Researchers & Staff

Friendship that lasts even beyond death

Laurence Grove

In 1992 I had my first article published, on the theme of ivy in emblems, using Andrea Alciato’s 16th-century image: ivy clinging to the dead tree is like everlasting friendship, amicitia etiam post mortem durans.

My supervisor at the University of Pittsburgh, Daniel Russell, told me about Glasgow’s Stirling Maxwell emblem book collection, the world’s best, in a wonderful place. I have now lived in Glasgow for over a quarter century and am Director of the Stirling Maxwell Centre. I have no intention of dying, but my Amicitia, with Glasgow, the University, the place and the people, is everlasting.

Art illuminates our understanding of light and time

Sarah Cook

This single image is the first one produced by artists Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) in an experimental technical set-up, realised in the ARC with colleagues from Daniele Faccio’s Xtreme Light Group. The image is raw data – one of hundreds of ‘images’ which together make up a stop-motion animation that renders visible photons scattering across a room (bouncing off walls, chairs, sheets of paper, etc.).

This 'time of flight’ technology is the subject of the first artist-residency collaboration between artists and scientists in a lab in the ARC and forms part of my curatorial practice-research. My work on art-science collaborations values artistic outcomes as evidence of how digital technology alters our experience of the world, and our understanding of time.

I wrote my first book – and came up with a brand new concept

Katharine Jenkins

My first book, published in April 2023 with Oxford University Press, is called Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality. In it, I introduce a brand-new philosophical concept: ‘ontic oppression’ (oppression relating to ‘ontology’, i.e. the study of how things exist).

Ontic oppression happens when someone is made into a certain ‘type’ of person in a way that seriously and unfairly harms and limits them. For example, if counting as a woman in a certain society means counting for less, so that you are made to seem inferior by being made into that ‘type’ of person – that’s ontic oppression.

MY SELF-IMPOSED TRIAL - the first workshop of Judicial Theatre

Kfir Lapid-Mashall

Putting myself on trial was inevitable. If my research was to introduce the form of Judicial Theatre, its initial theatrical experiment had to originate within. Performing the role of Jephthah, the biblical commander who sacrificed his daughter to win a war, I invited Theatre Studies students and researchers to interrogate the lawfulness of Jephthah’s actions.

Yet Jephthah was not tried alone; I was too. As the cross-examinations scrutinized Jephthah, they were profoundly evaluating the possibility of Judicial Theatre to generate political art through enduring adversarial exchange about masculinity, militancy, gender-based violence, and those doomed to pay the price of war.

My music was performed by a robot orchestra

Björn Heile

During the UCU strike, when I had a little more time on my hands, I composed a wee trio for unspecified instruments. I put the beginning of a draft version of it on Facebook. Godfried-Willem Raes, the Honorary Founding President of the Logos Foundation in Gent got in touch, saying they wanted to perform the piece with their robot orchestra.

The piece isn’t written specifically for robots, and I’m not sure how I would have gone about that, but it worked quite well!

A bovine symphony

Konstantina Linardopoulou

The cow, a humble maestro, unknowingly conducted a mesmerising dance of echoes and vibrations. As the micro-Doppler radar weaved its invisible waves, a captivating spectrogram emerged. Each rise and fall, every hoofbeat and breath, transformed into a melodic composition.

Nature's rhythms intertwined with technology's spectacle, revealing the enchanting harmony that resonates within this curious animal.

This is the spectrogram of the first cow I recorded for my PhD project using a micro-Doppler radar, with the objective of developing automated methods to detect lameness in cows.

A Living Link to Vienna 1900

Sabine Wieber

When working on Viennese modernism, one does not expect to ever cross paths with the historical actors who turned the city into a hotbed of artistic innovation. But in 2011, I met Dr Anthony Felsövanyi (1914-2013), the son of Gustav Klimt’s sister in this famous portrait. He brought to life his mother, her beautiful Vienna apartment filled with modern art and design, and her glamorous social world. He also described the pain and suffering inflicted on his Jewish family by Austria’s Anschluss in 1938, their flight to the US and the loss of their invaluable art collection. Sadly, he died before the painting was restituted in 2015 but our encounter left an indelible mark on me.

