Research without Borders 2021 - Online Showcase Exhibition

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About this event

Each postgraduate researcher has created a digital asset to share with you that helps to explain their work in an accessible way, you don't need to be an expert, all you need to bring is your curiosity. 

The showcase exhibition will take place live online via Remo, a simple to use online event platform, and you will have the opportunity to meet with each of our researchers in small friendly groups to discuss the impact their work is having on the wider world in an interactive way. 

You can select the exhibitors you want to speak to from our programme or enjoy a virtual wander through our researcher tables meeting a mix of interesting people each with their own research story to tell. 

The event takes place on Wednesday19 May, from 10 am until 4 pm but you can join us at a time that suits you and stay for as long as you like, this is not a conference or research seminar, this is your chance to be part of the conversation around postgraduate research at the University of Bristol . 

We will email you with the full joining instructions prior to the event.

ProgrammeResearcher Sessions: Morning, 10am to 12 Noon

"Spring Time" in Ancient Rome - Amy Nizolek: Find out more about how both human beings and the gods interact with "spring time" in the Ancient Roman poetry of Horace. 

Assessing the damage: learning disability, emotions and self-harm - Beverley Samways: This session deals with the differences in how we assess young people who self-harm if they have a learning disability. This difficult topic is treated sensitively, and support groups will be shared, there are no images of self-harm in the video. 

Medieval Spanish Music Manuscripts: What Do They Mean? - Emily Wride: Interactive experience using images of an ancient musical manuscript. Explore this digital resource to find out how the writing, the music and later additions to the text tell us about the history of Spain, religion and cultures in the medieval period and how historical objects can tell us about the past. 

Discovering the Metaphysical Unity of Science - Francesca Bellazzi: This Prezi interactive poster session will give you an insight to the Metaphysical Unity of Science and Francesca’s work as part of a research group alongside, Vanessa Seifert, Toby Friend, Sam Kimpton-Nye, Tuomas Tahko and Elle Chilton-Knight. MetaScience, ERC Project (No 771509)

Storyhaven - Gareth Osborne: Storyhaven is an immersive storytelling experience for children to boost social interaction and mental wellbeing, this short explainer video shares the experience of being part of Storyhaven, using images taken from the pilot in a primary school. This will lead you into exploring various links to the different elements of Storyhaven, including the rulebook, a graphic designed pdf where immersion in the storyline begins; episode 1 of the branching narrative story app, built in Twine; a link to an example of video content that simulates the live streamed theatre sessions. 

Illness and treatment in three levels - Wiship Zhong: “We are already ill, no matter if we have diseases or not! To understand what existential predicament is, is the prerequisite to understand what illness is.” This video explores the phenomenon of illness in physiological, existential, and ontological levels, and introduce the German philosopher Martin Heidegger's ideas and Buddhist thoughts on these three levels. 

Low Definition, Silences, and Poetic Evocations in Trinh T. Minh-ha's Feminist Films - A Videographic Exploration - Leonie Gschwendtberger: This evocative video essay explores feminist thought and documentary film. Focusing on low definition, obscuration, and withholding in the films of feminist Vietnamese-American filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha and the poetic effects this produces. Leoni will also be sharing her experiences of applying these strategies to her own film project. This session shares an understanding of a feminist resistance practice in film, which focuses on obscuring and withholding expected images rather than re-signifying them. There are some scenes of partial nudity featured in this video. 

Antibodies: Coronavirus and Diabetes - Matthew J Randell: Did you know you can predict type 1 diabetes by testing for autoantibodies? What if we could reduce the impact of undiagnosed diabetes with quick, affordable tests that only need a couple of drops of blood and could be undertaken as part of a routine screening programme. Explore the future use of testing to predict who will get type 1 diabetes and how this research can save lives. 

Who is who is as important as what is what - the role of social networks in health promotion -Nina Abrahams: This video session explores how our social networks can improve health promotion, it focuses on South Africa and social network analysis in the context of Nina’s research. Opening up the conversation and sets us thinking about how we can use our own social networks to improve health. 

