Wednesday 29 February 2012
For more information about this conference please visit the URF Research Conference 2012 main page.
Dr Boris Adryan, University of Cambridge (Speaker)
Dr Boris Adryan is a biologist by training (studies at Mainz, Germany, and Charleston, USA). He obtained a PhD at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (Göttingen, Germany) for work on the development of the Drosophila tracheal system. Postdoctoral work at the University of Cambridge and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology exposed him to both the wet- and dry-bench sides of modern genomics and computational biology. As a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Cambridge Systems Biology Centre, his team of currently six biologists, computer scientists and mathematicians work on experimental and theoretical studies of transcriptional regulation and transcription factors. By heart, Boris is still fascinated by the tracheal system and continues to work as a developmental biologist.
Dr Sean Barrett, Imperial College London (Speaker)
Dr Sean Barrett completed his PhD in solid state quantum computing from Cambridge in 2003, and has subsequently undertaken postdoctoral positions at HP Labs (Bristol), the University of Queensland, Imperial College London, and Macquarie University. He is currently in the third year of a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at Imperial College London. His main research interest is in figuring out how to build a quantum computer.
Dr Alex Brand, University of Aberdeen (Speaker)
Dr Alex Brand’s first career was as an advertising Account Executive, responsible for clients such as PepsiCola and Andrex. She had started with the company as a secretary straight from school, working in London and New York before being promoted. After moves to the Middle East and Jakarta, Dr Brand switched careers and took a BSc in Biochemistry. In 2004, she completed a PhD in Microbiology and co-authored a BBSRC grant studying calcium influx and fungal growth. She then established her own group in Aberdeen in 2010 after the award of a Royal Society URF and an MRC New Investigator Grant.
Dr Holly Bridge, University of Oxford (Chair)
Dr Holly Bridge is a visual neuroscientist working at the University of Oxford’s Centre for functional MRI of the brain (FMRIB). She is interested in the development of the human visual system and the reorganisation of the system following cortical damage. She employs a variety of brain imaging techniques to determine the structure, function and connectivity in the brains of people who are blind, or who suffer brain damage from trauma or stroke. In addition to studying subjects with abnormal vision, Dr Bridge also investigates how sighted subjects combine images from the two eyes to form a 3-D percept.
Dr Sarah Bridle, University College London (Speaker)
Dr Sarah Bridle is a URF and Reader at UCL. She obtained her PhD in 2000 from Cambridge. Her research focuses on understanding the cosmological model using gravitational lensing, the tiny distortions of distant galaxies induced by the bending of light by dark matter. Dr Bridle is Co-Coordinator of the Weak Lensing Working Group of the international Dark Energy Survey which will image one eighth of the sky and measure shapes and approximate distances to 300 million objects. She is author of over 50 refereed publications. Dr Bridle holds an ERC Starting Grant and received the Royal Astronomical Society's Fowler Award for Astronomy in 2009.
Dr Martin Charlton, University of Southampton (Plenary Speaker)
Dr Martin Charlton is currently a Reader in photonics and nanofabrication at the University of Southampton and held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship between 2001-2011. Dr Charlton’s key expertise is in the fields of optical modelling of nano-photonic systems, integrated optical design and nano-fabrication. He has spent 16 years pioneering work in photonic quasi-crystals and planar-waveguide based photonic crystal devices. In 2001 Dr Charlton co-founded Mesophotonics Ltd, which developed Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) sensing platform (Klarite), RAMAN instrumentation, and high efficiency Photonic Quasi-Crystal enhanced LEDs. The company was subsequently sold in 2008 to companies that have successfully transferred SERS and high efficiency LED technologies to high volume production products. His current research interests continue in integrated solid state Laser devices, Photonic Crystal enhanced LEDs, Hybrid LEDs, integrated SERS and SPR sensing platforms, and high efficiency solar cells.
