Previous Events – 2016

All reviews can be found on the Reviews page.

PubhD #33: 16 November 2016

  • Verusca Calabria (Health and Social Work) is a PhD student at Nottingham Trent University. She is researching the oral history of former patients and staff at the psychiatric hospitals in Nottinghamshire, with a focus on what has been lost with the move to care in the community.
  • Antony Chum (Social Sciences) is an assistant professor in the School of Geography in the University of Nottingham. His main research interests are to understand the influence of built environments on human health and wellbeing, and to develop and evaluate strategies to build healthier cities and communities. He is a principal investigator on a project to reduce cycling injuries in collaboration with Transport for London. He will discuss some project results and tips on working with public sector research partners to affect policy change.
  • Blaine Keetch (Mathematics) is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham. His research revolves around approximating “a maximum cut on a network”. Blaine will explain what a mathematical network is, what a maximum cut is, and why it’s incredibly difficult to find the maximum cut.

PubhD #32: 19 October 2016

  • Amy Williams (History) is PhD student at Nottingham Trent University. She is researching Kindertransport (Children’s Transport), which was the informal name of a series of rescue efforts which brought thousands of refugee Jewish and non-Aryan children to Great Britain from Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1940.
  • Hollie Harvey (Medical) is a final year PhD student (viva in September) in Academic Rheumatology at Nottingham University, studying pain in Osteoarthritis. She is also interested in genetics.
  • Daniel Brown (Astronomy) is a (cultural) astronomer at Nottingham Trent University. He explores how people now and in the past engaged with the sky above. This includes shadows of a 4,000 year old standing stone and Stone Age passage graves acting as ‘telescopes’.

PubhD #31: 21 September 2016

  • Rosi Smith (Education) researches education in Cuba. Her PhD focussed on the generation of young Cubans who reached adulthood in the first decade of the 2000s, explaining how Cuba’s high-quality, explicitly ideological education system tried to turn them into model socialist citizens, to what extent it succeeded and how this generation sees the task of (re)making the Revolution in the 21st century.
  • Andrew Fox (Classics/Geography) is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham, funded by the Midlands3Cities AHRC Consortium. His research looks at how the Roman Empire used the trees of their colonies to display the conquered world, and to incorporate and welcome the foreign territories into Rome.
  • Dawn Hazle (Russian studies) is a MA student at the University of Nottingham. She is researching political and cultural influences on Russian heavy metal in the mid-1980s, using the first Russian heavy metal album as an example.

PubhD #30: 17 August 2016

  • Jonny Sheldon (Microbiology) is a PhD student working at Warwick Medical School and the Animal and Plant Health Agency. He is looking at antibiotic resistance in Swine Dysentery, which is caused by a certain species of bacteria. He’s examining the bacteria’s DNA to find out what changes have occurred to cause resistance and what the population of the bacteria looks like in the U.K.
  • Dr Theodore Hughes-Riley (Physics) is a post-doctorate researcher at Nottingham Trent University. He is building magnetic resonance sensors for monitoring constructed wetland health.
  • Jonny Hunter (Chemistry) is a Sustainability Chemistry PhD student at the University of Nottingham. He uses ultraviolet and visible light to make chemicals.

PubhD #29: 20 July 2016

  • Harriet Lander (Classics) is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham. She is writing about how eighteenth-century English translators approach the erotic lesbian (and Lesbian!) love songs of the ancient Greek poet Sappho.
  • Stacey Griffiths (History) is a PhD student at Nottingham Trent University. Her research focuses on juvenile reformatory schools during the mid-Victorian period. She is particularly interested in how an idealised notion of “the rural” influenced reformatory practice in three juvenile institutions.
  • Floor Ruiter (Chemistry) is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham. She uses temperature sensitive chemistry to grow cells and is hoping to improve the current “gold standard” for cell cultures  used in regenerative medicine.

