Leadership in Science

It's not every day that you have a meeting with the good and the great in Manchester within a ball pool, but this was that day. Organized by Siemens and the Museum of Science and Industry, a select number of Manchester leaders were brought together to consider how to address the low levels of productivity within the North West. 

It was a first step in re-thinking how we collaborate, inspire, and stimuate the economy of the region, at a crucial time in Manchester's history. Ahead of the European City of Science and the Northern Powerhouse debates, this was a fantastic and inspiring conversation which was made all the more remarkable by it taking place in an adult ball pool!

Drone Expo

Another big delivery for me within the Manchester Science Festival was the Drone Expo at the Museum of Science and Industry, which took place over the opening weekend of the festival. It was produced in association with my Josh Award for Science Communication and we created a large flying space at MOSI with professional pilots and STEM volunteers to show the public what's happening with this amazing techology.

Science Jam

Well, this is the night when it all comes together, the preview of our Science Jam, our main delivery weekend within Manchester Science Festival. Over the last year, I have been curating a programme of work in the festival as Salford University's contribution. For many of the activities, I've also had some creative oversight and provided direction to some of the amazing people around the projects. 

It has been an amazing and exhausting journey to get to this point, but the evening was a great success, with previews of the Royal Photographic Society science prize, the Chernobyl installation, Alienated Life?, and our co-commission exporing electricity and art, Kinetic Flux, produced with artists Paul Miller and Griet Beyaert, along with some science busking and a premiere of a new documentary science film called Traces.

There was so much over this weekend, I'm not sure how to showcase it, but here's a snapshot.

Science Question Time

For the first time in Manchester Science Festival, we have produced a 'Science Question Time', which I'd like to make a regular feature within the programme. To address some of the key issues facing science, we brought together a fantastic array of expertise, comprising the following:

Professor Judith Smith, parasitologist,
Dean of the School of  Environment and Life Sciences, University of Salford, Manchester

Marieke Navin, physicist and science communicator
Director of Manchester Science Festival

Dr Delphine Ryan, engineer
Ministry of Defence

Gunes Taylor, biologist
University of Oxford

We held the event at the newly opened University Technical College at Media City, in their amazing tv studio, filmed by students. It was a fantastic, wide ranging debate and we'll follow it up with some key statements. The event was produced with the support of the amazing Dr Gary Kerr.

Pitch to Pixel

Opening at the National Football Museum this week is a new exhibition I was involved with producing, through my relationship with the museum's artistic director, John O'Shea.

I have worked with John for many years now and he has done amazing work in bioart and new media art. He has brought together an extraordinary exhibition of the last 40 years of football computer games to show how much gaming has evolved and how close art and life now come together.

The exhibition is on until June, so plenty of time to see it. It's worth spending a whole day at least, just to experience the different kinds of game interfaces and appreciate how they have changed over the years.

Back to the Future Today

In advance of #futureday, I worked with Guardian journalist Joanna Goodman to produce a piece that would come out on the day. It was a fantastic chance to talk about how close the film came to realising our world as it is today. Here's the final article - it got the most views on the Guardian for that day and Joanna even came up to Manchester for our sell-out screening.

IOC #athletesforum

My slides from the 7th International Olympic Committee Athletes' Forum, which focused on the use of media to empower and enable people. Also, here is the programme from the event.

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#futureday @thisisGorilla #MSF

My first contribution to the Manchester Science Festival is this amazing screening of Back to the Future 2, a trilogy that was certainly defining of my teenage years. I'm so excited to have been able to produce this with #MSF15 and that Gorilla in Manchester is screening. Here is my presentation from the night.

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Making Digital Work

As part of the Digital R&D for the Arts funding stream overseen by Nesta, they put together a programme of presentations as a final showcase. I was asked by their new Director for Digital, Tim Plyming, to make a contribution to the final session of the day, looking at future directions. It was a really fun panel with Freya Murray, Director, Stamp House; Anthony Lilley OBE, Interim CEO and Creative Director, The Space and CEO, Magic Lantern Productions; David Watson, Head of Digital, Hull UK City of Culture 2017.

Personal health technologies

As part of my involvement with the amazing 2020 Health project, I was asked to take part in a Conservative Party fringe event, exmaining how digital technologies can transform the health care system. It was a pretty far reaching discussion and my central concern was around data ownership, mobility, and expansion. More to come on that.

Chaired by: Dame Helena Shovelton DBE, Chair, 2020health 

With guest speakers: 
Nicola Blackwood MP, Chair, Science & Technology Select Committee (Invited) 
Paul Burstow, Independent Health Consultant
Dr David Lee, Medical Director, Computer Sciences Corporation    
Professor Andy Miah, Chair in Science Communication & Future Media, University of Salford

Should you get a smart watch? #MobTechEdu

Talk today for Salford University CPD conference.

Drones in the House of Lords

This week, I received a report from Lord Haskell, detailing the House of Lords debate of 8th September, in which he kindly mentioned my work on drones. This is an important citation for Project Daedalus and great to have made a link there for NESTA. Here's the report, crucial reading for all UAV/drone users. Our online toolkit is also online now! Here's a link to get started on learning about drones.

Abandon Normal Devices

AND festival went to Grizedale forest this year, a return after 5 years. We delivered a number of drone activities over the weekend, including a networking event for drone enthusiasts and some flying experiences for beginners and experts. We were incredibly lucky with the weather and had some great people come along and learn.

