In our final episode of this series, Cassidy and Cerys reflect on some of their favourite interviews. They share updates from guests and discuss the ground-breaking research that has really surprised or changed them in the course of making the podcast.

SPEAKERS
Professor Carey Jewitt, Cassidy Martin, Dr Owain Rhys Hughes, Professor Anne Young, Dr Susan McGrath, Mr Manish Chand, Lili Golmohammadi, Theme music, Professor Andrew Coates, Dr Michelle Heys, Professor Helge Wurdemann, Cassidy, Dr Simbarashe (Simba) Chimhuya, Dr Emilia Molimpakis, Cerys Bradley, Dr Sarah J Young, Dr Seb Coxon.

This month's episode is about awareness and the activism it can lead to. Join us as we talk to three members of the UCL community who are making meaningful change to combat the problems they have been confronted by. Cassidy spoke with Hope Oloye, a PhD student whose programme Thinking Black is breaking down barriers to higher education, Virginie Le Masson, a geographer working with women across the world to understand the impacts of climate change through a feminist lens, and Emilia Molimpakis, a neuroscientist and entrepreneur who is revolutionising mental health care.

Act 1 - Hope Oloye

Hope Oloye is the founder and director of Thinking Black, a social enterprise that runs interdisciplinary programmes for Black British students. She is also a PhD student at UCL studying Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience and a published essayist.   

Act 2 - Dr Emilia Molimpakis

Dr Emilia Molimpakis is a neuroscientist with a PhD & post-doc from UCL in Linguistics, Neuroscience & Psychology. She is an expert in using language as a biomarker for cognition. Her startup, Thymia, is a platform that uses video games (based on neuropsychology) to help doctors assess and monitor mental health conditions such as depression. Emilia won the Young Innovator’s Award 2020/21 and was recently named one of the top scientists for mental health worldwide.

Act 3 - Dr Virginie Le Masson

Dr Virginie Le Masson is a Geographer by training, and one of the Co-Directors of the IRDR Centre for Gender and Disaster. Her research looks at gender inequalities and violence-related risks in places affected by environmental changes and disasters. Her ongoing collaborations with grassroot organisation Lead Tchad, Oxfam Intermon, and more recently with Plan International, aim to inform gender-responsive humanitarian and development programmes. She currently acts as the Global Monitoring & Evaluation Coordinator for GRRIPP, a project funded by UKRI to federate organisations and scholars working on gender equality and resilience in the development and humanitarian sectors. In 2017, she co-edited a book, published by Routledge with Prof. Susan Buckingham on the importance to address climate change with attention to gender relations and power relationships. Virginie is also a Research Associate with the think tank ODI. 

Music Credits:

Basketliner by Bitters
Sorry Linus by Limoncello
The Onyx by Glass Obelisk

Act 1 - Dr Owain Rhys Hughes

Dr Owain Rhys Hughes is the founder and CEO of Cinapsis. He has over 13 years of experience working as a doctor and he is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. Cinapsis SmartReferrals is an NHSX-approved platform that makes it easy for clinicians to communicate and share information to make smarter patient referrals.

Currently used by 16 NHS Trusts across the UK, Cinapsis' secure platform gives GPs, paramedics, optometrists and NHS 111 operators immediate access to specialist advice, resulting in more efficient triage, faster decision-making and fewer unnecessary referrals.

Act 2 - Dr Athena Akrami

Dr Athena Akrami joined the faculty at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL, in October 2018. She obtained her BA in Biomedical Engineering from Tehran Polytechnic (Amirkabir University of Technology) and her PhD in Computational Neuroscience from International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA, Trieste), with Alessandro Treves. She was a postdoctoral fellow at SISSA where she worked with Mathew Diamond, and then at Princeton University where she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellow and worked with Carlos Brody on Parametric Working Memory.

After contracting COVID-19 in March 2020, Athena developed long COVID and was integral in uniting long COVID sufferers and conducting research that has been key for the understanding and treatment of long covid symptoms.

Act 3 - Dr Susan McGrath

Dr Susan McGrath is an Honorary Fellow of the Centre for Post-14 Education and Work at the Institute of Education. Her research focus on young people’s decision-making shows how teachers, parents, schools and employers influence education and career choices.

In the wider UCL community, Susan is better known for her work as project lead of the IOE Gardens, including Sarah’s Garden and the Bar Terrace. The gardens make a significant contribution to the UCL Biodiversity Plan and, in keeping with the IOE’s global status, operate as an outdoor classroom with a distinctly international flavour.