Muonwards & Upwards

Nuclear and Hadron Physics Research Group

Muography is an exciting non-destructive testing field that uses natural cosmic radiation to inspect the contents of some of the most enigmatic structures on Earth. A decade ago, University of Glasgow researchers produced the world’s first 3D images of uranium inside a steel-shielded, concrete-filled container using muography technology. These images were reconstructed using a particle detector that measures the scattering of ‘muons’ to produce images based on material density.

Ten years later and our spinout Lynkeos Technology has a muography system installed on the Sellafield nuclear site to inspect and improve the safety of nuclear waste containers.

Quantum Interferometry Enables New Capabilities for Fluorescence Lifetime Microscopy

Extreme Light Group - Ashley Lyons

The ability to measure fluorescence lifetimes is a key tool within the bio-imaging community that can unveil changes within cells in, for example, temperature, pH, and viscosity. Recently, the Extreme Light Group (Ashley Lyons, Daniele Faccio) in the Quantum and Nanotechnology theme have developed a new technique inspired by “quantum interferometry” that achieves unprecedented resolutions in the measurable lifetime. Together with Manlio Tassieri (Technology Touching Life), they have shown how the approach can detect extremely small changes in viscosity. This will be explored further in their recently funded EPSRC-NERC project to apply the technique to rheology in marine environments.

Research First. Sleep Late/r?

Michael Kho Lim

This photo shows a street art taken during my field work at the Old Town District of Sakon Nakhon in Thailand last March. It represents my mood or mode after having been successful on my first attempt at submitting a grant proposal for external funding. This also reminds me of the 2006 documentary Who Needs Sleep?, which talks about sleep deprivation and the long, extended working hours in the film industry.

Coming from this industry myself, I now see its similarity to the demands of academia—the countless sleepless nights and thinking hours that go into producing high-quality research outputs.

Unseen Hands

Joe Grove and the Unseen Hands Collaboration

Using machine learning to analyse thousands of virus sequences, we obtained our first view of the cell entry machinery of hepatitis C virus. Exciting and important for vaccine development! But are we aware of the stigma faced by people living with viruses like HCV and HIV? Do they know that their generously donated blood samples helped us with our findings?

The Unseen Hands project, a powerful collaboration with people living with blood-borne viruses, gave us an appreciation for the human and scientific links between our work and these communities. The artwork shown here, created in the ARC, reflects these connections.

AI with Diamond Point Engraving at GOMA

Healy Arts Charity

The project was initiated by Healy Arts (SC051273). The charity was established by University of Glasgow Graduate Siobhan Healy in 2021. The project was offered as free courses to the public funded by the Thornwood and Partick Ideas Fund. We combined experiments with the free online Artificial Intelligence (AI) design programme 'Craiyon' with the traditional craft of diamond point engraving on glass. We printed the designs the AI programme provided and then hand engraved the designs onto 2D flat stained glass and 3-D blown glass. The workshops took place at the Annexe in Partick and in Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) workshop space. Healy Arts continue to research traditional heritage crafts and cutting-edge technology in the context of contemporary art practice.

Illuminating Neurodegeneration with Intense Light

Philip Binner

The work here demonstrates one of the first collaborations in the ARC, and dates to even before the ARC was built. Physics and Biology are often thought to be opposites in scientific research; however, imaging and diagnostics are where the two themes have a large overlap. One particular interest that we have is to use light to non-invasively track neurodegenerative disease progression.

The image I have included is of a mouse brain illuminated under a microscope. It was something very preliminary that I took when starting my project and not all like what I would do in my analysis nowadays, but I think it is a good example that shows how light penetrates deep into tissue alluding to its ability to peer deep inside the brain.

Queer Data on a T-shirt!

Kevin Guyan

My research first happened in December 2022 when a quote from my book Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action featured on the back of a t-shirt.

The t-shirts were produced to support a keynote talk at Google on my research into what happens at the intersection where data practices meet questions of identity.

