativity and searches for dark matter and gravitational waves, and I am not
referring here to my night attire.’
Ed Daw is a physics lecturer whose hobby is music. He has played in numerous bands, mostly on
the piano.
02.30
Who were Langmuir & Blodgett, and what did they ever do for us?
A light-hearted look at the scientific careers of Irving Langmuir and Katharine Blodgett, the
scientists accredited with the development of the Langmuir-Blodgett trough which was
extensively used by Dr Tim Richardson throughout his research career.
Alan Dunbar is a Lecturer in Energy in the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering,
having previously worked as a researcher in the Physics department under the supervision of Tim
Richardson. His research is focused on studying nano-materials for various applications including
solar cells, gas detectors and CO2 utilisation.
03.00
CatClo in China
Catalytic Clothing seeks to explore how clothing and textiles can be used as a catalytic surface to
purify air, employing existing technology in a new way. It is a collaboration between
artist/designer Helen Storey and Professor Tony Ryan, featured at last year’s 24 Hour Inspire.
Whilst technical progress is slow, a series of cultural and artist interventions are bringing this
forthcoming technology into the public domain, seeking to engage potential users in helping us
shape our world for the better. The latest installation is on the campus of South East University in
Nanjing where a group of interested students are campaigning to clean up their city. If everyone
in Nanjing had catalytic clothes then they would be able to reduce their NOx by half and be
cleaner than Sheffield.
Tony is Pro Vice Chancellor for the Faculty of Science. His research covers the synthesis,
structure, processing and properties of polymers and he was in at the beginning of polymer
nanotechnology. He has co-authored more than 200 papers and 8 patents and written a book on
polymer processing or how things are made from plastic. Tony is a regular contributor to TV,
radio and newspapers. He was born in Leeds and got his three degrees from UMIST. Married with
two daughters, Tony is a creative cook, a keen cyclist and an occasional mountaineer with a
weakness for gadgets. He was made an OBE in 2006 for ‘Services to Science’.
03.30
Sperm you can bank on
Allan Pacey is Senior Lecturer at the School of Medicine and Biomedical Science, Head of
Andrology for Sheffield Teaching Hospitals and Academic Head of Reproductive and
Developmental Medicine. In addition to Science and Clinical Work, Allan is an accomplished
broadcaster and regularly appears on the Today programme and Woman’s Hour. Recent
television programmes include Britain’s Secret Code Breaker (2011), Donor Unknown (2011), The
Great Sperm Race (2009), The Truth About Food (2007), Make me a Baby (2007) and Lab Rats
(2004). Allan is going to talk about his favourite topic: sperm.
04.00
One of our scientists is missing
Physics is the ‘knowledge of nature’. Physicists are the rock stars of Science, good looking,
charming and hugely intelligent. The question is where do they go when they leave the safety and
warmth of the universities they were created in; are we missing some?
The makers’ revolution is the next industrial revolution, and will complete the digital revolution
started in the 1970s. The ability to translate the digital world directly into the physical world will
allow anyone with an idea to bypass the conventional manufacturing process. Just as the Web
ended the monopoly of mass media, the combination of science and bespoke engineering will
allow for future scientific advances to be developed by anyone, at lightning speed. This new land
of scientific opportunity will give refuge to all those missing physicists.
Dr Ashley Cadby is a senior lecturer in soft matter physics at the University of Sheffield’s
Department of Physics and Astronomy. His research interests range from optical bio-physics to
organic semi-conductors. Born in a small fishing village just outside of Birmingham, Ashley used
his physics powers to travel the world working in labs from Austria to California finally finding his
spiritual home in the Hicks Building at Sheffield.
04.30
Throwing spanners at nanobots
The cells of all living organisms are wonderfully complicated factories. Enzymes – or nanobots –
are key to this. Nanobots work furiously and specifically to produce the products required for a
cell to respire, respond and reproduce. Nate introduces how we dissect the individual roles of
enzymes, first by mass producing them in our own bioreactors. Then we interrogate them (mainly
using lasers) to understand how they function, how powerful they are and how specific they are.
