Social programme: Fellows' research weekend on 'Communicating Science'

"Ottoline Leyser is Professor of Plant Development and Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Her research uses the control of shoot branching in Arabidopsis as a model system to understand plant developmental plasticity and the role of plant hormones in integrating endogenous and environmental inputs into developmental regulation. The aim is to understand how local and systemic signalling mechanisms give rise to environmentally sensitive shoot system architectures, an endeavour that is increasingly dependent on computational modelling to understand the dynamic networks involved.

Ottoline received her BA (1986) and PhD (1990) in Genetics at the University of Cambridge. After a period of post-doctoral research at Indiana University, she returned to the UK and took up a Lectureship at the University of York (1994), where worked until moving to the new Sainsbury Laboratory University of Cambridge, in 2011. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Member of EMBO and a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. She was awarded a CBE in the 2009 New Year Honours list."

Saiful Islam is Professor of Materials Chemistry at the University of Bath and recipient of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit award. He grew up in Crouch End, north London and obtained his Chemistry degree and PhD from University College London, followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Eastman Kodak Labs in New York, USA. He returned to the UK to the University of Surrey, before joining the University of Bath in 2006. His research covers materials modelling for clean energy applications focusing on lithium batteries and perovskite solar cells. He has presented over 65 invited conference talks, and was awarded the Peter Day Award for Materials Chemistry (2017) of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Saiful served on Diversity Committee of the Royal Society, and is a Patron of Humanists UK. He presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 2016 for BBC TV on the theme of energy. Outside interests include family breaks, football, indie music (The Smiths et al) and the chemicals gin and tonic.

Uta Frith is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. As MRC Scientist from 1968 to 2006 she carried out research on neurodevelopmental disorders, with the aim to understand the links between mind, brain and behaviour in autism and dyslexia. She has a special interest in science communication and public engagement. This has resulted in TV documentaries about her work for BBC Horizon and in a graphic non-fiction book. Together with her husband, Chris Frith, she is writing a book entitled What makes us social. Uta was chair of the Royal Society’s Diversity Committee from 2015–2018. She has raised awareness of the value of diversity in making group decisions and has produced guidelines and visual materials to explain and combat unconscious bias.

Christopher D. Frith FRS FBA is Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology in the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College, London, and Niels Bohr Visiting Professor in the Interacting Minds project at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He is one of the pioneers in applying brain imaging to the study of mental processes. He is known especially for his work on agency, social intelligence, and understanding the minds of people with autism and schizophrenia. 

I am a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Professor of Cosmology at University College London. I have been involved in public engagement throughout my Fellowship, with activities including talks in schools; contributing to TV, radio and print media; and delivering a three-week event in the Grizedale Forest (supported by Royal Society Public Engagement funding). By building an art exhibition, we aimed to build two-way in-depth dialogue with communities in this remote area of Cumbria around the nature and future direction of theoretical physics.

My research focuses on understanding dark matter – a mysterious component of the universe that is hypothesised to drive the formation of galaxies and other structures. While little is known about the nature of dark matter, the basic idea of an invisible sector interacting through gravity with what we can see has been highly predictive. Over the last 20 years, the dark matter hypothesis has generated a huge number of correct predictions about both the present day universe and the ancient "cosmic microwave background" light.

My team's work focuses largely on using the visible universe to help us to understand better how the invisible sector operates. This is essential if we are to connect our expanding knowledge of the night sky to fundamental physics experiments performed here on Earth. Ultimately this work should point us to a fuller understanding of the basic building blocks of reality.

More specifically, my team use a combination of mathematical and computational tools to make predictions for how dark matter should behave in different circumstances. We work on building more precise, controlled numerical "experiments" using powerful supercomputers. We then interpret the results to make predictions for new observations of the real universe, or to explain existing ones.  In this way we are attempting to understand how the visible and invisible components of our universe interact.