The talk was a big moment for me as it made clear my research was engaging communities outside of academia and shifting how people in the tech industry engage with issues related to LGBTQ lives.

A Taste of the Renaissance in the 21st Century

Yujia (Flavia) Jin

My PhD research focuses on the representation of the Italian Renaissance in contemporary audiovisual culture, which is featured in a series of clashes of tradition and innovation.

It is my first time making a collage and the first time that the heteroglossia of the Italian Renaissance in the contemporary world is presented artistically as a collage.

The intermediality of history in popular visual culture allows my collage to express this phenomenon to the public because it is a unity formed through fragments that reveal the ideology and aesthetic taste of both the creator and spectator.

Growing in the wind

Oleksandr Zhdanov

When it is windy outside it is easy to observe how plants bend under the wind. Although it might be intuitive to assume that plants grow in the same direction as the wind, our experiments in a bespoke wind tunnel, where Arabidopsis thaliana was grown under constant wind, clearly demonstrate for the first time that plants do not ‘go with the flow’, but actually grow against the wind.

In scientific terms, plants exhibit a positive anemotropic response (from Greek ánemos ‘wind’ and tropikós ‘turning’) by directing their growth towards the source of the force, in this case the wind.

First of the Brains: Immuno to Neuro

Deepika Sharma

Moving from Immunology to Neurosciences was the first leap of faith I took in my scientific career. Knowing nothing about the experimentation biology of the brain and neurosciences, I started out in the Cavanagh lab here at Glasgow.

My first experiment with the neuro-inflammation model was a flow cytometry experiment. And the difference I saw on my flow plots between an inflamed brain and non-inflamed brain was striking.

This was the first result which pushed me through my first year and still drives me to get to the bottom of the biology demonstrated here.

My first research interview… ended in tears

Doris Ruth Eikhof

My first interviewee was a catch: a much-admired, celebrated actor who had shared the stage with the good and great of German theatre.

Five minutes into our interview she broke into tears: “I just heard they aren’t renewing my contract because I am too old.” Her beloved stage career lay in ruins, but to help a young researcher she bravely spoke a heartbroken account of it into my dictaphone.

She taught me what is still my first rule of empirical research: My data is other people’s lives – hopes, dreams, traumas, everything. My work better be worthy of their trust.

Antennas See Ice

Mahmoud Wagih

Taken in the West Highlands of Scotland, this photograph shows my first time taking research as far as possible from lab. It’s also the first-ever experiment of wireless ice and snow sensors being measured in the field, using inexpensive open-source hardware, supported by my first grant as PI.

Remotely sensing ice can be a game-changer for applications ranging from wind energy generation, aviation, to making cities and remote areas safer. In the UK, over 7,000 ice-caused injuries occur annually; in Scotland, an average of two fatalities are caused by avalanches per year. Our electro- magnetic sensors can distinguish ice from water, showing great potential for wide-scale deployment.

Bone regeneration technologies, from first-in-dog to landmine victims

Centre for the Cellular Microenvironment (CeMi)

This is Eva the dog, our first patient. We saved her leg from amputation by using our bone regeneration technologies. The work required a large multidisciplinary team with expertise in biomaterials, bioengineering, cell engineering and veterinary medicine.

The importance of the work was recognised by Sir Bobby Charlton who travelled to Glasgow and meet Eva. We are working with his charity – the Sir Bobby Charlton Foundation - to translate this regenerative technology to developing countries badly affected by landmines.

Quantum Computing with Photons

Sam Nerenberg

The work presented here demonstrates a kind of moment that I have chased over my scientific career: A spontaneous unification of seemingly disparate fields into a new cohesive idea.

My initial line of research was to use the theory of optical networks to investigate whether quantum states of light can be used to image inside the human body with greater precision. However, as I proceeded, I saw that the same objects I was trying to see inside of could perform quantum operations on information encoded in the light itself. Thus, for the first time, turning ordinary objects into quantum computers.

