Digitisation without disruption

About this lecture

Some items in museum and archive collections are inaccessible due to damage or deterioration or are otherwise closed to the reader because they have never been opened. In all of these cases it is possible to make massive interventions to reveal the hidden insides, but only by causing permanent disruption of the structure of the object. In this talk David Mills will show how he and collaborators are working towards digitisation without disruption using new imaging methods and computer science techniques.

Virtual event details

This virtual lecture will consist of a 45 minute presentation from David Mills, followed by a 15 minute Q&A chaired by Dr Josep Grau-Bove.

About the speaker

David graduated in 1999 with a BSc in Physics and then went on to develop detector control hardware for the ATLAS detector at CERN, before returning to QMUL to gain a PhD. As part of the PhD he discovered the phenomena of Solidification Driven Extrusion.

He joined the Dental Institute in 2009 to work on designing and building a new microtomography scanner to image sealed parchment rolls and other heritage artefacts.  As part of his interest in heritage science, David sits on the Heritage Science Committee of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

David is also interested in mineralised tissues, specifically comparative anatomy and development of mammalian and reptilian teeth.

David is currently the XMT facilities manager in the Dental Institute.