Communicating Chernobyl

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I have spent the last week in Chernobyl with my Salford colleagues Dr Mike Wood and Professor Nick Beresford, as part of a programme funded by the Natural Environment Research Council. The week was spent visiting key sites around the Nuclear Reactor, including the reactor itself, along with doing some fieldwork. I have been working with Mike and Nick on a project called 'Alienated Life?' which is an artistic installation for Manchester Science Festival. I spent a lot of my time there producing films for the install and documenting what took place over the week. Films to follow.

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In search of the Giant Anteater

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This is the first of a series of short films about colleagues in ELS I am making, profiling their research and sharing a bit about their lives. I'm delighted to have worked with Prof Rob Young to track this enigmatic creature. We got a lot more than we expected, even a mother carrying its young. Hope you enjoy the footage.

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Andy Miah Filming

Mamiraua

On the recommendation of one of our PhD students, I spent some time at the Pousada Uacari, which is connected with the Mamiraua Institute, an organizational set up in the 1980s to conserve an area of the Amazon that was under threat from logging and fishing companies.  A number of the region's wildlife were affected negatively by this, notably the Uacari, a primate that was near extinction until this programme began.

Thirty years later and the Uacari is thriving again and the local communities have both ownership of the fishing industry and the capacity to feed and grow their populations. The focus of the research here remains the conservation of the natural habitat but there is so much more that they do, including health and education programmes.

The idea of conservation has defined a lot of this trip for me and I have thought a lot about how that concept may have evolved since its rise in prominence in scientific disciplines in the 1970s. It emerged clearly out of a range of disciplines and is intimately connected to the rise of wider environmentalism which defined that period.

Many of the techniques used to underage conservation research are quite primitive, involving experimentation with mimicking conditions in the wild so as to understand whether it is possible to use captive breeding or growing as as step towards a more natural repopulation.

In this sense, science and technology are servants to nature, their aim s imitation not displacement. Alternatively,  science is used to measure and monitor, with a view to establishing things like fishing quotas or simply an understanding of how populations are being affected by human behaviour.

The question I leave here with though has to do with that concept of conservation and how compatible it is with population growth and how much it may have changed over the last 40 years. This seems a nice starting point for a new line of inquiry for me which resonates with the aspirations biotechnologists have for nature. There seems something on obviously incompatible about the two approaches, but reaching this conclusion depends heavily on where one ends up with the definition and meanings of the word conservation.

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Fieldwork in Brazil

This month, I am out in Brazil for a few things, one of which is to work with Professor Robert Young to track and document the Giant Anteater. I'm currently working on a film about this, but it's my first time out in the field with a colleague from Salford, figuring out what they do and getting an insight into their research. All of this is enriching my skills as a film maker, but also as a theorist interested in biotechnological and environmental change. I'm hoping part of what I learn at Salford will inform my theories on posthuman evolution, drawing particularly on an understanding of biological precedents for  species adaptation and change. It is one of the main reasons I took the role at Salford. I tell people that I spent the first decade of my career with humans and I want the next decade to be with non-humans. It's not quite as clear cut as this, but certainly a lot of what I have been arguing about posthumanism over the last ten years has led me much closer towards non-human species to understand how we might think about our own biological possibilities, but also the implications on disrupting. species categories through technology.

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Rio 2016 #Falta1Ano

This week, Rio marked the 1 year to go anniversary before the opening of the Olympic Games. I always try to get to an Olympic city ahead of the event and spent my time here attending the official press conference of the organizers in the morning, and the civic protest in the afternoon. Here's what the latter looked like. It was a small group and very peaceful. It was also not focused only on the Olympics, but instead a range of groups were present, all of whom have complaints that may be tied to the wider changes around the city.

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What I find fascinating about drones

A quick interview with Mind the Film productions for Project Daedalus

The Josh Award for Science Communication

This week, i was in my home city of Norwich for 'BIG' the STEM communicators Network, at which I received their Josh Award for science communication. The Josh Award is so named after Josh Philips, the first science communicator at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. You can read a bit more about Josh here. I had a chance to talk to his dad while in Norwich, which was really lovely. It was fantastic to be among such wonderful communicators and it was really humbling to see the range of talented people who are making a career out of professional science communicators.

This award comes at a wonderful time for me, as I find myself doing a lot more production, commissioning, and staging of science communication activities. During the event, I attended a session for freelancers, to understand what they need and what they are going through. it was led by my friend Greg Foot who has to be one of the best examples out there for this kind of work.

I'm really over the moon to have received this award. My first forays into science communication were when I was a PhD student and decided I needed to start building websites to communicate my research. I remember hearing that the average academic article is read 6 times and felt there was a lot more we need to do to get our work out there. Since then, I have made public communication, engagement, and involvement, a core part of my own research discovery process. From working with film makers on productions, to developing concepts around theatrical shows, to giving talks at festivals and speaking/writing for the media, communication is core to what I have tried to do as an academic.

My new role at University of Salford, along with the wonderful relationships I am developing around Manchester with the likes of MOSI's Sally McDonald, Natalie Ireland, and Marieke Navin, along with long standing relationships with other creative people in the city, it feels like this year is really going to be a fantastic time for me to have this award and, I hope, make a contribution to the prospects of other science communicators.

The major thing for me will be the Salford Science Jam, a weekend of science activity taking place at our university building in  Media City. Keep the 24-25 October free to come to Manchester!!

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