Unveiling Earth's Hidden Rhythms: Detection of Earth Tides with Wee-g

Abhinav Prasad

Earth tides are a fascinating natural phenomenon caused by the gravitational attraction between the Sun, Moon, and Earth. While we often associate tides with the ebb and flow of ocean waters, it’s remarkable that the Earth’s crust also deforms, albeit on a smaller scale. These periodic deformations cause semi-diurnal and diurnal changes in gravitational acceleration, which have traditionally been picked-up by large and expensive gravimeters. Glasgow’s thumb-sized gravimeter chip, Wee-g, was the world’s first microfabricated device to detect the Earth Tides (theoretical tides are shown in red and measured signal is in blue).

The Tenementals: A History of Glasgow in Song

David Archibald

The Tenementals are the first band in the world to develop a history of a city through song. Formed by David Archibald (Film and TV) and other academics and musicians, they are currently recording a series of songs which recount an experimental history of Glasgow. The Tenementals have received significant critical acclaim and press coverage. They picked up the ‘Outstanding Event’ award at the 2022 Glasgow Open Doors Festival, and they have played subsequent, sold out, gigs at notable venues across the city, including The Revelator Wall of Death.

Keep up with their activities on social media: @tenementals 

Photo credit: Tommy Breslin

Productive Waste: a shared experiment with slag

Minty Donald and John MacDonald

A first-time collaboration where artist-researcher Minty Donald and Earth scientist John MacDonald used the same experimental technique, with different outcomes.

John’s research is on the potential of waste material from the steel industry (slag) to capture CO2 from the atmosphere. Minty’s research is on the potential of contemporary art practices to examine humans’ interrelations with rocks and minerals. John and Minty placed etched glass slides into a slag-filled pond near the site of former steelworks, Ravenscraig. The slides became encrusted with calcite, drawn from atmospheric C02. The experiment will lead to new data (John) and new artworks (Minty).

Ya Dancer!

Marie Bowers

For the first time, members of Gypsy, Traveller, Roma, Showman, and Boater communities came together with their dances, stories, films, songs, and art at the ARC. My outreach project ‘Science Travels’ enabled me to bring these marginalised voices together and the Arcadia and the ARC provided a safe and welcoming setting for an afternoon of sharing experiences ...and laughter.

The dancers of ‘Romane Cierhenia’ (Roma Stars), quite rightly, stole the show in St Mungo’s square. September 24th, 2022 was the first time my Romany culture was truly represented in my workplace.

Arcadia... ya dancer!

Listen to your Heart

Marija Vaskeviciute and Haobo Li

Our project first collects and investigates people’s heart sound signals through a ‘laser stethoscope’ remotely. The system involves an eye-safe green laser diode and an industrial high-speed CMOS camera. It can ‘listen’ to the human heart from a maximum distance of 2 meters. The periodicity of the retrieved heart sound matches perfectly with the ECG signal we acquire synchronously. Moreover, we could also capture and identify the heart murmurs hidden in the heart sound.

The users could evaluate their heart conditions at home and get an early warning of heart diseases with the help of machine learning models. This technology could also be used as fingerprinting in biometric identification.

What place for journalists on digital platforms?

Stefan Luca

The first event I co-hosted in the ARC with my CREATe colleagues explored how journalists navigate the perils of starvation and silencing online.

Practitioners and researchers addressed the contentious relationship between news publishers and online platforms, which is being renegotiated in multiple jurisdictions, from Australia to the EU, and across diverse areas of law, from copyright to media regulation. Along the economic dimension, we asked whether journalists benefitted from legally-mandated bargaining, platforms’ funding initiatives, or their dedicated news products. Along the expressive dimension, we explored responses to both online hate and over-zealous moderation. 

Image generated by Dall-E

‘Gen-up’: Authorship and First Ownership of AI-generated works

CREATe Centre

CREATe examines the interplay between law, creative labour markets and technology. In response to simple prompts, AI tools can instantaneously generate works that traditionally attract copyright (songs, music, images etc.) creating unprecedented conceptual shifts in understandings of authorship. AI has been heralded as a democratising force in creative sectors but is also viewed by many as posing an existential threat to these sectors. This image, generated by DALL-E depicts the CREATe team in the style of a Romanticist oil painting.

Copyright confers first ownership of a work on the author. Who is the author of this work? Who owns it?

