UCL at Cheltenham 2010

Professor Anne Johnson is the director of UCL’s Division of Population Health and co-director of the UCL Institute for Global Health.

Professor Johnson has worked in research in the epidemiology and prevention of HIV and sexually transmitted infections and other infectious diseases for over 20 years.

She is appearing at Cheltenham today to talk about the treatment and prevention of HIV, and the state of the world’s fight against the virus, as the number of people living with HIV continues to increase.

Dr Andrea Sella, EPSRC Senior Media Fellow at UCL Chemistry, yesterday previewed on BBC Breakfast (footage unavailable) some of his Cheltenham Festival demonstrations, for which he is renowned.

Today, in a New Scientist blog, he questions the value of “bangs and flashes” demos that “leave out the deeper story that underpins the amazing phenomena that we can illustrate through demos.”

He says: “The demos ought to be subservient to the science in much the same way that diagrams support the text rather than the other way around. Coffee table books may look beautiful but they seldom get you through that exam.”

“What we need to do is to become real storytellers, bards of science, singing tales of valour, heroism, and mystery of our subject.”

What do others think? Any ideas about how this can be achieved?

Robert West is professor of health psychology and works at the Health Behaviour Research Centre within UCL Epidemiology and Public Health.

He is taking part in the festival to talk about the choices smokers make, nicotine dependence and effective treatments available on the NHS.

In this podcast he explains how ‘nicotine hunger’ tests the resolve of even the most strong-willed smokers and drives more than 95% back to smoking after each quit attempt.

Dr Lucie Green works at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UCL’s Department of Space and Climate Physics.

She divides her time between research into how the Sun behaves and communicating her work to the public (for which she won an award last year).

Today at Cheltenham she is discussing how scientists monitor the Sun, and its mysterious calm over the past two years which is baffling astronomers.

In this video, Dr Green describes her experience of a total solar eclipse from the Pacific Ocean – and what scientists can learn from such a rare phenomenon.

Professor Steve Bramwell is visiting Cheltenham today to talk about the London Centre of Nanotechnology’s discovery of ‘magnetricity’ – magnetic charges that behave and interact just like electric charges in some materials.

The groundbreaking research could lead to a major reassessment of current theories of magnetism, as well as significant technological advances.

Professor Robert Brown is the director of UCL’s Tissue Repair and Engineering Centre, part of the university’s Institute of Orthopedics and Musculoskeletal Science.

He is also co-ordinator of the London Tissue Engineering Consortium and the British Tissue Engineering Network.

He is visiting the festival today to take part in a panel discussion with other biomedical engineers, whose work is pushing back the boundaries of medical science.

In this video he discusses the centre’s pioneering research on tissue engineering and its potential application in transplant and other surgery.