Episode 11 features Andrea Ravagli who performed at our sixth show in November 2016. Andrea tells us about the difficulties of getting used to southern English accents after living in Scotland, how he wanted to study glass for his PhD because he’d never been taught about glass during his undergraduate chemistry degree, and about how he has come to love custard and marmite. Andrea also talked about how he’s using glass to make lasers and how much it annoys him that people seem to think glass is a liquid!

Episode 10 features Nic Percivall who performed at our seventh show in February 2017. Nic tells us about how she ended up doing research into the father/son relationships in medieval Viking societies and why she then left academia after her PhD. Nic also has great stories about finding out bridge spotters exist, how history students fought to get onto the course they wanted, and how one Viking Earl of Orkney was killed by a dead Scottish chieftain!

Episode 9 features Phil Wiles who performed at our eighth show in May 2017. Phil tells us about his interests in hormones, obesity, and parasites. He also tells us how he uses his twitchiness to fight weight gain, why Labradors are so easy to train, and about one of the drugs that has been used to tackle obesity. Phil was an undergraduate biomedical scientist at the time of his Bright Club performance and for some reason decided to spend the week before his exams preparing to perform at our show!

Episode 8 features Tom Hunt who performed at our second show back in November 2015. Tom tells us about why he ended up doing a Masters in History, why he’s now moving towards studying Physics, and how little funding there is for academic research in History. He also tell us about the explorer Sir Richard Burton, who was apparently seen as a pornographer by some of his contemporaries, and a bit about the East India Company. Tom’s Bright Club set was mostly one-liners and his jokes span across time from the Vikings to Queen Victoria!

Episode 7 features Jamal Kinsella who performed at our sixth show back in November 2016. Jamal tells us about his experiences working in multiple different labs with different research focuses and how he moved from psychology towards engineering by studying human response to vibration and what causes car accidents. He also tells us how weird it is to get paid to shake people, why he had to take photos of peoples’ thighs while they were sat on his motion simulator (which he nicknamed Little Twitchy), and about the difficulties of getting quantitative data when asking people how comfortable or uncomfortable they are.

Episode 6 features Katherine Crawford who performed at our second show back in November 2015. Katherine tells us about how she ended up studying archaeology and in particular about her interest in underwater archaeology and the use of modern computational techniques to model the way people move around cities to study ancient religious processions. She also told us about how little she likes comparisons with Indiana Jones, about how she’s never found a dinosaur, and about how she isn’t looking for Atlantis.

Episode 5 features Natt Day who performed at our third show back in February 2016. Natt tells us about how she only found out that she has asthma after starting her PhD studying asthma and the common cold, why she has a DVD of the inside of her lungs, and how she got into wearing Pac-Man dresses, as well as teaching us a lot about how to work with lung epithelial cells and how she compared cells taken from asthmatic patients and healthy volunteers.

Episode 4 features John Lapage who performed at our second show back in November 2015. John is a developmental biologist who studied the mammalian skull and jaw for his PhD and although he is still looking to publish his results and didn’t want to share much detail, he did explain why research into how the skull grows is important and tell some very funny jokes about his subject! John also explains why Southampton should still have a grudge against Monaco and his theory that the quality of a research project is directly related to the quality of the chat-up line you can make based on it. Please send us your research-based chat-up lines!

Episode 3 features Nikhil Mistry who performed at our first show, back in July 2015. Nikhil tells us about how he got into underwater acoustics, how bubbles might be used to destroy tumours or reduce noise pollution in the oceans, why he does public engagement, and how he put together his Bright Club set. In his stand-up, Nikhil tells us a story of his brother imitating whales using bubbles to trap fish and how an immature person might use a reverberation chamber to record the echoes of a fart, which contrasts nicely with how he says NASA uses a reverberation chamber to test the ability of a satellite to withstand high pressures.

Episode 2 features Dave Christensen who performed at our first show back in July 2015. Dave tells us about how he ended up in stem cell research, where his research is going, and why Minecraft doesn't provide a good analogy for stem cells.