The things within usAbout this Event
Chaired by: Rob Parsons, Northern Agenda Editor
Honey, I shrunk the needle: how thinking small is creating non-invasive diagnostic tools that will have a massive impact on the early detection of disease. Tarl Prow, Hull York Medical School.
From a very early age, Tarl Prow thought small. With an oncologist for a mother and a father who explores the interfaces between computer hardware and software, he likes to think he ended up ‘somewhere in between’. Today he is a blend of innovative entrepreneur and medical researcher working at the intersection of dermatology, nanotechnology and molecular biology.
His talk is a voyage of discovery that traverses the world from Texas and Baltimore to York via Melbourne Australia, and a career in medical research spanning the delivery of genes to white blood cells to help astronauts cope with ionizing radiation in space, to deploying nanoparticles to the eyes of diabetic animals to stop diabetic retinopathy and prevent diabetic blindness.
The latter work provoked an epiphany and a career pivot from the frontiers of fundamental science to an applied R&D world of invention that brings much more immediate health benefits. This resulted in the production of a non-invasive ‘needle’ that can take skin samples from a baby and not wake it from sleep and, here in York, the development of ‘digital twins’ where clinical experiments can be carried out in the virtual world using AI and machine learning to deliver with measurable results that advance the cause of human health and wellbeing.
Finding YorVoice: how interdisciplinary research is revealing the uniqueness of the human voice. Vince Hughes, Department of Language and Linguistic Science.
Your voice is unique. It contains rich information about where you grew up, your social and educational background, your age, your sex and gender, as well as short-term factors, such as how you feel towards a person or topic, the time of day, and any illness you might have.
The unique properties of your voice are determined by a combination of your anatomy and physiology, as well as the set of life experiences that make you, you. In recent years, there has been a huge increase in AI-based speech technologies, allowing us to transcribe speech and singing in real time, recognise your voice to allow you access to your bank account, and even to create deepfake versions of your voice saying words that you never said.
In this talk, Vince shows that such systems are often limited by focusing on ‘average’ voices, meaning that many people are left behind. Vince is lead figure in the YorVoice project, funded as part of the University’s SPARKS programme, which is a two-year research endeavour that brings together researchers from across all three faculties to address important and timely questions related to the uniqueness of the human voice. In this talk, he will reveal the range of interdisciplinary voice research happening at York as part of YorVoice; from the development of legal frameworks to protect ownership over a voice, to interventions to make performers sound more like themselves, to themselves. In bringing together different skills and perspectives, YorVoice is transforming the way impactful voice research is done.
A Bolivian Pr*son journey: Breaking down the barriers to sustainable mental healthcare in Latin America’s highly populated prisons. Anne Aboaja, Health Sciences.
Consultant forensic psychiatrist Anne Aboaja is a global citizen who has worked in some of the world’s most challenging environments in a quest to deliver better mental healthcare – including overcrowded prisons in South America. In this talk she shares her exhilarating journey from identifying the mental health development needs in Bolivian prisons to building a collaboration of like-minded researchers capable of challenging the status quo at every level.
Drawing on her experiences, Anne reveals how, layer by layer, she stubbornly chipped away at the obstacles to reform from the outside-in. By breaking down the old, narrow ways of measuring success in research papers, she co-authored a key report that is having real impact on Pr*son policy (the outer layer). Her work in creating a network of psychiatrists that could collectively chip away at the middle layer of the Pr*son mental healthcare ecosystem revealed how to build mental healthcare capacity and capability in the prisons (the middle layer). And, finally, by convening a workshop with prisoners and practitioners to identify research priorities; raise awareness of signs of mental health conditions; and provide the lay skills in managing mental health distress (the inner layer); she is overturning common conceptions of people living inside highly populated South American prisons.
Reflecting on this remarkable journey, she identifies collaboration, determination and innovation as being necessary ingredients for compassion-driven researchers to address the global mental health challenges facing people living in underserved prisons. These qualities, Anne believes, have relevance to the wider world and to the UK where she heads a team in the low secure mental health service at Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust.
Can you heal people using electricity? – Dr Stuart Higgins, School of Physics, Engineering and Technology.
For centuries we’ve been trying to zap ourselves into better health using electricity. Luigi Galvani’s experiments to make frogs’ legs twitch in the 1780s catalysed investigations into the electricity present inside living things and the effects it has on the body. The following century witnessed a proliferation of new machines, claiming to do everything from healing wounds to curing cancer.
While many of these machines were dismissed as ‘quackery’, electrical stimulation is still routinely used in healthcare today. And centuries more research has helped us understand better how electrical currents and fields emerge inside the body – and, coincidentally, how these processes are disrupted in wounds and cancer.
Today, electrical stimulators such as pacemakers are routinely used in clinical settings to help treat various conditions and companies continue to develop new electroceutical (electronic pharmaceutical) treatments. At the same time, recent research suggests that modulating bioelectrical signals can influence fundamental behaviours, such as the ability of organs to regenerate.
In this talk, Stuart will explore his obsession with living things and electricity. He’ll describe contemporary efforts in electrical healing, and the ongoing fundamental research into bioelectricity.
He’ll also reflect on his own recent scientific journey into this area, as a scientist attempting to build both a team and a lab to rigorously study bioelectrical phenomena. And he’ll describe how this fascination is also his fear – is he just the latest scientist to become enthralled by the possible healing power of electricity?
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Event Venue
Ron Cooke Hub auditorium, Ron Cooke Hub, York, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