In this month’s episode of #MadeAtUCL we’re growing. Join us as we explore three unique perspectives on growth and how it can be both a positive and negative concept. We chat with Dr Michelle Heys and Dr Simbarashe Chimhuya and hear about their technical solution to newborn healthcare, with Dr Philip Pogge Von Strandmann about how we can reduce the growing levels of co2 in the atmosphere, and lastly with Dr Seb Coxon to learn how beards of medieval Germany can help us understand masculinity today.

Act 1 - Dr Michelle Heys

Dr Michelle Heys is a Child Population Health Scientist combining clinical expertise in newborn and child health with expertise in public health practice and research, and in health services research and quality improvement. She has over 25 years of experience in clinical newborn and child health in the UK, Australia and Hong Kong; and during the last 15 years has combined clinical care with a growing portfolio of global child and adolescent population health research. She seeks to maximise timely translation of knowledge and impact on health outcomes through bidirectional learning from global south to north and vis versa. Over the last 7 years she has led the Neotree project and is also a founder and trustee for the Neotree charity (www.neotree.org).

She is an Associate Professor in Community and Population Child Health, GOSH ICH and a fellow of CASMI (Centre for the Advancement of Sustainable Medical Innovation).

She is a Consultant Paediatrician and leads the Motor Disorder service in Newham, East London where she is also the lead for Population health and Research.

Act 2 - Dr Philip Pogge von Strandmann 

Dr Philip Pogge von Strandmann is a Professor of Isotope Geochemistry at the Department of Earth Sciences, UCL, and at the Institute of Geosciences, JGU Mainz. His focus is on elucidating Earth’s biogeochemical cycles, primarily the response of the climate system to rapid perturbations, such as warming and cooling. He also works in developing carbon sequestration methods, in particular enhanced weathering (e.g. with the CARBDOWN project) and mineral carbonation (e.g. with the CARBFIX project).  

Act 3 - Dr Seb Coxon

Dr Seb Coxon is Reader in German in the UCL School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS). He specializes in medieval literature, with a special interest in comedy and laughter. He is a published translator of medieval German comic tales and medieval Latin jokes. In a new departure (for which he has his UCL students to thank) his most recent research project looks at the significance of beards in the medieval literary imagination. 

Dr Seb Coxon's book, Beards and Texts, is available from UCLPress. 

Act 1 - Prof Alan Penn

Prof Alan Penn is a former Dean of the Bartlett faculty of the Built Environment (2009-19), he is a founding director of Space Syntax Ltd, and a board member of UCL Consultants Ltd. He is a member of the Space Syntax Laboratory within The Bartlett School of Architecture and holds a part time role as Chief Scientific Advisor at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. 

His research focuses on understanding the way that the design of the built environment affects the patterns of social and economic behaviour of organisations and communities. In order to investigate these questions he has developed both research methodologies and software tools. These are known as ‘space syntax’ methods. Current research includes the development of agent based simulations of human behaviour, the development of spatio-temporal representations of built environments, investigations of urban spatial networks and the application of these techniques in studies of urban sustainability in the broadest sense, covering social, economic, environmental and institutional dimensions.

Act 2 - Prof Daniel Miller

Prof Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at UCL. He is director of the Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing (ASSA) project and was director of the Why We Post project. ‘Why We Post’ focused on social media use around the world and the resulting books, published by UCL Press, amassed more than one million downloads.
 
He is author/editor/co-author of 43 books including How the World Changed Social Media (with 8 others), Social Media in an English Village, Tales from Facebook, Digital Anthropology (Ed. with H. Horst), The Comfort of Things, Stuff, A Theory of Shopping, Material Culture and Mass Consumption.

Act 3 - Guilherme Ferreira

Guilherme Ferreira is a research fellow at UCL’s Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research working on the Biome Health Project. His research focuses mostly on using camera trap data to investigate how wildlife responds to human pressure and environmental factors, particularly in Brazil but more recently also in Nepal and Kenya. 

Guilherme obtained his PhD degree at UCL studying the effectiveness of protected areas in safeguarding mammals in the Brazilian Cerrado and before moving to the UK worked for almost 10 years as a field ecologist and project manager in a small NGO that he helped to establish Brazil.

In this episode, #MadeAtUCL goes to Mars! We hear about the incredible UCL work that is helping to send a Rover (and maybe one day even a person) to the Red Planet as well as what we might find when we get there.