Dr Tom Coates, Imperial College London (Plenary speaker)
Dr Tom Coates is a mathematician whose research lies at the boundary between geometry and theoretical physics. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge in 1997 and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2003. From 2003 to 2006 he held an Assistant Professorship in Mathematics at Harvard University; moving to Imperial College London as a Royal Society University Research Fellow in mid-2006. In 2010 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for Mathematics.
Dr Helen Coxall, University of Cardiff (Speaker)
Dr Helen Coxall graduated with a BSc in Geology/Biology from Manchester in 1994 before completing a PhD at Bristol in 2000 on the evolution of Eocene (50-34 million years ago) planktonic foraminifera, a group of microscopic shell-building marine plankton with an exceptional fossil record. She joined Cardiff University as a URF in 2005. Dr Coxall’s research looks at climate and environmental change during the early Cenozoic (from ~65 million years ago) when our modern climate mode was developing. She utilizes fossilized foraminifera and marine sediments to generate evolutionary and marine geochemical climate proxy data on ocean temperature and carbon system changes.
Dr Colin Crump, University of Cambridge (Chair)
Dr Colin Crump received a BSc (1995) and PhD (1999) in Biochemistry from Bristol University, where he was studying mechanisms of membrane traffic. He started his postdoctoral career at the Vollum Institute, Oregon Health and Sciences University, USA with a Wellcome Trust Travelling Fellowship. There he expanded his work on membrane traffic to investigate viral envelope proteins. In 2002, he returned to the UK, to continue studying virus replication at the Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge, where he has been ever since. His Royal Society University Research Fellowship began in 2005 and his research focus since then has been the cell biology of virus assembly.
Dr Mark Dennis, University of Bristol (Speaker)
Dr Mark Dennis is a Theoretical Physicist in the School of Physics, University of Bristol. He works mainly in the theory of optical and wave physics, with an emphasis on topological and geometric aspects of propagation and interference.
Dr Steven Diggle, University of Nottingham (Speaker)
Dr Steven Diggle began his career by leaving school early to become a rock star (failed). Later he studied Biological Sciences at the University of Salford, and then undertook a PhD at the University of Nottingham focusing on the regulation of ‘quorum sensing’ in the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. During this period, he became interested in ‘why’ such systems exist in micro-organisms rather than just focusing on how they work. Asking such questions allows us to more fully understand the biology of infection. This led to him obtaining a URF in 2006 and the Society for General Microbiology Fleming award in 2010.
Dr Antony Dodd, University of York (Speaker)
Dr Antony Dodd is a plant molecular biologist based at the University of York. His research investigates circadian rhythms and cell signalling. He obtained his PhD in 2001 from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and subsequently worked as a post-doc and Broodbank Research Fellow in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He began his URF in 2008 and simultaneously moved to the Department of Biology at the University of York.
Dr Martin Dominik, University of St Andrews (Speaker)
Dr Martin Dominik was dragged from theoretical physics into astronomy with new developments in the emerging field of 'gravitational lensing'. Since 1993, Dr Dominik’s research has focused on applications of the gravitational microlensing effect, and in particular on its potential for studying planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. Martin is a strong advocate of communication being an essential part of science, and science being an integral part of society. He turned the hunt for planets by gravitational microlensing into a public live event, and organised a Royal Society 350th anniversary year Discussion Meeting on "The detection of extra-terrestrial life and the consequences for science and society".
Dr David Drew, Imperial College London (Speaker)
Dr David Drew completed his PhD in Biochemistry at Stockholm University in 2005. He was awarded an EMBO long-term postdoctorate fellowship in 2006, which he undertook at Imperial College. He since started his Royal Society University Research Fellowship at Imperial College in October 2009. His research focuses on understanding the mechanisms by which secondary transporters shuttle and move ions, drugs, and natural compounds across membranes. This is principally achieved by obtaining crystal structures of secondary transporters using X-ray protein crystallography. Because of the technical difficulties in working with membrane proteins, he also devotes part of his research to developing methods to aid structural studies.
