APEX Networking Event 2026

Gabriel Egan is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at De Montfort University, and a General Editor of Oxford University Press's landmark complete-works edition, the New Oxford Shakespeare (6 volumes, 2016-2027). His computationally aided research into just what Shakespeare did and didn't write has put Christopher Marlowe's name as co-author on the title-pages of the three 'Henry 6' plays, and inspired the hit West End show 'Born With Teeth' by Liz Duffy Adams. He teaches students the arts of computational textual analysis and letter-press printing.

Gabriel Egan is primary applicant on the APEX-funded project 'Shakespeare's Textual Variations: New Insights from Information Theory' (2024-2026).

Dr Ad Spiers is an Assistant Professor in Robotics and Machine Learning at Imperial College London. He runs the Manipulation and Touch Lab, which conducts research on hands / grippers, and the sense of touch in humans and robots. He is also a co-founder of the assistive technology startup, MakeSense.

As an undergraduate in 2004, Ad started researching the potential of novel haptic interfaces to aid navigation for people with low vision. 22 years later, he is still working on a related topic, as the PI of an APEX award. Dr Spiers’ APEX research aims to design and test new hardware devices that can aid low-vision computer users in navigating digital information (eg webpages) by augmenting typical screen-reader audio feedback.

Brian Ball is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Computational Philosophy Lab at Northeastern University London. His research concerns the philosophy of AI and cognitive science – broadly construed so as to include mind and language, as well as the theory of knowledge. His PolyGraphs project has been supported by the Royal Society and others; he received a Talent Development Award from the British Academy for the follow-up Human and Network Sciences; and he was a DISKAH Fellow during 2025-26, working on Digital Research Infrastructure and High Performance Computing to support Arts and Humanities research. He is widely published and in 2016 his ‘Knowledge, Safety, and Questions’ won the Philosophy South international essay prize. A member of Steering Group for the 695th Lord Mayor of London’s Ethical AI Initiative, he has acted as a consultant for the British Computer Society.

Professor Ball’s PolyGraphs project, with co-Is Alexandros Koliousis (Computer Science, NU London) and Mike Peacey (Economics, Bristol), was awarded an APEX from 2021-2023.

Stephanie Bunn is Leverhulme Emeritus Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. She has conducted research through practice into textiles and basketry worldwide for over 35 years. Her focus is on skill, human-environment relations, and learning. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including Striking Tents, on Kyrgyz felt textiles, at the British Museum, and most recently the Forces in Translation installation on basketry and mathematics at Ruthin Craft Centre, Wales. She is author of Nomadic Felt (British Museum Press), editor of Anthropology and Beauty (Routledge), co-editor of The Material Culture of Basketry (Bloomsbury) and co-author of a forthcoming publication Crafting Mathematics (Bloomsbury). For the past six years she has been collaborating with mathematical educationalists and basket-makers on Forces in Translation, researching the relationship between textile hand-skills and mathematical cognition.

Stephanie’s APEX award funded her at St Andrews to coordinate the Forces in Translation project which was a collaboration between herself as an anthropologist, mathematical educationalist Professor Ricardo Nemirovsky and three basket-makers: Mary Crabb, Hilary Burns and Geraldine Jones to explore how hand skills are an essential complement to other forms of learning, in her case, mathematical learning. The anthropological aspect was particularly important because it enabled Stephanie to explore how the award’s collaborators conducted investigative research over time.

Dr Robyn Grant is a sensory biologist and Reader in Comparative Physiology and Behaviour at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on whiskers (vibrissae) as specialised touch sensors, investigating how mammals use them to perceive and navigate their environments. Her work combines animal behaviour, anatomy, biomechanics, robotics and engineering. Her early research examined how rats actively move and control their whiskers, while her more recent work has compared whisker systems across a range of mammals. Robyn’s research has moved beyond laboratory rodents to include observations of animals in zoos, rehabilitation centres and the wild, helping to improve our understanding of natural sensory behaviour in mammals, and its implications for animal welfare. Robyn is Editor-in-chief for Mammal Review.

