Soapbox Science Exeter 2023 speakers
Past speakers
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Dr Sophia Amenyah
Healthy Food, Happy Brain
Dr Sophia Amenyah is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Health and Social Science, Bournemouth University, UK. She will focus on eating well and keeping active to keep our brains healthy. Dr Amenyah's talk promises to provide interactive and fun activities to engage with children, parents and the general public around food and brain health as well as offering practical tips on keeping our brain healthy through nutrition.
Twitter: @SophiaAmenyah
LinkedIn: Profile
Interview blog: Beki Hooper interviews Sophia
Dr Lauren Biermann
I spy with my little eye: good and bad things floating on the ocean
Dr Lauren Biermann works at Plymouth Marine Laboratory as a marine remote sensing scientist, and she did her degrees in marine biology and oceanography in Cape Town and Scotland. Dr Biermann will be showing how patches of materials floating on the ocean surface can get big enough to be seen from space. These materials can be natural, like pumice after underwater volcanic eruptions. Increasingly, however, floating patches also contain litter. Dr Biermann will show using satellites, how we can start to spot marine plastics, and how this this information can be helpful to us.
Twitter: @LaurenBiermann
Ioana Blein-Dezayes
I Am Small, But I Am Fierce! Hunting Cancer with Nanoparticles
Ioana is a PhD student in the Biomedical Spectroscopy group at the University of Exeter, where she focuses on the synthesis and optimisation of gold nanoparticles as agents for diagnosis and treatment of cancer. She will talk about what nanoparticles are, how their size and shape alters how they interact with light and how we can harness these properties as new tools to detect and treat cancer.
Twitter: @iBleinDezayes
LinkedIn: Profile
Dr Delphine De Moor
What animals can teach us about why we make friends
Dr De Moor is a behavioural ecologist studying the evolution of social relationships. Delphine will talk about her research on the evolutionary roots of friendship: why do animals - and more specifically macaques - form social relationships, who do they choose as their partners and what can this teach us about the friendships we, humans, form?
Twitter: @DeMoorDelphine
Imogen Fermor-Worth
What makes the grass green and the sea blue?
Imogen is a Biomedical Physics PhD student currently working on developing absorption spectroscopy instrumentation and its applications in the biomedical sciences.
Imogen will talk about how light interacts with matter, how it makes the colours we see around us and allows plants to photosynthesise. She will be explaining how we measure light absorbance, and use this tool across science, including measuring DNA concentrations to determining the composition of the sun. She will go over high-level aspects of different technologies that extract energy from offshore, including wave energy, offshore wind, floating wind turbines and tidal energy.
Twitter: @ImogenFWorth
Dr Alison Gifford
Cryptococcal meningitis - understanding a deadly brain fungus
Dr Gifford is a Paediatric Specialty Trainee with a passion for Global Child Health. She has worked in Dundee, Scotland for five years in the Tayside Children's Hospital before taking time out to start a PhD at Exeter University this year.
What is Cryptococcus and who does it affect? How does it causes meningitis and what is the difference in the disease between adults and children? How will Dr Gifford's PhD project delve into how common this disease is and how it affects a child's brain?
Twitter: @alisonmgifford
Daisy Harley-Nyang
Microplastics in Wastewater Treatment Plants - From Home to River
Daisy is a Engineering PhD student at the University of Exeter, researching microplastics in wastewater, sludge, biosolids and soils. She will talking about her research on microplastic pollution in wastewater treatment works - sources, pathways and what it means in terms of terrestrial pollution.
Twitter: @daisy_00124
Interview blog: Beki Hooper interviews Daisy
Dr Katie Partridge
Blood sugar: a body balancing act?
Katie ihas just completed her PHD studies at the University of Exeter. Katie will be talking about blood glucose homeostasis and regulation, pancreatic islet cell involvement, diabetes and therapeutic management.
View profile
Twitter: @Partridge2019
Dr Ann Power
The Pollen-ator: Rise of the Machine Learning
Dr Ann Power is a Environmental Sciences Researcher based in Biosciences at the University of Exeter.
Pollen forecast are important for hay fever sufferers. Daily pollen counts are performed by humans using light microscopy, but Ann will showcase an automated pollen classification system using AI technology. Are the audience as good at identifying pollen as the AI?
Twitter: @DrAnnPower
Instagram: @pocoscopic
Rebekah White
LIFE CHANGING: Using worms to explore longevity and ageing
Rebekah is an evolutionary geneticist studying for a PhD at the University of Exeter.
If evolution is so powerful, why do we get more susceptible to sickness as we get older? Why does this continue in lineages? Rebekah uses worms as biological models to explore this, and discover treatments to changing lifespan and mitigating age-linked decline. She will discuss the translatability to other living things - including humans.
Twitter: @rebekah_jwhite
Instragram: @bio_bex
Beth Stokes
Why birds only need to know how to count to 7!
Beth is a first year PhD student within the Statistical Applied Mathematics (SAMBa) at the University of Bath. Her PhD project aims to develop a mathematical model to describe the uniquely fascinating behaviour of Trinidadian Guppy fish. In her talk, Beth will discuss how mathematics can help us to understand and model animal behaviours such as bird flocking and fish schooling, and hopefully convince you that there is more of a link between maths and animals than just counting sheep!
Twitter: @knottheoryknits
Webpage: Beth Stokes - Samba | Samba
Interviews with past speakers
2023 speakers
- Daisy Harley-Nyang: Microplastics in Wastewater Treatment Plants
- Dr Sophia D. Amenyah: Healthy Food, Happy Brain
- Dr Delphine De Moor: What animals can teach us about why we make friends
- Dr. Ann Power: Using AI to tackle climate change
- Dr. Katie Partridge: Understanding the pancreas and diabetes
- Dr. Lauren Biermann: Grasping the ocean from space
- Rebekah White: The phenomenon of ageing
2019 speakers
- Cristina Alexandru: It is important to have role models that can be humanised
- Priyanka Dey: How science is the best travel buddy
- Joanne Smith: You've leaned in, now how to avoid getting leaned on
2018 speakers
- Kirsten Thompson: How I got to study the rarest whales in our oceans
- Soraya Meftah: Using electrophysiology to study Alzheimer’s Disease
- Rachel van Heugten: For the love of science- Finding my passion
- Sariqa Wagley: What it means to be a woman from an underprivileged background in science
- Monika Bokori-Brown: Interdisciplinary research gives you a unique set of skills
2017 speakers
- Maria Weber: I’m a Nerd (and a Geek) and That’s Okay
- Lauren Barr: Ask the Impossible Questions!
- Emma Stevenson: Overcoming the career insecurity in academia
- Nicole Morrissey: Academic workplaces should discuss mental wellness
- Helen Fones: You need to find your niche in science
2016 speakers
- Kate Littler: Not just nerds or geniuses
- Isabel Castanho: From the Azores to Exeter to become a neuroepigeneticist
- Shanti Shanker: Just a kid from Bombay
- Olivia Champion: Entrench the Athena SWAN aims into the fabric of institutions
- Claire Burke: On being an attribution scientist
- Stacey Heath: You should do it mum!
- Eleanor O’Brien: Of trees and mice
- Amy Lusher: Twixt sea and pine
- Regan Early: The best possible thing to do on a Saturday afternoon
- Rebecca Hemingway: You don't need a PhD to be extremely successful in science
- Ayoe Hansen: Inspired by nature