Dr Caterina Ducati, University of Cambridge (Speaker)
Dr Caterina Ducati is a Lecturer in the Electron Microscopy Group in the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy. Dr Ducati started working with nanoscale materials during her undergraduate degree in Physics (Milan, Italy), and has devoted her career to the study of finite size structures using electron microscopy techniques. She received a PhD degree in Engineering from Cambridge, held a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship between 2004 and 2007, and is currently a Royal Society University Research Fellow. Her main research interest is the study of metal oxide nanostructures for photocatalytic and photovoltaic applications, and in particular for hybrid solar cells. Dr Ducati is also working on the nucleation and growth of carbon nanotubes and semiconductor nanowires. Her research has been published in over 100 articles.
Dr Kerry Franklin, University of Bristol (Chair)
Dr. Kerry Franklin is a plant scientist working at the University of Bristol. Her research investigates the molecular mechanisms controlling plant developmental responses to light and temperature. She obtained a PhD in plant biochemistry from the University of Southampton in 2001. This was followed by a period of postdoctoral research at the University of Leicester and a HFSP fellowship at the Plant Gene Expression Centre, CA, USA. In 2010, Dr. Franklin was awarded both the Society of Experimental Biology President’s medal in Plant Science and the Federation of European Societies of Plant Biology (FESPB) award.
Dr Andy Gardner, University of Aberdeen (Speaker)
Dr Andy Gardner is a University Research Fellow at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. Dr Gardner completed his PhD in theoretical population genetics at the University of Edinburgh in 2005. Subsequently, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Deparment of Mathematics and Statistics, Queen’s University, Ontario, and then a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford. He started his URF in January 2007 at the University of Edinburgh, and moved to the University of Oxford in 2009.
Dr Robert Gilbert, University of Oxford (Speaker)
Dr Robert Gilbert studied Biochemistry at Durham University, graduating 1995, and gained a PhD from the Department of Biochemistry, Leicester University in 1999. He then worked in the laboratory of David Stuart in Oxford, developing his own research programme on the basis of his URF awarded in 2004. Since 2002 he has been Tutor in Biochemistry at Magdalen College, Oxford. His graduate research work focused on the pore-forming protein pneumolysin, and he continues to work on pore formation. He also works on cell adhesion, currently kindlin proteins. His major funding has been in protein expression control.
Professor Nicole Grobert, University of Oxford (Speaker)
Nicole Grobert is Professor of Nanomaterials and focuses on establishing ‘Growth systematics for the controlled generation of nanomaterials'. For her work on 'Novel Carbon Nanostructures' she received the international Pergamon Prize and was also selected as ‘Future Leader' at the STS Forum in Japan. She was awarded an ERC Starting Grant, is the Vice-Chair of the British Carbon Group and has served on the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Committee and Hooke Committee. As a member of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering Nanotechnology working group Professor Grobert is also involved in Science Policy and Science Outreach.
Dr Julius Hafalla, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (Plenary speaker)
Dr Julius Hafalla obtained a BSc in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology cum laude from the University of the Philippines–Diliman in 1995. He then worked as a molecular biologist at the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (Philippines) and as a Fogarty Fellow at the International Health Institute of Brown University. In 2003, he obtained a PhD in Basic Medical Sciences (Medical Parasitology) from New York University (NYU) where he studied T cell responses during malaria liver stage infection. After initial post-doctoral work at NYU, he joined LSHTM in 2005 as a Royal Society Incoming Fellow and a Wellcome Trust Visiting Fellow to investigate immunity to malaria blood stage infections in experimental models and in humans. In 2008, he was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship.
Dr Giandomenico Iannetti, University College London (Speaker)
Dr Giandomenico Iannetti graduated in Medicine in 1999 and obtained a PhD in Neuroscience in 2003 from “La Sapienza” University of Rome. From 2003 until 2006 he was post-doctoral fellow in Irene Tracey’s group at Oxford University. In 2006 he was awarded a Royal Society URF to investigate the functional significance of the brain responses to painful stimulation in humans. In 2009 he moved his research group from Oxford to UCL, where he is currently based. His research focuses on the neurophysiology of sensory systems in humans, with particular interest on the somatosensory system and pain.