Robyn led the interdisciplinary MMMMammalWhiskers project, funded through a Royal Society APEX Award, investigating the morphology, mechanics and movement of mammalian whiskers. Working with Dr Geoff Goss at London South Bank University, the team described how whiskers differ between aquatic and terrestrial mammals. Robyn also leads a programme of public engagement, which was further developed through the project.

Dr Roberts's research has focus on two main areas, namely the extinction modelling and the wildlife trade. His work on extinction modeling has again to determine whether a species is extinct and if so when did it become extinct through inferential statistics. Beyond conservation this work has been applied to data the origin of COVID-19, and in biological anthropology to date the origin and extinction of stone tool cultures. Within the area of wildlife trade, his research has been varied, from livelihoods and development, through to illegal trade over the Darkweb. Previously he has served as the Prevention Lead for the Cyber-enabled Wildlife Crime Priority Delivery Group, and as member of Defra's Illegal Wildlife Trade Advisory Group. He is currently a member Interpol's Wildlife Crime Working Group, and an APHA wildlife inspector.

Dr Roberts's was the principal investigator on an APEX Award looking at the application of inferential statistics from conservation to the inference of cessation of political violence. Currently he is a co-I on another award looking at item biography methodologies from the humanities and its application to understanding the wildlife trade.

Anna is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in Education at the University of Glasgow, where she is also Director of the Centre for Research and Development in Adult and Lifelong Learning. She has an interdisciplinary background, having worked in the field of nuclear structure physics for about 20 years before undertaking a second PhD in education and starting a new academic career. Her current research develops the concepts of socioenvironmental literacies and pedagogies as a way of understanding what and how we learn from the environments (physical, cultural and social) that we inhabit; and how knowledge, practices, norms and values emerge, change or decline.

Anna and her colleague Professor Bhavani Narayanaswamy (Scottish Association for Marine Science) were awarded an APEX award in 2025. Their project, Remnants and Revenants, combines science and humanities approaches to study how beached marine litter can help develop ocean and waste literacies.

Professor of Probability and Statistical Physics at the University of Portsmouth, Professor Burridge interests and research question whether geographical and time variations in human language behave like a novel state of physical matter.

For example – do linguistic features exhibit spatial ordering like the atomic structure of magnets, do they undergo phase transitions between ordered and disordered states, and can the mathematical tools of physics be adapted to forecast the future of language? To address these questions, Professor Burridge has developed a statistical field theory for language and working with his linguistic collaborator Bert Vaux, he has inferred its parameters from high resolution linguistic data. Together, they have found strong evidence that linguistic features exhibit phase ordering and that consequently their evolution is partly predictable. This work has been funded by the APEX award. Professor Burridge also applies inference and machine learning to commercially focused problems in battery technology.

Tom Mitchell (he/him) is a Professor of Audio and Music Interaction in the School of Computing and Creative Technologies where he leads the mica lab. With an interest in computer science and music, Tom's research involves the development and evaluation of interactive technologies that support novel and accessible forms of creative expression.

Tom is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow working on the project "Sensing Music Interactions from the Outside-In". The project aims to rethink the fundamental practice of digital musical instrument design, inviting broader participation in the development of new musical instruments and future visions of musicianship. For more information see the project website: www.micalab.org.

Additionally, Tom is also a co-investigator on the Bridge, a creative technology facility at UWE, which is funded by the AHRC, WECA and UWE. Tom is also co-creator of the MiMU Gloves: technology for composing and performing music with gestures.

Tom was awarded an APEX grant in 2018 for the project "Exploring Molecular Data with Immersive Technology: Interactive Sonification in Virtual Reality".