Act 1 - Prof Andrew Coates

Professor Andrew Coates is the Deputy Director (Solar System), at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL). He gained a BSc in Physics from UMIST in 1978, and MSc (1979) and D.Phil. (1982) in plasma physics from Oxford University. He has been at MSSL since 1982, with temporary guest positions at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Physics (Germany), the University of Delaware (USA) and the BBC World service (Media Fellowship).  

Professor Andrew Coates’ space mission involvements include the Rosalind Franklin (ExoMars 2022) rover where he leads the PanCam team, as well as Cassini, where he leads the electron spectrometer team (part of the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer), Venus Express, Mars Express and Giotto. His scientific interests include the solar wind interaction with planets and comets, and space instrumentation; he has authored and co-authored over 550 publications, including over 440 refereed. He is currently a member of STFC Science Board. He is active in space and science outreach and is currently President of the Society for Popular Astronomy.

Act 2 - Prof Ian Crawford

Ian Crawford is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow (Department of Physics & Astronomy) at UCL's Faculty of Maths & Physical Sciences and Professor of Planetary Science at Birkbeck College, London. He talks about possible life on Mars. The primary focus of his research is on lunar exploration, including the remote sensing of the lunar surface and the laboratory analysis of lunar samples. Professor Ian Crawford also has strong interests in the new science of astrobiology, the study of the astronomical and planetary context of the origin and evolution of life.  

Professor Ian Crawford was appointed as a member of the UK Space Agency's Space Exploration Advisory Committee (SEAC) in 2020, and has also been awarded the Royal Astronomical Society's Service Award for Geophysics for his long-standing promotion of lunar science and human space exploration, his role as a mentor for young planetary scientists, and other contributions to the planetary science community over the last twenty years.

Act 3 - Dr Iya Whiteley

Dr Iya Whiteley is a Space Psychologist and Director of the Centre for Space Medicine at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL). Her aim for the Centre for Space Medicine is to dive into and explore the human mind, and to develop our abilities and to realise our potential while we explore outer space. During her time as Director, Iya has been instrumental in developing collaboration activities between Russia, the United States and the UK -- in particular the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre and NASA’s National Space Biomedical Research Institute. 

Dr Iya Whiteley has been selected as the Chair of the Space Environment Working Group (SEWG) advising to the UK Space Agency and represents SEWG at the UK Space Exploration Advisory Committee. She leads several Europeas Space Agency projects, including the EPSILON (Embedded Psychological Support Integrated for long-duration missions) toolset for exploration expeditions to the Moon and Mars, to designing CET IO (Crew Expert Tool) to resolve innovatively challenges in a highly technical and alien environment while voyaging to Mars, when there is no live communication link with Earth. Dr Iya Whiteley is yearly requested as a public speaker at the Royal Institution, the New Scientist Live, the Wellcome Trust, Radio and the TV Presenter on BBC Science Expert and Presenter (six episodes): Astronauts: Do You Have What It Takes? which run three times due to its public demand since its production. 

In this episode we’re exploring the value of freedom, from the people who found it in the bleakest of circumstances to the ways in which we restrict our own freedom (and the freedom of others) without even realising it.

Act 1 - Prof Virginia Mantouvalou

The first act is on the freedom to work without abuse.

Virginia Mantouvalou is Professor of Human Rights and Labour Law at UCL, Faculty of Laws. She has published extensively on issues of human rights and labour law, including workers’ exploitation, the right to privacy and free speech at work, structural injustice, domestic labour, unfair dismissal and modern slavery. Her most recent book is Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law (co-edited with Hugh Collins and Gillian Lester, OUP, 2018). She is currently working on a monograph on Structural Injustice, Workers’ Rights and Human Rights (forthcoming, OUP, 2022) funded through a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship.  She has also worked as specialist advisor to the UK Joint Committee on Human Rights and as consultant for the ILO and the Council of Europe. She is on the management board of Kalayaan, the Equal Rights Trust, and the Institute of Employment Rights and has received the UCL Provost Public Engagement Award for her research with Kalayaan.

Act 2 - Dr Sarah J Young

On the freedoms and the lack of it at the Shlissl'burg Prison in Russia

Sarah J. Young is Associate Professor of Russian at UCL SSEES, where she teaches and researches nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature, culture and thought. She is the author of Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative (Anthem Press, 2004), and co-editor of Dostoevsky on the Threshold of Other Worlds (Bramcote Press, 2006). Her current research focuses on the Russian tradition of carceral literature, and she has published extensively on the representation of prison, exile and hard labour in works by Dostoevskii, Chekhov, Varlam Shalamov, and others. Her book Writing Resistance: Revolutionary Memoirs of Shlissel’burg Fortress, 1884-1906 is available from  UCLPress.