Climate change and the Arctic Ocean - Soukhanda Kent-Morris: This video demonstrates the effects of climate change on the Arctic Ocean and the impact on the habitat and people who live in the Arctic circle, starting a conversation on the effects we have as humans on our ecosystem. 

Metal in the sea becomes corroded and covered with marine organisms - Why is this a problem for ships? - Tamsin Dobson: Exploring the issues of using weld metal in a marine enviroment this video explains how microscopic sea creatures that call it home create corrosion and how this causes problems to ships and other marine structures. 

Invisible clues: an archaeology adventure - Sophie Brown: Chemistry holds the key to unlocking the secrets of archaeology. Find out more about how chemistry can help give us information about what humans were eating hundreds and thousands of years ago, what food products we can detect, and what other clues archaeologists can find. 

Dancing to the heartbeat - Tessa Forbes: Dance Your PhD! Sharing research into heart disease through the medium of dance. Explaining the research “The role of vascular smooth muscle cell phenotypic switch in abdominal aortic aneurysms” and other medical research in a creative way helps to share complicated concepts in a way that helps people understand and remember them! Dancers: Angie Edwards, Zoe Greenhill, Suze Mellor, Alice Mete, Josie Rampley, Lizzie Rees Jess Sparling. Choreography: Angie Edwards (AE Dance + Fitness). Produced by: Jennifer Huszar

Was there machine translation back in the USSR? - Suzanne Eade Roberts: During the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States were competing to develop atomic weapons and go to space, machine translation was being developed in the Soviet Union - but back in the 1960s it was nothing like Google Translate! Some of the Soviet theorists had never even seen a computer, which were the size of rooms. The dream was to be able to translate automatically technical and scientific material obtained by Soviet spies in the USA. 

Stomata: A Defence Against Drought - Sophie Hammond: Using climate change and changes in our future food supply to survive, as part of a research group, Laboratory 324 in the Life Sciences Building. 

Keeping our Leafy Greens Green: Reducing Food Wastage by Harnessing the Power of Light- Tom Dobson:

Image and Text in Visual Politics, the Case of Jeremy Corbyn - Maximillian Guarini: How do images in the media affect our perception of world events and our world leaders? Looking at how image and text work together to create a narrative, this session looks at how Jeremy Corbyn has been portrayed in the media and takes a deeper look into the impact of visual politics work in action. 

Researcher Sessions: Lunchtime, 12 noon to 2 pm

Solving big issues with a small particle: a new way to introduce DNA into plants - Callie Rice: Plant transformation/genetic engineering is vital to a sustainable future find out why and learn more about innovation in introducing DNA into plants. 

Bacterial life support: how far-red light absorbing cyanobacteria can help us travel deep space - Cassie Hopton: Design and draw your own home on Mars using far-red absorbing bacteria to power your electronics. 

OutBreak: A game to return to normality - Chris Moreno-Stokoe: Play a short video game looking at the best strategies to help us return to ‘normality’ while living in a covid world. Developed with endcoronavirus.org (ecv: a global volunteer coalition helping end the pandemic) Chris was part of a global team of volunteers who developed this game. It shows that the fastest way back to 'normality' in the game is to have short and severe lockdowns. Other strategies taken in the game such as no lockdown, or going in and out of lockdowns were ineffective. Game design, development, copywriting: Endcoronavirus.org, Pandemic Game workgroup https://outbreak.endcoronavirus.org/ ;

Hearing Nemo: How clownfish communicate to survive and thrive in a changing coral reef - Isla Keesje Davidson: Immerse yourself underwater and explore what it means to have to make decisions as a small clownfish to respond to any imminent predator threat. Find out how clownfish interact, behave and communicate using all their senses. Isla will also be sharing her own clownfish rap! 

Mosaix: a swarm of robot tiles - Merihan Alhafnawi: Join us to remotely control robots at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory to create collective art with other users. The robots, called Tiles, are small, 4-inch screens-on-wheels that users can move around and colour.