This helps us build a picture of how the entire cellular factory system works, and how we can use
this knowledge to help research in medicine, food sustainability and bioengineering.
Dr Nate Adams, postdoctoral researcher in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, works on
elucidating mechanisms in chlorophyll production. In addition to his day job, he has a sideline
doing silly things for the BBC, from designing demonstrations on shows such as Bang Goes the
Theory to being on screen on Absolute Genius with Dick and Dom, or just presenting to thousands
of people at live events.
05.00
A brief history of the telescope: from Galileo to Gaia
Telescopes are our eyes on the Universe. Since their invention in the early 17th century they
have transformed how we view our place in the Cosmos. Today's giant telescopes are peering
across 95% of cosmic time at wavelengths spanning the full electromagnetic spectrum. However,
how we have got to this point is an interesting story in itself. James briefly delves into the history
of the telescope, revealing failed attempts and the somewhat "interesting characters" behind
them.
Dr James Mullaney is an astronomy research fellow in the Physics and Astronomy department
here at Sheffield University. His research uses data collected by some of the most advanced
telescopes in the world (and in space) to reveal the hidden details of black hole growth and how it
connects to galaxy formation.
05.30
Deep Underground Science at Boulby Mine: Subterranean studies from Dark Matter to Dark Life
For more than a decade UK astrophysicists have been operating experiments to search for Dark
Matter - the 'missing mass in the Universe' - 1100m below ground in a purpose-built 'lowbackground' facility at Boulby potash mine in the north-east of England. Boulby is one of just a
few places in the world suited to hosting these and other science projects requiring a 'quiet
environment', free of interference from natural background radiation (in particular the difficultto-escape-from 'cosmic rays'). The race to find Dark Matter continues - and Boulby currently hosts
the 'DRIFT' project: the world's most sensitive dark matter detector with direction-sensitivity, a
'Dark Matter telescope'. In the meantime the range of science projects looking for the special
properties of deep underground facilities is growing - and projects now operating at Boulby range
from astro and particle physics to studies of cosmic rays, clouds and climate, environmental
radioactivity, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and life on Earth (and beyond!). Dr Sean Paling
gives an overview of the Boulby Deep Underground Science Facility, the science currently
supported and plans for science at Boulby in the future.
Sean is Director and Senior Scientist at the Boulby Underground Science Facility, and an Honorary
Senior Research Fellow in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sheffield.
06.00
Big science at the Large Hadron Collider
With the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has inaugurated a
new era in particle physics. Currently shut down for maintenance and upgrade work, the LHC will
restart in 2015 with the aim of discovering new physical phenomena and performing precision
measurements of the properties of the Higgs boson. Dr Davide Costanzo gives a brief overview of
the physics programme of the ATLAS detector at the LHC, and describes how novel physics
phenomena such as SuperSymmetry could be discovered. He gives a local perspective
emphasising the work done in Sheffield as part of a large collaboration, and explains why, despite
not having discovered SuperSymmetry yet, we are gearing up for the new data-taking phase.
Davide is Reader in Experimental Particle Physics in the department of Physics & Astronomy,
working on the ATLAS and SuperLHC projects at CERN.
06.30
AIMS (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences) & the Next Einstein Initiative
The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is based upon the vision that the key to
development in Africa is Africans having a high level of education in science/technology. Instead
of the privileged few leaving the continent to study in the west, AIMS brings western lecturers to
Africa. The top students in maths and physics from all over Africa are brought together for an
intensive residential one-year masters course. On graduation they are encouraged to use what
they have learned for the good of their home countries and to remain in contact with the friends
they have made from around the continent.
Rhoda Hawkins is a Lecturer in Soft Matter Theory in Physics & Astronomy at the University of
Sheffield. She did her first degree at Oxford, and her PhD at Leeds, and subsequently undertook
postdoctoral research in Amsterdam, Paris and Bristol. She has been a visiting lecturer at the
African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town and in Senegal.