Act 3 - Dr Salheli Datta Burton

On the dark side of freedom

Dr Saheli Datta Burton is a Research Fellow at the Department of Science Technology Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP), University College London. Saheli is interested in the political-economic and socioethical issues of science and technology with a focus on emerging data-driven and biomedical technologies. She has received research funding awards from the Newton Fund, EPSRC etc. Since the completion of her PhD in late 2018, Saheli has published over 11 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Social Science and Medicine, Science, Technology and Human Values, Biosocieties and Critical Public Health, book chapters and reports for institutions such as the European Commission and the UK government. Saheli’s work with colleagues at STEaPP on the emerging risks of medical and other IoTs was recently published by the UK Government’s Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and reported widely by media outlets such as The Times, Independent, Daily Telegraph etc. 
 
She has co-authored book on global science governance ‘The Elephant and the Dragon of Contemporary Lifesciences’ with the Manchester University Press.

In this episode we're talking about saving the planet with Professor Mark Maslin, a climate change expert and author of "How to Save the Planet: the Facts". Mr Manish Chand, Associate Professor in Surgery, joins us to discuss how he's using the latest technology to make surgery smarter and less invasive to save lives. We also talk to Dr Dexter Penn, creator of an app that can help identify vulnerable people at risk of being financially abused.

Act 1 - Prof Mark Maslin on Saving the World

Mark Maslin FRGS, FRSA is a Professor of Earth System Science at UCL. Maslin is a leading scientist with particular interest in understanding the climate change and the major challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. He has published over 175 papers in journals such as Science, Nature, and The Lancet, with a current citation count according to Google Scholar over 20,000 (H=67 and i10 index=168) with 40 papers that have been cited over 100 times. He has supported this cutting-edge research with funding of over £70m from government, charities and the private sector. 

Mark has written 10 books and over 60 popular articles (e.g., for New Scientist, Independent, Guardian, Telegraph, New York Times and The Conversation – currently over 2.9 million reads).  He appears regularly on radio and television, including BBC One David Attenborough’s ‘Climate Change: the fact’. His latest book is “How to save our planet: the facts" published by Penguin in early 2021.

Mark also co-founded Rezatec Ltd which is now one of the world’s leading geospatial analytics companies providing AI “big data” solutions to environmental issues for companies, NGOs, and local and national Governments and is currently valued at £30-50m. He was included in Who’s Who for the first time in 2009, made a Royal Society industrial fellow in 2012 and was granted a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Scholarship in 2011 for his work on East Africa.

Act 2 - Mr Manish Chand on Saving Lives

Manish Chand is Associate Professor of Surgery at UCL and a practising colorectal surgeon at University College Hospital, London; Apollo Hospital, India; and Al Zahra Hospital, Dubai. His clinical interest and expertise is minimally-invasive surgery (laparoscopy and robotic) for colorectal cancer for which he is recognised as a global trainer and key opinion leader. He is the Chief Medical Officer for AIS Channel which is recognised as the world’s leading surgical video platform.

His research interests are in surgical technology which includes image-guided surgery, fluorescence; AI and Augmented Reality. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles and continues to research these areas and their integration into the next generation robotic platforms. 

Act 3 - Dr Dexter Penn on Saving Money 

Every year, around five million older people in the UK are targeted by fraudsters and one in five fall victim to scams.

Dexter Penn created Kalgera, an award-winning mobile and web application that helps protect the finances of vulnerable people, to address this. The tech-for-good company is now welcoming its first users.

Join Cassidy for April’s podcast which talks about Pain: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Hear about the woman that feels no pain, less terrifying trips to the dentist, and being able to visualise and communicate pain.

Act 1 - The woman that doesn't feel pain

Dr James Cox is a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Graduate Tutor working in the Molecular Nociception Group at the UCL Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research. James is a human geneticist using DNA sequencing to find mutations in genes that are important for pain perception. He is also developing gene therapy approaches to help treat people with chronic pain disorders and has a keen interest in the endocannabinoid system and the biology of non-coding RNAs.

The FAAH-OUT gene discovery was widely reported in the media (Altmetric score in the top 100 for 2019), with the research featured in the New York Times, New Yorker, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine and the BBC.

Act 2 - Pain-free dental visits

UCL researchers and dental materials manufacturer collaborate to speed up the development of a new dental filling material for children.