Antibodies: Coronavirus and Diabetes - Matthew J Randell: Did you know you can predict type 1 diabetes by testing for autoantibodies? What if we could reduce the impact of undiagnosed diabetes with quick, affordable tests that only need a couple of drops of blood and could be undertaken as part of a routine screening programme. Explore the future use of testing to predict who will get type 1 diabetes and how this research can save lives. 

Researcher Sessions : Afternoon, 2 pm to 4 pm

What outcomes are important after stillbirth? - Dr Danya Bakhbakhi: This short film will share the findings of the iChoose Collaborative research and present how the group have identified outcomes that are important after stillbirth using a variety of research methods. The video will include material from in-depth interviews conducted with parents who have experienced stillbirth from across the UK. You will also be able to find out about the next stages of the research and how the iCHOOSE study team are using their findings to develop a core set of outcomes to improve research and care for bereaved families. iCHOOSE Collaborative group, iCHOOSE Parent Involvement Group, Supervision team: Dr Christy Burden, Dr Abigail Fraser, Dr Lisa Hinton, Dr Dimitrios Siassakos & Dr Anna Davies

Lifestyle choices and cancer - Fernanda Morales-Berstein: Using comic book illustration this session explores how our lifestyle choices affect our risk of developing cancer and shares why it is important to understand more about their role in cancer risk. Looking at how finding out more about the links between lifestyle factors and cancer could contribute to the development of cancer prevention strategies and treatments - preventing people from getting cancer and helping people with cancer get better. 

From clicking moths to bioinspired structures - Hernaldo Mendoza: Find out how engineers can take inspiration from nature to develop novel engineering devices. This film features origami structures that can replicate the sound production mechanism in a moth species and explores how studying and understanding nature can enhance engineering developments. 

Oxygen: Friend or Foe?- Joanne Boden: Take a trip back in time by 2,700 million years, to a world without plants, animals or even air. The story of life goes back further than dinosaurs and giant man-eating reptiles. It extends to an inhospitable rocky landscape with crashing waves and a toxic atmosphere where the beginnings of life as we know it were brewing as microscopic biofilms. This session focuses on how the evolution of antioxidants provides insight into the origin of life on Earth. 

Million Years of Deoxygenated Ocean - Mohd Al Farid Bin Abraham:To understand the future of today’s oceans we need to look back at a million years of the deoxygenated ancient ocean. This animation highlights the geological mechanism of ocean deoxygenation, including volcanism and high atmospheric carbon dioxides and looks at how molecular fossils (biomarkers) can be used as a proxy in understanding geological past and the impact of current climate change in our oceans.

The effects of light pollution on the behaviour of marine animals - Octavia Brayley: Find out how light pollution impacts marine animals and look at what you can you do to reduce your lighting usage in a positive way to help with this issue. 

Transport for Proteins: a new route for antibiotic treatments? - Tia Salter: Explore the process of protein transport in bacteria in the style of a London tube map, to explore how to identify a good antibiotic target and the fundamental research needed to support drug development. 

Where Have You Gone? Cancer Narratives in Children's Literature - Alessia Silvestrin: Looking at how the power of stories and storytelling can provide support even in the most difficult situations in this interactive presentation. 

Investing in people! - Ahmed Drwish: Which aspects of investing in people needs more attention: health, education, or training? This session invites discussion on the significance of investing in human beings and encourages the audience to consider investing more in themselves and their children if they want better future. 

How can we talk about women's rights through comics? - Surangama Datta: Can a popular medium like comics also be a serious platform for telling histories with an impact? Get involved by drawing a tiny comic strip about your own day to share and discuss with others at the session.

How Eating Food From God Makes You More Divine - Ashlynn Blackwell: An opportunity to explore the exciting world of ancient literature and get a new appreciation for the past in this interactive presentation and Q&A. 

Boosting the immune system to fight cancer. - Carissa Wong: Using medicine to boost the immune system helps the T-Cells win against cancer in this short animation with a powerful message.