Nerd Nite Brighton

Celebrate (almost) mid summer by worshipping your inner nerd! Nerd Nite brings you talks, a quiz and news in the nerdiest possible way. With added cake.

Doors open 7.30pm for an 8pm start. Our speakers this month:

Claire Baert – Citizen science: Play, help, research

Prof Kathy Romer – Life with Clusters of Galaxies: like a box of chocolates (but at least it is all soft centres…)

Gianluca Memoli- Shaping sound

Claire Baert is a project manager for a video game company in Brighton. She discovered citizen science by playing Foldit, a research discovery game developed by the University of Washington. She started the Brighton Citizen Science Meetup Group in 2015 to promote local citizen science projects and launched citizensciencegames.com in 2016, a website dedicated to scientific games. She is also contributing to EyesOnAlz, a biomedical game that accelerates research on Alzheimer’s disease.

Originally from Tyneside, Kathy Romer got her BSc in Physics with Astrophysics from the University of Manchester in 1990 and her PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Edinburgh in 1995. She then moved to the USA and was a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University and at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). After a short time as a research professor at CMU, she secured a tenure track position there. She moved back to the UK in 2004 to take up a lectureship at the University of Sussex. She is still at Sussex and is now both a Professor of Astrophysics, and a Public Engagement Fellow for the Science and Technology Research Council. Kathy is a world expert in the discovery and exploitation of X-ray clusters of galaxies. She is principle investigator of the XMM Cluster Survey collaboration and is coordinating the cluster research for the international Dark Energy Survey project.

Gianluca Memoli works as research fellow at the University of Sussex. His research is focused on how sound interacts with objects, for entertainment and medical applications like novel human computer interfaces, acoustic levitators and (eventually) drug delivery. He is a passionate science communicator and, in his spare time, the proud father of two boys.

Gianluca will talk about how sound can take different shapes that can be touched. He will demonstrate how to shape ultrasound fields and use them to create 3D displays made of floating objects, how to create invisible objects that you can feel in mid-air (like in the Iron Man films), how to levitate objects against gravity (much like in Star Trek or Star Wars), and how use specially designed blocks (a little like LEGO bricks) to control the direction of sound.

Tickets: £4 Regular Nerds, £3 NUS/65+ Nerds

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