Dr Andrew Jardine, University of Cambridge (Speaker)
Dr Andrew Jardine begun his academic career at the University of Nottingham, before taking up a PhD position in the Surface Physics group at the University of Cambridge. He later won an Oppenheimer Research Fellowship to continue his work, during which he was instrumental in developing the helium spin-echo technique for surface-dynamics measurements. Dr Jardine spent several months with Mathworks UK, before taking up his Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2005. He is now a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and treasurer for the Institute of Physics Thin Films and Surfaces group.
Dr Malcolm John, University of Oxford (Speaker)
Dr Malcolm John is a University Research Fellow at Oxford University since 2007. His research is based on the LHCb experiment at CERN, near Geneva and its exploitation in the search for unexpected physical effects in the manner quarks couples to each another. Dr John began his career at Imperial College in 1997, as the first research student on LHCb, developing some of the experiment’s core detector technologies. In the intervening years, he worked both in California and France on a related physics experiment, held a CERN fellowship and even had a stint in strategic consultancy in London.
Dr Richard Kirby, University College London (Chair)
Richard completed his PhD in genetics at University College London in 1992 and followed this with postdoctoral appointments at the Universities of Stanford and South Carolina before returning to the UK in 1996. Between 2003 and 2011 Richard held a Royal Society Research Fellowship at the University of Plymouth with the short research title of ‘molecular plankton ecology’. Richard’s studies have focused on understanding how the plankton and the plankton food web are responding to rising sea temperatures. Richard is enthusiastic about the pubic engagement of science and his work on plankton features regularly in the press and public exhibitions.
Dr Kristine Krug, University of Oxford (Plenary speaker)
Dr Kristine Krug investigates the neural basis of visual perception and decision-making. She started out with a DPhil on how ordered visual maps are formed during rodent brain development. Since then, she moved on to bigger brains. Using ambiguous figures with multiple possible appearances, much like the drawings by MC Escher, she has shown how single brain cells contribute to perception in a non-human primate model. More recently she has worked on the effect of contextual factors, like expected reward, on making perceptual decisions. She is currently a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Oxford University and a Tutorial Fellow at Oriel College
Dr Steve Liddle, University of Nottingham (Speaker)
Dr Steve Liddle obtained his BSc Hons in 1997 and PhD in 2000 from Newcastle University. After postdoctoral fellowships at Edinburgh, Newcastle, and Nottingham Universities he took up a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2007 and was promoted to Associate Professor and Reader in 2010. In 2009 he was awarded an ERC Starting Investigators Grant, and in 2011 the Royal Society of Chemistry Sir Edward Frankland Fellowship and Bill Newton awards, and was a co-recipient of the IChemE Petronas prize for his contributions to Periodic Videos. He is Chairman of COST Action CM1006 and has 95 publications.
Dr Huiyun Liu, University College London (Speaker)
Dr Huiyun Liu received the PhD in Semiconductor Science form Institute of Semiconductor, Chinese Academy of Sciences at November 2001. After receiving his PhD, he joined the EPSRC National Centre for III-V Technologies at Sheffield University. He was responsible for the development of low-dimensional semiconductor materials and devices (such as quantum dots and nanowires) by using molecular beam epitaxy for the UK research community. In 2007, he was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and started his academic career in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at UCL with commissioning the first new Molecular Beam Epitaxy reactor in London.
Dr Mikel Lujan, University of Manchester (Chair)
Dr Mikel Lujan holds a University Research Fellowship at the University of Manchester since October 2009. He investigates many-core architectures and virtualization to obtain low-power computing systems. Previously Dr Lujan worked as a research scientist on large-scale runtime environments (peta-scale systems with more than one million hardware-supported threads) for Sun Microsystems Laboratories (CA, USA). Since his first publication in 2000, Dr Lujan has authored more than 40 refereed papers and has amassed a rich research experience covering many aspects of Computer Science. He is an active member of EU Network of Excellence on High Performance and Embedded Computer Architecture and Compilation (HiPEAC).