Margarita Staykova is Professor of Biophysics at Durham University. Margarita works at the interface of physics, biology, and engineering. Her main research focuses on understanding how biological cells sense electrical and mechanical cues from their environment and translate them into coordinated behaviour. Margarita’s research also extends to engineered living materials. Using lipid membranes as scaffolds for living cells, she investigates how cells adapt to synthetic environments and imbue the resulting materials with novel properties.

Since 2023, Margarita has served as Director of Science at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, where she contributes to the development of interdisciplinary research programmes and international collaborations.

In 2019, Margarita Staykova (Physics) and Tiago Moreira (Social Sciences) received an APEX Award for their interdisciplinary project, Material Imagination. The project aimed to develop a prototype living material combining bacteria and lipid membranes, while exploring an open, interdisciplinary approach to innovation that considered the perspectives of scientists, stakeholders, and even the bacteria themselves. This collaboration resulted in several research papers and public engagement activities exploring these different perspectives and their implications for how new technologies are imagined and developed. In 2025, she joined the APEX Award Committee.

Dr Jamie A Ward is a Professor of Computer Science at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research lies at the intersection of wearable computing, theatre, and psychology, where he uses body-worn sensors to study human behaviour across a diverse range of social situations. He received his PhD in electronics from ETH Zurich, where he developed some of the first uses of multi-modal, wearable sensing for human activity recognition. He continued this work as a Marie Curie Research Fellow in Computing at Lancaster University, and later as a postdoc at DFKI Germany, and the UCL Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience. In between these posts he retrained and worked as an actor. His work centres around the convergence of technology, neuroscience, theatre, and autism, and has been funded by grants from the Royal Society and the European Research Council (ERC). He recently served as a visiting professor at Keio University, Japan and is currently Head of the School of Computing at Goldsmiths.

Jamie was awarded an APEX grant in 2020 for a proposal titled, "Exploring social interaction using theatre and wearable sensing”. The focus of this work was to research new ways of using wearable sensing to study real-world nonverbal, social interaction. The award provided a mechanism for Jamie to develop novel research at the intersection of theatre, computing, and autism research; research that he continues working on to this day.

Alexandra Sanmark is Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the Institute for Northern Studies, University of the Highlands and Islands. Her research interests include Iron Age Scandinavia, in particular the Viking Age and the expansion into the North Atlantic. She also has a strong interest in Viking Age religion, law and assembly as well as the Christianisation of northwest Europe. Her publications include the monographs Power and Conversion. A Comparative Study of Christianization in Scandinavia (2004) and Viking Law and Order. Places and Rituals of Assembly in the Medieval North (2017).

In 2022 she was awarded a Royal Society APEX grant for the project Communications in Norse Orkney, together with Prof. Richard Bates, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of St Andrews.

Lisa Mol is co-Director of the Centre for Environment, Society and Resilience at the University of the West of England. She provides strategic leadership for interdisciplinary research addressing environmental change, social justice and resilience across policy, practice and communities.

As holder of a Personal Chair in Geomorphology and Heritage in Conflict she leads Heritage in the Crossfire, an initiative that investigates the material damage caused by armed combat and vandalism. This work has been generously supported by funders such as the Royal Society, AHRC, the Leverhulme Trust, Historic England and the British Council. Lisa works collaboratively with academics, practitioners and partners to translate scientific evidence into application, supporting innovative projects, capacity building and inclusive knowledge exchange. Her role spans research development, partnership building, and research-informed teaching, with a strong commitment to sustainability and justice within the nexus of conflict and climate change. In recognition of this work she was awarded the 2025 Gordon Warwick Award by the British Society for Geomorphology. This is also translated in her teaching within both BA and BSc Geography, as well as supervision at Masters and Doctoral level.

Lisa received a 2020 APEX award for the project "Remote scientific support for sustainable conservation of heritage damaged by explosives" and was awarded additional funding towards public engagement activities including schools outreach. In 2024 she joined the Society’s APEX Award Committee.