A new co-created video game amplifying Minoritised Ethnic voices

SEvEN Project Team

Our game “SEvEN: Seven Voices, One Future” highlights Minoritised Ethnic people’s voices and the importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge on Scotland’s sustainable future. SEvEN is co-created by the University of Glasgow (Mark Wong and Timothy Peacock), Education Evolved, Ethnic Minority Environmental Network, and the Floating Designer.

SEvEN invites people to reflect on what a sustainable future means and for whom. Minoritised Ethnic voices are often missing in policy and media around Net Zero. SEvEN highlights real-life climate actions led by these communities.

The game is publicly available at www.educationevolvedltd.com/seven

Augmenting Intelligence: Unleashing the Power of Human-AI Brainwaves

Gao Wang

This study represents the first-ever implementation of trained AI within the human brain using Human-AI Brainwaves. By analysing the spectrum of Brainwaves, we can directly determine the classification result of input data. Moreover, we have successfully connected multiple brains, resulting in improved performance. In this scenario, the Brainwaves of the first person are encoded and used as input data for the second person.

This pioneering achievement carries profound implications, as it has the potential to bridge the gap between AI and human intelligence in the future.

When the dancing went wrong, the evening went right

Mark Ball 

These are photographs of a group of line dancers. The bottom image shows bodies moving in unison, but above a leg looks out of step. Is this bad? Per accepted teaching, good dancing is strict adherence to a looping set of turns and steps. But at this line dance class, breaking form was common and accepted. More than this; when the dancing went wrong, the evening went right.

This contradiction anchors my first academic journal article, published this year, in which I explore the ways cultural values and meanings age and change, and celebrate the significance of solidarity in practice.

Home Away From Home

Zein Al Maha Oweis 

When I started attending workshops at the ARC, I always seemed to get lost. However, once my Guide Dog Mitch and I qualified, the ARC was one of the first buildings we would sit in to work.

I wanted Mitch to feel comfortable while I was working on my PhD research. After, two visits, Mitch has claimed the space as a home away from home. He even enjoys sitting next to the big windows where he loves to sunbathe. Navigating around has become easier as Mitch guides me around the building. He has the ARC mapped out all in his head.

My experience at the ARC has become more enjoyable now that I have Mitch by my side.

The triumph of GW150914: Discovery of gravitational waves from a coalescing binary black hole

Institute for Gravitational Research (IGR)

14 September 2015, the first observation of gravitational waves!

Decades of research were required to develop detectors able to measure gravitational waves, and algorithms to identify their astrophysical sources. Scientists from the Institute for Gravitational Research, as part of the international LIGO Scientific & Virgo Collaboration, were central in this science. This artistic representation of the first detection created by PhD student Laurence Datrier shows two merging black holes creating ripples in spacetime (the gravitational waves) above a time–frequency spectrogram showing the characteristic chirp of a gravitational-wave signal; the dividing red line represents the lasers of the LIGO detectors.

The Dear Green Bothy

The Dear Green Bothy Team

The Dear Green Bothy is a programme of arts and humanities events and projects responding to COP26 and the climate crisis, organised by the College of Arts. In July 2022, we hosted Bothy Conversations at the Advanced Research Centre, which brought together artists, students, and researchers who contributed to the Bothy.

In the Atrium, we exhibited works created from the Local Women of the World project, an interactive audio installation, and heard from speakers how the arts can address the climate change. This was the first time we used the space in this way, and have since held exhibitions, workshops, and performances in the Atrium.

Sound Thought

Sound Thought Team

Sound Thought is a collective of practice-researchers working across experimental sound and music.

For COP26, we created a series of site-specific soundscape pieces which constitute The Dear Green Bothy Soundwalk. The Soundwalk draws upon research into acoustic ecology, sound walking, and deep listening practices to highlight human-made noise pollution by shifting listeners’ perceptions.

We led a series of soundwalks at various times throughout the year, sharing personal stories and experiences of the locations and how we relate to and can address the climate crisis through creative practice.

