Spotlight @ Sussex Impact Day: A celebration of Sussex postdoctoral research
Building on the successful Spotlight Profiles of Sussex Research Fellows, on Tuesday 13th June 2017, the Research Staff Office hosted a Spotlight session as part of the annual Sussex Impact Day. The aim of the session was to celebrate the research achievements and impact of Sussex Research Fellows through a series of short engaging TED-style talks from postdoctoral researchers from across the University.
Spotlight Speakers
Our line up of speakers for Spotlight @ Sussex Impact Day was as follows:
Click on the names below to read the full talk abstracts.
- Dr Adam Barrett - Measuring Consciousness
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Understanding the biological basis of consciousness is sometimes considered the final frontier of science. We are now finally seeing some progress on this frontier: a theory for describing mathematically the key differences between conscious and unconscious brain activity, that can be tested on brain data. Strikingly, when we’re conscious there are a greater number of distinct patterns present in our brain waves. This reflects how complicated each moment of our experience is, and that each experience is one of an absolutely vast number of possible experiences that we could have. Drawing from my mathematical background in theoretical physics, I have been refining the theory and its real-world applications. We have been developing and applying new methods for counting the number of different patterns in a brain recording. The results are encouraging: brain activity when asleep or under anaesthesia is indeed less diverse, in terms of number of distinct patterns, than brain activity when awake. Intriguingly, we have even found that there is greater diversity than normal in the brain waves of someone given a psychedelic substance such as LSD.
- Dr Stefano Caserta - Discovery of Novel Biomarkers for Sepsis
- Dr Priya Deshingkar - Demonised migration brokers offer useful lessons for reducing migration risks
- Dr Helena Harder - From Patients to Apps: developing bWell - a breast cancer app
- Dr Mari Martiskainen - The Energy Cafe - Community Action on Fuel Poverty
- Dr Christiane Oedekoven - Remembering events - the influence of memory impairment
- Dr Katarzyna Pisanski - Science for sale: Predatory journals and editorial misconduct
- Dr Elizabeth Rendon-Morales - First minute of life: novel technologies for heart monitoring
Visit the Sussex Impact Day webpage for more information about the day.