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Science Week 2024

Science Week 2024 covered lectures on subjects such as exploring the Moon, creating an effective data culture within an organisation and how neuroscience, psychology and philosophy can shed light on people's experiences of unseen presences.

The programme also included the annual Rosalind Franklin Lecture, the Andrew and Kathleen Booth Memorial Lecture and the Gender and Sexuality Annual Lecture (BiGS).

May 29 2024

  • Rosalind Franklin Lecture: Back to the Moon: How and why we explore our closest planetary neighbour. 
  • Speaker: Professor Katherine Joy. Professor Joy is based at the University of Manchester, UK, has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Birkbeck, and is an internationally recognised expert in Lunar and Planetary Science. Among other prestigious appointments, she worked at NASA's Johnson Space Center, USA, funded by the NASA Lunar Science Institute, and led the first UK team to recover meteorite samples from Antarctica in collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey. She has appeared on the BBC Radio 4 series 'The Life Scientific' and regularly participates in science and cultural exchange activities.
  • The annual Rosalind Franklin Lecture celebrates the life and work of one of Birkbeck's most distinguished and inspirational scientists, Rosalind Franklin, biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer. We invite a leading woman scientist to present her work to the Birkbeck community and the wider public.

May 30 2024

  • Andrew and Kathleen Booth Memorial Lecture: Data Literacy for All: Creating a data culture within an organisation.
  • Speaker: Chris Webb. Modern organisations – business, charities, governments – are awash with data and it seems obvious to state that they should be making decisions based on that data, not on gut feeling. That's still not always true today though. Hiring or training data scientists is only a partial solution; everyone in an organisation needs to be data literate to some degree. But what does "data literacy" actually mean and how can organisations make the technical and cultural changes necessary to achieve it? In this talk Chris Webb, a Birkbeck alumnus who currently works at Microsoft and has spent the last 25 years working in data and analytics, will present a personal view of this topic. He blogs about MS technology and related topics.
  • The Andrew and Kathleen Booth Memorial Lecture is delivered annually by world-renowned scholars and practitioners of computer science to commemorate the pioneering work of Professor Andrew Booth and Kathleen Booth (née Britten) at Birkbeck.

May 31 2024

  • Presence: The strange science and true stories of the unseen other.
  • Speaker: Dr Ben Alderson-Day. Talk of presences that we cannot see or hear may conjure thoughts of ghost stories, spirits, or mystical revelations. But feelings of presence are also a matter of science, and are providing new ways of thinking about schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, and dementia. Join us for an evening of conversation where we will explore the uncanny truth behind felt presence of all kinds. Far from being just phantoms, they hold the key to a deeper understanding of mind, brain, and body. Dr Ben Alderson-Day is an associate Professor of Psychology at Durham University and scientific chair of the International Consortium on Hallucinations Research. An expert in atypical cognition and mental health, his work spans cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, and child development. His book Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other won a British Psychological Society Book Award for Popular Science in 2023.

June 3 2024

  • Gender and Sexuality Annual Lecture (BiGS): Intersectionality Matters: The centrality of social positioning to understanding everyday life and social relations.
  • Speaker: Professor Ann Phoenix, Professor of Psychosocial Studies (IOE - Social Research Institute, UCL).