Essential Blends, a practice-research podcast

Essential Blends Project Team

Essential Blends is a podcast created by practice-based researchers Adriana Minu and Kevin Leomo, supported by the College of Arts Community Building and Public Engagement Fund. We interview artist practitioners from various disciplines, both within and outwith academia, in order to uncover possibilities of practice that others might find inspiring.

Our first episode was with Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, an academic, artist, composer, and improviser interested in the materiality and musicality of language. We discussed building community, self-care, intention, and learning how to resist. Together, we performed Emmanuelle’s ‘Song of an Intention’ in Emmanuelle’s beautiful home in Thornton Heath.

Laboratory for Civic Arts Research

Laboratory for Civic Arts Research Team

The Laboratory for Civic Arts Research is a pilot training programme for researchers. Based at the Advanced Research Centre and run by the Collaborations & Cultural Activities Committee in the School of Culture and Creative Arts, this programme is the first of its kind; a collaboration between University partners which aims to open up new ways of seeing, making, and participating in the cultural life of Glasgow.

The image captures the Decollage method from a workshop with the artist duo, FRAUD (Francisco Gallardo and Audrey Samson) – mapping across time and space; representing interdisciplinary, nonlinear, and nonhierarchical approaches to civic engagement.

Stories for Change

Jude Robinson and Zoe Strachan

Everyday Clean marked a new collaboration and a new experiment in storytelling for change! Jude Robinson and Zoe Strachan developed a partnership with Zippy Okoth at Kenyatta University and used it to create a methodology for using stories targeted at different audiences in Kware, Nairobi, to highlight strategies for everyday hygiene. 

Scenarios proposed by local researchers and communities were combined with research findings from anthropologists and microbiologists in Kenya and the UK by Robinson. Strachan and Okoth co-produced culturally appropriate and entertaining stories which were published in a desirable illustrated book distributed to research participants and the wider community. The image shown from the book is called Using water in a home in Kware (Ongata Rongai, Kenya).

Don Quixote and the quest for Quantum gravity

Marko Toros and Maria Chiara Braidotti

Circular motion is as much part of classical literature as it is a cornerstone of science -- the iconic windmill in Cervantes' novel Don Quixote harnesses the power of the wind to generate rotational motion.

Researchers at Glasgow University also showed that rotational motion should produce entanglement – a quantum effect where objects become interconnected – dubbed by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance”. The proposed experiments with quantum light and rotational motion might shed light on the elusive quantum-gravity theory, one of the biggest open problems of modern physics, and lead to applications in communication and computation technology.

Follow the money: How the type of funding governments

provide affects the development outcomes they get

Bernhard Reinsberg

Financing development has become an increasingly political issue. International development organisations increasingly support their operations through earmarked funds. These funds allow donor governments to support specific sectors, countries, or projects, rather than the general budget of an organisation. While earmarked funding has helped organisations expand their activities, it also poses significant operational challenges that undermine aid effectiveness. We are the first to demonstrate this causal relationship using large-N datasets and inferential methods. We have shaped policy discussions on earmarked funding at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, and other international development organisations.

First Light

Steven Johnson

Within quantum optics we build systems to control and analyse light. These experimental systems are not always easy to align.

This image depicts the “first light” where light has passed through the system for the first time. It is an important step during the experiment in the process towards having a working system. The image depicts the light coming from a laser into a series of optics to measure the polarisation of the light. The red light can be seen emitting from a fibre optic cable, which will carry the light to the final detector.

First University-Sponsored Wall of Death Ride

David Archibald

The University of Glasgow hosted what we believe to be the first ever University-sponsored wall of death ride at The Revelator. Built by Stephen Skrynka and a team of volunteers, The Revelator is a unique arts space, and a fully functioning wall of death.

In June 2023, The Revelator’s researcher-in-residence, David Archibald, and Stephen Skrynka organised ‘Thanopticon: Looking Death in the Eye’, a theatricalised symposium comprising lightning talks, performances and song. The event also included Stephen riding the wall of death, and a closing life- affirming discussion on how artists and academics deal with living, and dying.

Photograph credit: David Archibald | Instagram: @the_revelator_clydebuilt