Professor Cait MacPhee, University of Edinburgh (Speaker)
Professor Cait MacPhee is a University Research Fellow in Biological Physics at the University of Edinburgh. She was originally trained in the biomedical sciences in Australia, before gradually making her way across to physics. She carried out a postdoc in Oxford and took up her first academic post in the Cavendish Lab in Cambridge before moving to Edinburgh in 2005. She has held a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship as well as a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. Her interests are in understanding the self-assembly of biological molecules, both to increase our understanding of the limits of life and for the design or assembly of new materials.
Dr Stuart Mangles, Imperial College London (Chair)
Dt Stuart Mangles is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Imperial College London. He works in the field of laser-plasma physics - using very intense laser pulses to build compact particle accelerators and bright x-ray sources.
Dr Walter Marcotti, University of Sheffield (Speaker)
Dr Walter Marcotti’s passion for physiology began as an undergraduate at the University of Pavia, Italy, during his degree he discovered the beauty of sensory systems. He completed a PhD in 1998 on the electrophysiology of mammalian vestibular hair cells and moved to Prof Kros’s laboratory in the UK to study transduction in cochlear hair cells. Dr Marcotti was awarded a University Research Fellowship by the Royal Society in 2004. In 2006 he moved his laboratory to the University of Sheffield where he now works on the physiological and molecular mechanisms underlying the function and development of the mammalian cochlea.
Dr Zita Martins, Imperial College London (Plenary Speaker)
Dr Zita Martins graduated in Chemistry at Instituto Superior Tecnico (Portugal) in September 2002, and defended her PhD in Astrobiology at the Leiden University (The Netherlands) in January 2007. She was a Visiting Scientist at NASA in 2005 and 2006, and an Associate Researcher at Imperial College from 2007 to 2009. She is a University Research Fellow at Imperial College since October 2009. Dr Martins frequently gives media interviews about her work and Astrobiology.
Dr Oleg Mitrofanov, University College London (Chair)
Dr Oleg Mitrofanov is currently investigating high-resolution microscopy methods in the Terahertz frequency spectrum. He received the BSc degree in physics in 1997 from Moscow State University (Russia) and the PhD degree in applied physics in 2001 from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (USA). In 1998, he joined Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill (USA) where he began his research on near-field microscopy as a research student. From 2001 to 2007, he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, and in 2007, he joined the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department at UCL, where he holds the Royal Society University Research Fellowship.
Dr John Morton, University of Oxford (Speaker)
Dr John Morton has been a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Oxford University since 2008, based in the Department of Materials where he leads the Quantum Spin Dynamics group. He received his D.Phil in 2005 at Oxford studying endohedral fullerenes as candidate quantum bits, and then took a Junior Research Fellowship at St. John’s College, Oxford. In 2009 he was awarded the Nicolas Kurti European Science Prize, the Cavendish Medal at SET for Britain and the departmental “Best lecturer” award.
Dr Salvador Navarro-Martinez, Imperial College London (Speaker)
Dr Salvador Navarro-Martinez obtained his Mechanical Engineering degree in the University of Zaragoza (Spain) and his PhD in the University of Southampton. He then moved to Imperial College where he worked as a Research Assistant on Turbulent Combustion. He obtained the Sugden Award for the most significant contribution to combustion research in 2005 and 2007. In 2009, he was awarded a Royal Society University Fellowship in the topic of Droplet Size Distributions in Spray Atomization and in 2010 he obtained the Hinshelwood prize for meritorious work in combustion by a younger member of the British Section of the Combustion Institute.
Dr Thanh Nguyen, University College London (Speaker)
Dr Thanh Nguyen is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at The Davy Faraday Research Laboratory, The Royal Institution and Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London. She leads a very dynamic research team focused on the design, synthesis and study of the physical properties of nanomaterials as well as their applications in biomedicine. She has been an invited speaker at over 60 international scientific meetings and institutes. Dr Nguyen was a guest editor of The Royal Society Philosophical Transactions A on ‘‘Nanoparticles’’ theme issue published in September 2010. She was also the lead exhibitor on "Nanoscale Science: A giant leap for mankind" exhibit at RSSE in 2010.
