Event Details

Join Lancaster University's undergraduate STEM students for an evening of short talks as a part of their Teaching, Outreach and Public Engagement (TOPE) module, covering everything science and technology!

We will be running two evenings' worth of talks, delivered by undergraduate students from across the Faculty. The lineup for the 18th is:

• Ibrahim Kamran: The Significance of Urban Planning
• James Cooper: Snails to Whales: The Role of Sexual Selection in Animal Morphology
• Poppy Colledge: Do CSR/ESG initiatives genuinely deliver equality for women plantation workers?
• Dr Rostislav Mikhaylovskiy: Ultrafast Magnetic Recording
• Dr Jonathan Gratus: The importance of outreach and public engagement, why I set up a new undergraduate course and its outcomes.

Abstracts:

• The Significance of Urban Planning: The importance of urban planning/regeneration in a changing world, including climate change and urbanisation. What future solutions addressing these issues such as Sustainable and Smart Cities.
• Snails to Whales: The Role of Sexual Selection in Animal Morphology: This talk aims to understand take the audience through the process of sexual selection theory, why it happens, who theorised it, and different concepts relating to sexual selection and how that influences animal morphology (physical characteristics). Throughout I will explore how we can see these different concepts in animals both across the UK but also across the world.
• Do CSR/ESG initiatives genuinely deliver equality for women plantation workers?: A talk on the everyday struggles faced by women palm oil workers and whether initiatives put in place by conglomerates actually elevate these issues or not.
• Ultrafast magnetic recording: It is hard to believe that writing a magnetic bit in one trillionth of a second and with virtually zero loss of energy can ever become true. I will discuss how the interaction between ultrashort pulses of light with magnetic materials makes it feasible. In the talk I will survey applications of terahertz electro-magnetic pulses (the oscillation period of the order of a picosecond, which is one trillionth of a second) to interrogate ultrafast dynamics in magnetic materials and to control magnetization with minimal losses of energy. In particular, we will see that ultrashort pulses of electric field can navigate magnetization between its metastable equilibrium orientations at picosecond timescale and with energy input of just one photon (~1 meV energy) per an elementary magnetic moment, called spin.
• The importance of outreach and public engagement, why I set up a new undergraduate course and its outcomes: Struck by scientific misunderstanding in parts of the general public, and realising academics were partly to blame, I decided it would be a good idea to set up a course for undergraduates in how to present science to the general public and encourage more children to go into thew sciences. With the help of colleagues, the course TOPE (Teaching, Outreach and Public Engagement) is now in its 3rd year.