07.00
Controlling blood flow in the brain: understanding the BOLD signal
The brain uses electrical signals to represent information. As a result, like a computer, the brain
needs energy to think, and if it does not get enough energy parts may die. This energy is provided
as glucose and oxygen in the blood. When a part of the brain is active a signal is sent to the blood
vessels to tell them to dilate and allow more blood to flow to that local area. On top of the
increase in energy supply that it produces, a beneficial side-effect of this increase of blood flow is
that it allows us to image nerve cell activity inside the head in a brain scanner - a process called
functional magnetic resonance imaging. Clare provides an overview of how energy is delivered to
where it is needed in the brain.
Clare Howarth is Vice Chancellor’s Advanced Fellow in the Psychology. After an MSci Physics at
Imperial College Clare joined the Wellcome Trust PhD programme in Neuroscience at UCL.
Working with David Attwell, she discovered a new mechanism for the control of brain blood flow
at the capillary level and produced the first energy budget for an area of brain tissue that is based
on the measured electrical properties of its cells. During her Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship
she worked in Canada with Brian MacVicar (UBC), applying two-photon microscopy to brain slices
to investigate the role of astrocytes in the vascular response to neural activity, and in the UK with
Nicola Sibson (University of Oxford), using in vivo MRI and optical imaging techniques to
investigate how neuron to blood vessel signalling generates BOLD functional imaging signals.
07.30
Women and the Gothic
Gothic novels, films and television series offer up many versions of female heroines. Young
women who have been thrown onto the mercies of the world by the premature death of parents,
these heroines’ stories are predicated upon the death or absence of a mother figure. Or are
they??? Angela Wright discusses the Gothic from the eighteenth century to the present day in
order to consider the figure of the absent mother.
Angela Wright is Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield and
currently co-President of the International Gothic Association. She is the author of Gothic Fiction
(Palgrave, 2007), Britain, France and the Gothic: The Import of Terror (Cambridge University Press,
2013) and co-editor (with Dale Townshend) of Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic
(Cambridge University Press, 2014). Current projects include a study of Mary Shelley for the
University of Wales Press series Gothic Literary Authors and preliminary research for her next
project, which carries the provisional title Fostering Romanticism.
08.00
Securing security in cyberspace: the role of international law
Russell Buchan discusses the various threats that emerge from cyberspace and assess the
adequacy of international law in suppressing and deterring them, with particular focus on the
international legal regulation of cyber espionage and cyber war.
Dr Russell Buchan is a lecturer in international law at the University of Sheffield and has published
widely in the field of international peace and security. His latest book is entitled International Law
and the Construction of the Liberal Peace (Hart, 2013).
08.30
No fixed abode: celebrating twenty years of the National Fairground Archive
(NFA) at the University of Sheffield Library
Professor Vanessa Toulmin celebrates 20 years of the National Fairground Archive with a personal
talk, complete with family pictures, of how a girl from the fairground ran away from the circus
and found a home and place for her family legacy at the University of Sheffield.
Vanessa is Director of the National Fairground Archive in the University of Sheffield Library and
the University's Head of Engagement. She was awarded a personal chair in 2007 for her work on
early film and popular entertainment and has books and articles relating to Blackpool, early film,
illegitimate entertainment and circus. Working as both a circus producer and an entertainment
historian she was Director of the annual Showzam festival in Blackpool from 2008 to 2013. Since
returning to the University she has headed up the Public Engagement with Research team and set
up the Festival of the Mind which will return to the city in September 2014.
09.00
Cancer research: are we getting anywhere?
Decades and decades of research effort and millions and millions of pounds have been spent on
the battle against cancer. Dr Ingunn Holen presents a brief summary of some of the amazing
changes in diagnosis and treatment that have come about as a result, and shows that we really
are making a difference.
Ingunn is a cancer biologist who has worked in cancer research for more than 15 years. She is
particularly interested in how cancer spreads and colonises new sites, including the skeleton.
