NNB 52: A Midsummer Nerd’s Dream
Nerd Nite 52: A Midsummer Nerd’s Dream
Thursday 21st June, Rialto Theatre
Tickets
It’s the longest day, so make use of it with some top class nerdery. We have a very diverse selection of talks this month: from HIV and mental health, to bats and physics. With added cake and beer. As Shakespeare didn’t say, “Lord, what nerds these mortals be”.
Doors open 7.30pm for 8pm start.
£4 Regular Nerds
£3 Unemployed/NUS/65+ Nerds
We regularly sell out- so if you buy a ticket you can’t use, please let us know on the Facebook page so we can ensure disorganised nerds who forgot to buy a ticket in time can still come.
Our speakers this month:
Fungai Murau: Challenging your ancestors: mental health interventions for people living with HIV
A talk about how cultural norms are hard to challenge even when your life depends on it. Fungai is a passionate researcher in the HIV field with an interest in mental health and educating adolescent girls in making informed choices about their lives respecting their sexual and reproductive health and rights.
Fungai has an MA in poverty and development from the Institute of Development studies and her dissertation focused on the mental health of HIV positive undocumented migrant women living in the UK. She sits on the SWIFT steering group and is a trustee on the Sophia Forum and AMAZE boards. Fungai currently works at the International HIV/AIDS Alliance and is starting her PhD at the end of this year. Her other passions include writing children’s books and gardening.
Katherine Halsall: Blind bats? Seeing in a world of sound
Bats are incredibly important worldwide for pollinating important crops, but many species worldwide are at risk and populations have seen considerable decline. Bats have evolved a complex method of echolocation which allows them to catch insects as small as a midge by producing calls and listening to echoes bouncing off the insect. Different species have evolved unique call shapes, frequencies and patterns to catch their particular prey. Research into bat echolocation in recent years has been used to reduce the impact of large development projects on bats.
Kathy Halsall is an ecologist at Mott MacDonald. Her work involves consulting on major UK projects including coastal defence schemes, new highways and rail schemes. Kathy has a particular interest in bats. She previously worked for African Bat Conservation in Malawi leading the urban research team on a new project to discover which species of bats were present in Lilongwe. She currently volunteers in her spare time for Bats Without Borders, a charity working to conserve bats in southern Africa, on the communications and media team.
Lily Asquith: Big Questions in Particle Physics
Particle physics asks mind-tingling questions about the nature of the universe: ‘why is there mass?’, ‘what is dark matter?’, or even ‘are there extra dimensions?’. These questions are our focus at the Large Hadron Collider. The vast, complex machines and computing challenges we have taken on in pursuit of answers to these questions are equally fascinating, from magnets operating at temperatures colder than space, to training computer programmes to learn by themselves.
Dr Lily Asquith has a PhD in High Energy Physics. After a four-year post at Argonne National Lab, Chicago. Lily was awarded a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin fellowship in 2014 and is now working in the Experimental Particle Physics group at the University of Sussex, analysing data collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN.
Hosted by Anna Downie
Facebook: www.facebook.com/NerdNiteBrighton/
Twitter: @brightonnerd
Tickets: www.rialtotheatre.co.uk/whats-on/events/nerd-nite
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