Dr Jeremy Niven, University of Sussex (Speaker)
Dr Jeremy Niven read Natural Sciences as an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge specialising in genetics and remained there to pursue a PhD in neuroscience at the Department of Zoology. During his PhD he studied neural circuits controlling the movement and co-ordination of insect limbs. Subsequently, Dr Niven changed fields again to study insect visual systems and particularly their photoreceptors during two post-doctoral positions before being awarded a Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama in 2005. He returned to Cambridge in 2006 to begin his Royal Society URF, working for 5 years on ‘The Role of Cell Size in the Evolution of the Nervous System’ before transferring my URF to the School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex in October 2011.
Dr Alison Nordon, University of Strathclyde (Chair)
Dr Alison Nordon is currently a senior lecturer and Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry at the University of Strathclyde. Dr Nordon obtained a BSc (Hons) in Chemistry and a PhD in solid-state NMR spectroscopy from the University of Durham in 1994 and 1998, respectively. She then moved to the University of Strathclyde where she held research fellow and senior research fellow posts with the Centre for Process Analytics and Control Technology (CPACT). In 2004, she was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to work on ‘new acoustic paradigms for non-invasive chemical process characterisation’.
Dr Isabel Palacios, University of Cambridge (Speaker)
Dr Isabel Palacios received her Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology at EMBLin 1997 and worked in the Wellcome/CRUK Institute at the University of Cambridge as an EMBO and HFSP Postdoctoral Fellow (1998-2000). In 2000 she got an independent postdoctoral position as a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow. She was appointed a Royal Society University Research Fellow in 2004. Dr Palacios uses Drosophila as a model system in order to understand the mechanisms underlying the asymmetric localization of molecules and the establishment of cell polarity. She has published 20 papers (cited over 900 times in total), many of which are in the highest impact journals such as Nature, Developmental Cell and Current Biology.
Dr Maddy Parsons, Kings College London (Plenary speaker)
Dr Maddy Parsons obtained a PhD in Biochemistry from University College in 2000 after completing her BSc Biology degree at the University of Bath. Dr Parsons is currently a University Research Fellow in the Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics at Kings College London. Previously she has held a postdoctoral position at the Cancer Research UK Laboratories at St Thomas Hospital, London.
Dr Rachael Pearson, Institute of Ophthalmology (Speaker)
Dr Rachael Pearson is a Royal Society University Research Fellow, in the Department of Genetics at University College London Institute of Ophthalmology. After graduating from the University of Oxford, she undertook a PhD at UCL in the role of neurotransmitter signalling in retinal development. She then moved to UCL Institute of Child Health, where she began her current research into photoreceptor transplantation. Together with her Co-Investigators Professors Robin Ali and Jane Sowden, she has published a number of landmark studies demonstrating the feasibility of rod and cone photoreceptor transplantation and they have built a comprehensive programme to investigate the potential of stem cell transplantation to repair the degenerating retina.
Dr Steven Penfield, University of Exeter (Speaker)
Dr Steven Penfield is an expert in the biology of seeds, and began his career at the John Innes Centre in Norwich. He then moved to the University of York where he studied the control of metabolism in seeds and how seed sense their environments. Since 2006 Dr Penfield has been a Royal Society University Research Fellow first at York and now at the University of Exeter, where his studies focus on how plants and seeds control seasonal behaviour, and how temperature affects basic biological processes in plants.
Dr Jane Reid, University of Aberdeen (Speaker)
Dr Jane Reid is a population and evolutionary ecologist. She has studied at the Universities of Cambridge, Glasgow and British Columbia and is now a URF at the University of Aberdeen. Her research aims to understand the genetic and environmental causes of variation in reproduction, survival and movements among individual animals, to quantify the consequences of this variation for the size, structure and location of wild populations, and to apply this understanding to designing effective population management policy. This is achieved by combining long-term individual-based data from wild bird populations with advanced statistical and molecular genetic analyses and simulation modelling.