Ingunn has worked closely with charities including Weston Park Hospital Cancer Charity and
Breast Cancer Campaign where she serves on a number of committees. In her team she has
encouraged public engagement in a number of ways, including offering lab tours, demonstrations
and public lectures.
09.30
The science behind spider silk
Chris Holland joined Sheffield at the start of 2013 and is head of the Natural Materials Group,
currently holding an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship. His research uses tools developed for the
physical sciences to better understand Nature’s materials, from latex to collagen, but with a focus
on silk. By studying how silk is spun he has been able to gain unique insights into silk’s
biodiversity, structure and evolution. Additionally, this work has made important links between
natural and industrial fibre processing which has lead to a fundamentally new way of designing,
testing and fabricating bio-inspired materials.
10.00
Sound and fury (Primary Schools talk)
In space no one can hear you scream. But on a planet with an atmosphere, like ours, almost
everything makes a sound - even when they are trying not to! Humans stay in touch with it, bats
`see' with it, and killer whales use it as a weapon. Our world is buzzing with invisible energy that
will make our eardrums move. How does it get there? How do we know what it means? David and
Marieke will take the audience on a journey from atoms to earthquakes, and from dropped pins
to jet engines, in search of the physics, the human experience, and the beauty of sound.
David Mowbray is Professor of Solid State Physics in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. His
hobbies include walking, bird watching, photography and reading. He has been actively involved
in outreach for many years with particular emphasis in working with primary schools.
After a PhD in particle physics from the University of Sheffield, Marieke Navin headed to the
Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester as a science communicator and now works as the
Director of the Manchester Science Festival.
11.00
Citizens of the world? towards a new political history for the global age
What difference can we make to the problems that now confront us? We act only as citizens of
nation states, and yet it’s clear that nation states are often unable to resolve problems acting
alone. Professor Mike Braddick considers why the nation state came to seem so influential and
why it has now come to seem insufficient to address our political challenges. He also looks at the
ways in which people in the past were able to act above or below the level of the nation state in
order to address their problems, offering an historical context for recent developments in local
and global activism. If we are to be effective citizens in the 21st century we will need to be, more
than we are now, citizens of the world.
Mike took his BA and PhD at Cambridge University, and was an assistant professor in Alabama
before coming to Sheffield in 1990. He has held visiting scholarships at the Huntington Library,
California, the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and an ARC
distinguished visiting fellowship at the University of Adelaide. Mike has published widely on
aspects of state formation and forms of political resistance in early modern England. He is coeditor of two essay collections and of a major edition of seventeenth century letters – his most
recent publications are God's Fury, England's Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars and
edited collections on The politics of gesture: historical perspectives and The experience of
revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland, the latter co-edited with David L Smith. Mike was
previously Pro-Vice-Chancellor for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.
11.30
Complexity, paradox and incompleteness
What's the smallest uninteresting number? Surely being the smallest uninteresting number is in
itself an interesting property. So the smallest uninteresting number is actually quite interesting.
This "joke" is sometimes called the "interesting numbers paradox". But taking the joke seriously
leads to notions of complexity, and the fact that there is no system of axioms for the natural
numbers which can capture everything about them.
Paul Mitchener has been a Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Sheffield since 2007.
Previously, he worked at the universities of Goettingen, Paris VII, and Southern Denmark. He is a
pure mathematician, and is passionate about seeing connections between different parts of
mathematics, and with different areas of science.
12.00
Surviving Warsaw 1939-1945: untold stories of Occupation and the Ghetto
Dr Marek Szablewski, a Durham University physics lecturer researching in materials physics, born
and brought up in Sheffield, was awarded a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship in 2010-11.
The aim of his Fellowship was to research his hidden Polish family history and the journey that
brought his parents to Yorkshire after World War Two. Marek travelled to Warsaw to work on this
project, digging up information from archives and museums, talking to relatives and visiting sites
of special interest in order to fill in the gaps in his late father’s stories and documents. After the
war his father ended up in Britain, married and joined the toolmakers W. Tyzack, Sons & Turner
where he rose to become technical director. He died in 2008.