PubhD #28: 28 June 2016 – National Astronomy Meeting special

The National Astronomy Meeting 2016 was hosted by The University of Nottingham. We found three speakers from three different subject areas:

  • Daniel Williams is a gravitational astrophysics research student at the University of Glasgow, researching gravitational waves.
  • Sally Dacie is a PhD student at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory. She researches the Sun’s magnetic field and how it evolves when it breaks through the surface of the Sun.
  • Sarah Hutton is UCL’s outreach co-ordinator and Ogden Science Officer. Sarah completed her PhD in 2012 on supermassive black holes, but now spends her time telling school children about space, and uses UCL’s observatory in Mill Hill to develop resources and activities that help students understand the Universe we live in.

PubhD #27: 18 May 2016

  • Ibtisam Ahmed (Politics) is a PhD student at the School of Politics and International Relations, the University of Nottingham. His thesis looks at whether the British Empire can be studied as an attempt at political utopia – how it conceptualised the “good life” and how it was actually implemented.
  • Adam Smith (Paleontology) is the Curator of Natural Sciences at Wollaton Hall. His main interests are plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, and he has recently completed some interesting research on plesiosaur swimming. He is also part of the team that is bringing a feathered dinosaur exhibition to Nottingham in 2017.
  • Suzy Harrison (History) is a PhD student at Nottingham Trent University. Her research looks at the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage, also called ‘living heritage’, in the East Midlands. Examples of such cultural heritage include local traditions, customs, festive events and rituals.

PubhD #26: 20 April 2016

  • Samuel Lowe (Chemistry) is developing new forms of resilient and environment responsive hydrogels for use in the treatment of chronic wounds.
  • Sara Bradley (History) is a PhD student at Nottingham Trent University researching early modern English identity. In the turbulent years following the reformations of the mid-16th century, England was divided along religious lines. Sara’s research investigates the ways in which the representations of Spaniards in early modern English cheap print provided a necessary ‘other’ on which the construction of English popular identities could be formed.
  • Katie Dexter (Physics) is a PhD student at the University of Leicester and makes nanoparticles. Her nanoparticles have a wide range of applications including novel new cancer treatments. In her spare time, Katie runs PubhD Leicester.

PubhD #25: 15 March 2016

  • Richard Bromhall (Literature) is a PhD student at Nottingham Trent University. His research examines the literary responses to the 2008 financial crisis.
  • Benito Juárez Aubry (Mathematical Physics) is a student at the University of Nottingham. His research includes understanding quantum aspects of black holes, objects with gravitational pull so strong that not even light can escape from them. A quantum phenomenon of his interest is “Hawking Radiation,” an effect by which a black hole can surprisingly radiate away its mass.
  • Florence Annan (Microbiology) is a PhD student at the University Of Nottingham and works as part of the Synthetic Biology Research Centre. Her PhD involves trying to trick bacteria into making as much jet fuel as possible out of some greenhouse gases and feeding them as little as she can. She does this by messing around with their genetics

PubhD #24: 17 February 2016

  • Michelle Strickland (Life Sciences) is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham, where she is investigating the genetic and material properties of spider silk. She also has an interest in underwater/diving bell spiders, which are the only spider species known to be able to live their lives entirely underwater!
  • Ola Oladokun (Food Sciences) is studying at the University of Nottingham. He is researching the sources of bitterness in beer and its perception by beer drinkers.
  • Reshaad Durgahee (Geography) is studying at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on the historical geography of contract labour migration from India to two of Britain’s sugar colonies – Mauritius and Fiji – following the abolition of slavery in the 19th century

PubhD #23: 20 January 2016

  • Andrew Chick (Forensic Entomology) is a PhD student at Nottingham Trent University. He is researching the effect of smoking on decomposition.
  • Helen Drew (History) is a PhD student at Nottingham Trent University. Her research is investigating occurrences of social misconduct that was presented to the Archdeaconry Court of Nottingham, between 1580 and 1640. In particular she is focusing on the attitudes held by the community towards the social offences that were being committed within their parish, and the relationship between parishioners and the church authorities in the early modern period.
  • Sam Morley (Mathematics) is based at the University of Nottingham. He is trying to understand the properties of certain mathematical structures, called Banach algebras, which appear quite naturally in various applications. By understanding these properties, we can attempt to solve certain problems and understand the characteristics of these solutions