Professor Andy Ridgwell, University of Bristol (Speaker)
Professor Andy Ridgwell is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. His research addresses fundamental questions surrounding the past and future controls on atmospheric CO2, and the nature of the relationship between CO2, climate, global biogeochemical cycles, and life. He is also closely involved in research into future ocean acidification impacts and the effectiveness (or otherwise) of geoengineering. His develops his own numerical analytical tools (‘Earth system models’) to ask questions and test hypotheses regarding the functioning of the Earth system.
Dr Tiina Roose, University of Southampton (Speaker)
Dr Tiina Roose did her undergraduate degree in Systems Engineering at Tallinn University of Technology. Then she came to Oxford and did an MSc in Mathematical Modelling and Numerical Analysis. After a two year stint at a bank she returned to Oxford to do a DPhil in applied mathematics under Andrew Fowler’s supervision. Following this she spent two years at the Steele Lab in Harvard Medical School working on modelling solid tumour growth. As part of this she had also a privilege to do in vivo and in vitro experiments associated with the model. She then returned to Oxford and following a postdoc with Professors Jon Chapman and Philip Maini was awarded the URF. She first held it in Oxford and subsequently in Southampton.
Dr Luke Skinner, University of Cambridge (Plenary speaker)
Dr Luke Skinner is currently a University Lecturer and Fellow of Magdalene College and holds a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in the Department of Earth Sciences, at the University of Cambridge. His research bears on the character and mechanisms of climate change as viewed from a geological perspective. As a palaeoceanographer, Dr Skinner focuses his research primarily on the ocean’s role in climate change, including in particular its role in ‘abrupt’ change and its influence on the carbon cycle.
Dr Vasilios Stavros, University of Warwick (Speaker)
Dr Vasilios Stavros received his BSc. from King's College London and remained there to do a Ph.D. under the guidance of Professor Helen Fielding. Following his Ph.D., Dr Stavros spent three months as a postdoctoral fellow at the PTCL at the University of Oxford in the group of Professor John Simons FRS and then returned as an EPSRC postdoctoral researcher in Professor Fielding's group for three years. Under a Lawrence Berkeley postdoctoral fellowship, Dr Stavros joined Professor Stephen Leone's group at the University of California, Berkeley for a further three years before returning to the U.K. in October 2005 to begin his fellowship at the University of Warwick. His group’s main interest of research is studying the photoprotection mechanisms of DNA bases and amino acids following excitation with ultraviolet radiation, using a combination of femtosecond laser spectroscopy and imaging methodologies.
Dr Giovanna Tinetti, University College London (Plenary speaker)
Dr Giovanna Tinetti is a Royal Society URF and Reader at the University College London, where she leads a team on exoplanets since 2007. She received the 2011 Institute of Physics Moseley Medal for having pioneered the use of infrared, transit spectroscopy to detect the molecular composition of exoplanets. Dr Tinetti is the lead scientist of the European Space Agency mission candidate EChO (Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory), a space telescope dedicated to the study of exoplanetary atmospheres (launch ~2022). She is an editor for Icarus, the planetary journal of the American Astronomical Society. She has authored more than eighty refereed publications.
Dr Jonathan Weaver, Imperial College London (Speaker)
Dr Jon Weaver is a URF (2010) at Imperial College London between the Departments of Materials and Bioengineering. Previously he held a Fellowship at the University of Liverpool and spent two years at Unilever. He is co-founder of Hydra Polymers Ltd (2007) and recipient of the Macro Group UK Young Researchers Medal (2010). His group’s research activities span various aspects of synthetic polymer chemistry, polymer self-assembly mechanisms, nanoparticle synthesis, colloidal chemistry, responsive materials and functional polymer-stabilised emulsions. An overarching aim is to understand the fundamental design rules and mechanisms operating in these systems to the point that it is possible retro-design high-level complexity and advanced function using simplified, generic and viable processes.