Marek says: “I am conscious that I am the custodian of these stories as there are very few firsthand witnesses left. I plan to write a book and give talks to the next generation and anyone who
is interested in order to bear witness, challenge stereotypes, celebrate survival and show how our
history relates to the way we live now".
12.30
Understanding science as a culture
Philosophers of science have for many years aimed to describe what science, and the process of
making knowledge, ought to be like. For far less time a small number of sociologists have jumped
straight inside the labs to find out what science and knowledge production is like. What kinds of
questions does a sociologist of science try to answer? What kinds of things do we see when we
take the everyday practices of scientific communities and open them up to scrutiny? Dr Susan
Molyneux-Hodgson takes us on some anthropological meanderings, through the rituals and
practices of some of strange tribes that can be found even inside universities.
Susan is Senior Lecturer in Sociology. As a sociologist of science, her research leads her to spend
(probably) too much time inside laboratories and in talking to scientists and engineers. Her
projects and publications have covered topics such as: how scientific communities operate; interdisciplinarity and collaboration; gender and science; and barriers to innovation. Her main teaching
is on science and technology studies and on philosophy and methodology of social sciences. She is
proud of the fact that, since joining Sheffield in 2001, she has managed to teach students in at
least 18 departments of the University, from all five Faculties.
13.00
"Trust me, I'm a web-site": problems and pitfalls of patients using health
information from the Web
Most of us know someone who has been diagnosed with a serious illness. When people receive a
diagnosis they may need information to help them through the illness. Many patients use the
Web to find this information and, increasingly, people share information about their condition
using social media and blogs. While this can be helpful, not all of the information on the Web can
be trusted. Professor Peter Bath discusses some potential problems of obtaining health
information from the Web.
Peter is Professor of Health Informatics in the Information School. His interest in information
science and health informatics developed at the end of his first degree in Applied Biology, when
he came to Sheffield to study for an MSc in Information Studies. Peter studied for his PhD in
chemical structure handling under the supervision of Professor Peter Willett and Dr Frank Allen
(Cambridge). He was appointed Research Fellow, then Lecturer in Information Science in the
Sheffield Institute for Studies on Ageing (SISA). He rejoined the Department of Information
Studies in 2000 to set up the new MSc in Health Informatics programme and became Head of the
Health Informatics Research Group.
13.30
The art of getting things spectacularly wrong
Marie Kinsey is a Senior University Teacher in the Department of Journalism Studies. For 25 years
she worked as a broadcast journalist and presenter for commercial radio, independent television
and the BBC, mainly reporting on business, economics and finance. She spent many of those years
trying to persuade news editors that stories about unemployment, inflation, GDP, swaps and
derivatives were actually important. Look what happened in 2008, when financial news made the
lead on news bulletins all over the world. Now she's helping aspiring journalists to recognise news
when they see it and to tell a great story accurately, fairly and impartially. And how to make
it interesting. She's now realised that what she's actually teaching is judgement: how to get things
right. And in the process she's learned just how easy it is to for people to unintentionally get
things wrong.
14.00
Sheffield: city of immigration
Although Sheffield doesn't come to mind as one of the 'immigration capitals' of the UK - such as
London, Bradford of Birmingham, inflows of migrants have been of great importance for a
century. The migration history of Sheffield has some distinctive features. These and the current
structures of ethnic communities of migrant origin will be illustrated in this short talk.
Professor Paul White is Professor of European Urban Geography. His teaching concentrates on
European themes, but he has also taught population geography, social geography and the
philosophy and methodology of human geography. Visiting other European countries, and
particularly their major cities, combines work and play for Paul, whose favourite cities at the
moment are Berlin, Lisbon and Paris. Paul has served as Secretary and Chair of the Population
Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society and as a member of the RGS/QAA
benchmarking group for geography in higher education. Paul is a member of HEFCE’s Teaching
Quality and Student Experience Strategic Committee, co-chair of the HEA´s Pro-Vice-Chancellor
network, and chair of the Russell Group's network of Pro-Vice-Chancellors for Learning and
Teaching. Closer to home he is a governor of Longley Park Sixth Form College in Sheffield.
