Speakers
We are excited to introduce our speakers for CUWiP 2022. Check back regularly for more updates!
Prof Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell
University of Oxford
She/her
Physics CRED - Community, Resilience, Equality and Diversity
Jocelyn Bell Burnell inadvertently discovered pulsars as a graduate student in radio astronomy in Cambridge, opening up a new branch of astrophysics - work recognised by the award of a Nobel Prize to her supervisor. She has subsequently worked in many roles in many branches of astronomy, working part-time while raising a family. She is now an Academic Visitor in Oxford, and Chancellor of the University of Dundee, and was (the first female) President of the Institute of Physics. Much in demand as a speaker and broadcaster, in her spare time she gardens, listens to choral music and is active in the Quakers. She has co-edited an anthology of poetry with an astronomical theme – ‘Dark Matter; Poems of Space’.
Prof. Catherine Heymans
Astronomer Royal for Scotland
University of Edinburgh
She/her
A planetarium journey through the dark side of our Universe
Join the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Professor Catherine Heymans, for a journey through the dark side of our Universe. Catherine will explore the latest discoveries on invisible dark matter and mysterious dark energy, showing why she believes these entities will only be explained with new fundamental physics. As a passionate science communicator, Catherine will also share her top tips for making scientific research accessible and understandable for everyone.
Photo credits: Royal Society of Edinburgh
Prof Gail McConnell
University of Strathclyde
She/her
Optical mesoscopy with the Mesolens
For more than a century, the design of low-magnification microscope objectives has been guided by the angular acuity of the human eye (approximately 1 second of arc). At x4 magnification, this requires a numerical aperture no greater than 0.1 or 0.2, which can be achieved cheaply and easily by simple optical designs. With the advent of confocal and multiphoton microscopy, however, it became apparent that the poor axial resolution of more than 30 microns with low magnification objectives was intolerable for these 3D methods. To overcome this, we have developed a new and complex objective with a magnification of 4x and an NA of just less than 0.5 which we call the Mesolens. We specified this lens for mammalian embryology, and have shown that it can image every cell of a 6mm-long embryo 3mm thick with sub-cellular resolution if the tissue is cleared appropriately. A by-product of the high NA is that the optical throughput is approximately 20x greater than a conventional 4x objective. The pupil size of the lens is so great that it cannot be used with a conventional microscope frame, so we have built the imaging system around the lens, and use either wide-field camera or laser point-scanning detection to create images. I will present an overview of the Mesolens technology, and I will give some examples of new and emerging applications that use this new instrument.
Dr Clara Nellist
Radboud University and Nikhef
She/her
The Building Blocks of the Universe
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Switzerland, is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator ever built, colliding protons and heavy ions in the centre of complex detectors located around the 27 km long ring. After completing its seventh year of data acquisition and fourth year at 13 TeV collision energy, the LHC was turned off for three years for scheduled upgrades and repairs of the accelerators and detector. Now it is almost ready to be switched on again. One of its greatest results so far was the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations. Yet many important scientific questions, such as the nature of dark matter, still remain unanswered, and the search for physics beyond the Standard Model continues.
Dr Yolanda Ohene
University of Manchester
She/her
Finding your inner selfie
Abstract: How can we use physics to help us to understand the brain in health and in disease? Join neuroimaging scientist, Dr Yolanda Ohene who develops imaging techniques for the early detection of neurodegenerative diseases. Yolanda will explore the different ways that physics has been used in medical imaging to revolutionise healthcare. She will share her journey from finding a passion in biophysics to communicating science and advocating for people from ethnic minority groups in STEM.
Dr Yolanda Ohene is a neuroimaging scientist, STEM communicator and co-founder of the Minorities in STEM network. She was awarded the Institute of Physics Bronze medal in 2019 for outstanding contribution to physics by an early career researcher, for her work in the development of a new MRI technique. Yolanda holds an MSci in Physics from Imperial College London (2013), a Masters in Plasma Physics from Ecole Polytechnique, France (2014) and a PhD in Medical Imaging from UCL. Yolanda is a science communicator; she has spoken on BBC Tomorrow’s World Live and is a speaker for Maths Inspiration and regularly gives talks for schools. She has also spoken at some of the biggest UK science events including Cheltenham Science Festival (2016/2017), New Scientist Live! (2017) and Einstein’s Garden at GreenMan Festival (2019). Yolanda is a recipient of the British Science Festival Award Lectures (2021). She is one of the founding members of The Blackett Lab Family, collective of UK Black physicists. Yolanda is currently a postdoctoral researcher within the Neuroimaging group at Geoffrey Jefferson Brain Research Centre at The University of Manchester.
Prof Sheila Rowan CBE FRS FRSE
University of Glasgow
She/her
Gravitational waves: listening to the Universe
In September 2015 the twin ‘Advanced LIGO’ observatories enabled the first direct detection of gravitational waves from astrophysical sources. The waves detected originated from the collision and merger of two black holes 1.3 billion light years from earth. This detection marked the start of new field of gravitational astrophysics, in the 100th anniversary year of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. This talk will cover the status of observations since then, plans for the global network of advanced gravitational wave detectors and what the future of the field might look like.
Dr Jess Wade
Imperial College London
She/her
Build back better: creating a more equitable scientific community in the post pandemic world
Evidence shows that diverse teams are more innovative, more impactful, more successful and more highly cited, but science is still a long way from equal representation. In the UK, women make up only 20% of physics undergraduates and 10% of physics professors. Despite the increasingly loud discussions around equity and representation - in 2018, a data scientist found we were still 258 years away from gender balance in the author lists of physics publications, and in 2022 the RSC reported that there was only one Black chemistry professor in the whole of the UK. In this talk, Jess will talk about why who we talk about matters, and our role as scientists in building a more robust and respected scientific community. She’ll also discuss her efforts to increase visibility of scientists from historically marginalised groups on Wikipedia and the power of social media for early career researchers.
Bio: Dr Jess Wade is an excitable scientist with an enthusiasm for equality. By day she is based in the Department of Materials at Imperial College London, where she creates super thin films out of organic electronic materials that emit and absorb circularly polarised light and transport spin polarised charges. She spends her evenings editing Wikipedia, working to make the internet less sexist and racist.
Dr Sabine Wollmann
Heriot-Watt University
She/her
Understanding Einstein's mistake and using it in today's technology
Understanding of the behavior of small particles, e.g. atoms and single photons, has been at the heart of the field of quantum mechanics over the last century. In this talk I will focus on a special property of quantum particles, the so-called quantum entanglement. The idea of this widely investigated feature was first discussed by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen in 1935. In their famous thought experiment they consider an entangled quantum state shared between two observers, Alice and Bob. Alice performs measurements on her received system and therefore, controls Bob’s measurement outcomes by her choice of measurement setting. The three physicists concluded from this counterintuitive effect, which Einstein later called ‘spooky action at a distance’, that quantum theory must be incomplete and an underlying hidden variable model must exist. It took another 29 years until it was proven by John Bell that there exist predictions of quantum mechanics for which no possible classical explanation exists. This phenomenon is today a key resource for foundational quantum information and communication tasks, such as teleportation, entanglement swapping and quantum communication. In this talk I will give an introduction into quantum entanglement and show examples how we can generate it using photonic setups. I will give an overview of today’s quantum technology and how it is using this phenomenon to provide us with advantages in computation, communication, and sensing.