Anne Young is currently a professor of Biomaterials at UCL Eastman Dental Institute.  She obtained a degree in Chemistry and PhD in Polymer Physics from Imperial before joining BP research center.  Following a postdoctoral position at the London School of Pharmacy, Anne became a lecturer in Chemistry at Brunel University.  She starting working at the Eastman in 2000, first funded by Schottlander Dental Company and then as a biomaterials lecturer.  Her current research interests include the development of new materials for repair of tooth and bone.  She is presently working with Schottlander to get a new dental composite into clinical trials and CE marked that can be placed without drill or anaesthetic.  

Act 3 - Communicating pain through pictures

Dr Deborah Padfield is a visual artist, Senior Lecturer in Arts & Health Humanities at St George's, University of London and Lecturer (Teaching) at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.  Collaborating with leading clinicians and academics, her research explores the potential of photographic images, co-created with people with pain, to facilitate patient-clinician communication. In 2001, she collaborated with Dr Charles Pither and patients and staff from Input Pain Unit St Thomas’ Hospital, London on the project Perceptions of Pain, resulting in a series of publications and a touring exhibition. The work was further developed with Prof Joanna Zakrzewska, patients and staff from UCLH, resulting in ongoing exhibitions, publications and films. Funded by numerous bodies including: Sciart Consortium, ACE, AHRC, CHIRP UCL, and HEIF, she is the recipient of many awards. She exhibits and lectures nationally and internationally and is a council member/trustee of the Association for Medical Humanities (AMH). 

This month's theme is VOICE. We're finding out how people are regaining their voice after their voice boxes are removed; how a group of LGBTQ + refugees in Brazil are using film to tell their stories; and how health students and advocates are sharing the impact of their work through poetry.

ACT 1 - from 02.28
Beatboxing after Laryngectomy
Dr Evangelos Himonides is a Professor of Technology, Education and Music, in the Department of Culture, Communication & Media, at the UCL Institute of Education. Besides leading on a number of post-graduate courses at UCL, he also supervises a doctoral and post-doctoral students and lectures on Music Technology and Information Technology. 

His beatboxing project with Shout at Cancer won the Experimentation Award in the Provost’s Public Engagement Awards 2020. It recognises how he went above and beyond his role, especially when it is not explicitly part of their role. He championed engagement practices by contributing as a music education expert in improving the voice after laryngectomy. The project empowered the people and local youth in finding their voice. (Go to minute 02.18)
www.shoutatcancer.org/

ACT 2 - from 11.22
Giving a voice to LGBTQ+ refugees
Hazte Sentir is an incredible piece of documentary giving a voice to LGBTQ+ refugees who fled from Venezuela to Brazil. The 26-minute documentary is the result of a collaboration between UCL Anthropology lecturer and filmmaker Dieter Deswarte and current and former residents of the Casa Miga shelter (the first shelter in Brazil for LGBTIQ+ refugees), as well as a number of local support organisations in Manaus, Brazil.

Funded by a public engagement Beacon Bursary from UCL Culture, Dieter spent four weeks at Casa Miga with residents of the shelter, training them in filmmaking skills, and collaboratively developing the documentary ‘Hazte Sentir’ (‘To Be Heard’). The project gave the residents of Casa Miga the opportunity to reflect on, document and communicate their experiences of stigmatisation and mass migration. The resulting documentary gives voice to and raises awareness of the challenges faced by LGBTIQ+ people in Venezuela and Brazil.

Hear how Dieter developed the project and how he created the film collaboratively with participants.  (Go to minute 11.22)

Dieter Deswarte is an award-winning documentary self-shooting filmmaker and editor based in London. His intimate approach leads to a low-intervention kind of filmmaking that captures human stories with sincerity, creativity and cinematic beauty. For several years now he has dedicated part of his practice to working with local and international charities and arts organisations, ranging from short documentaries on wildlife conservation projects in Zambia to short animations for research on disability-related bullying in the UK. He also teaches on the MA in Ethnographic & Documentary film at UCL, leading Studio 3: Cinematic Documentary Storytelling.
yarrowfilms.co.uk/2020/07/31/hazte-sentir/

ACT 3 - from 20.32
Expressing one's voice through poetry
Sarah Wong, Student, UCL Medicine
Jamie Hale, Student, UCL Arts & Humanities
Anna Vignola, Student, Yale School of Medicine

Hear from Sarah, Anna and Jamie – winners of the Yale-UCL Poetry Competition 2020. (Go to minute 20.32)

At a time when medical students are at the frontline in the fight against Coronavirus, Sarah and Anna write about their experience dealing with death and a crisis. A judge commented:

Presented by Cassidy Martin and edited by Cerys Bradley