14.30
Is artistic creativity the same as scientific creativity?
Are creative artists more emotionally unstable than creative scientists? Are scientists less
sociable than artists? Dr Kamal Birdi looks at common preconceptions of creative people in the
arts and sciences and explore whether psychological research supports or refutes these
assumptions.
Kamal is both an academic and practitioner in the field of Occupational Psychology. Over the past
twenty years he has studied and worked with hundreds of organisations and individuals in order
to understand how to improve creativity and learning in the workplace. In 2010, he was given the
British Psychological Society's DOP 2010 Academic Contribution to Practice Award. Most recently,
he has been introducing his CLEAR IDEAS innovation model into a wide range of organisations in
order to improve their creativeness.
15.00
Getting the skills to pay the bills with Arts and Humanities
What happens when you've lost everything and you don't even have the means to get the bus let
alone financial help and support? Could the skills you gained at university get you through it? This
personal account explores how Dr Katie Edwards did it herself.
Katie is Lecturer in the Bible in Contemporary Culture & Society. A graduate of the Biblical
Studies Department at Sheffield, her research specialism is the function, impact and influence of
the Bible in contemporary culture and the role of the Bible in the modern world. Her doctoral
work focused on the portrayal of Eve in post-feminist popular culture and her recent research
focuses on intersections of gender, race and class in popular cultural re-appropriations of biblical
characters/narratives.
15.30
Are we living in a computer simulation?
Could we be living in a computer simulation run by a far-future post-human civilisation? Dr Simon
Goodwin explains that this idea is not quite as insane as it first sounds...
Simon is a Reader in Astrophysics. His main research interests are star formation and the
dynamics of young stellar systems, but he is also interested in the science of aliens - do they exist,
what are they like, and how can we find them?
16.00
The holy grail of bio-geographic analysis – from DNA to home village
The search for a method that utilises biological information to predict humans’ place of origin has
occupied scientists for millennia. Over the past four decades, scientists have employed genetic
data in an effort to achieve this goal but even the best tools were only accurate within 700km in
Europe and inaccurate elsewhere. Dr Eran Elhaik presents the Geographic Population Structure
(GPS) tool, a most accurate bio-geographical tool with an accuracy of home village.
Eran completed his PhD in Molecular Evolution at the University of Houston and held
postdoctorate positions at Johns Hopkins working on population genetics and mental disorders.
He recently moved to Sheffield to take part in the new Bioinformatics Hub. His recent studies
traced the origin of European Jews to Khazaria and set the age of the so-called ‘Y chromosomal
Adam’, the most ancient human Y chromosome, to 209,000 years ago. Eran’s lab at the University
of Sheffield focuses on applying knowledge about population genetics to promote the field of
personalised medicine and the environmental causes for autism.
16.30
The singularity may be slightly delayed...
Some people - most famously, Ray Kurzweil, now director of engineering at Google - think that
technology is now accelerating so fast that it's leading us imminently to some kind of event
horizon, beyond which we will be facing a radically unknowable future - the Singularity. The key
scientific advances behind this are artificial intelligence which, it is believed, will soon surpass that
of humans, nanotechnology, which, it is anticipated, will create unparalleled material abundance,
and advances in life extension which, it is hoped, will abolish ageing and death. Professor Richard
Jones takes a mildly sceptical look at the science that underlies these hopes, and looks back at
some of the surprising historical antecedents of this belief package, concluding that, perhaps,
none of us are quite as modern as we think we are.
17.00
Richard is a physicist, and is currently Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation. He is the
author of the book Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life, and was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society in 2006.
Closing words from Catherine Annabel, Chair of Inspiration for Life
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