Loughborough Institute of Advanced Studies Podcast

Join the Cool Down - Sport for Climate Action Network and the Climate and Environment Community at Loughborough University’s Institute of Advanced Studies for an afternoon putting sport under the lens of the climate crisis - how is sport at threat, how does it make the problem worse, how can it make things better?
Panel: ‘Can sport stop promoting pollution?’ with speakers including Etienne Stott (Olympic Gold Medalist and co-founder of Champions for Earth), Katie Cross (CEO and founder of Pledgeball), Theo Frixou (Doctoral Researcher on fossil fuel sponsorship in sport), Anna Jonsson (Save Our Snow and co-director New Weather Sweden), Matt Rendell (Cycling author and broadcaster), Björn Sandström (former Swedish professional cross country and sustainability consultant to elite winter sports events), Niall Couper (Football Action Network), Andrew Simms (Director of New Weather Institute and founder of the Cold Down Network and Badvertising campaign.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias
 

IAS Residential Fellow Wangui Maina delivers a seminar on their research -
This seminar presents findings from an interdisciplinary investigation into how peer-led mental health interventions function as sites of discursive norm change among university students in Kenya. Drawing on discourse analysis of structured group sessions facilitated by trained student champions across 33 public universities, it examines how participants co-construct, and actively contest, the social meanings of distress, help-seeking, and wellbeing. Central to the analysis is the role of Ubuntu philosophy as a communicative resource: how a collective wellbeing framework operates not merely as cultural backdrop but as a practical discursive tool for displacing stigmatising, individualising mental health language. The seminar will share early analytical findings, invite critical dialogue on methodology, and explore implications for global mental health communication and peer intervention design.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias
 

IAS Visiting Fellow Assistant Professor Amit Kumar Singh delivers a seminar on their research, fully titled "Additively Manufactured Antennas and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Adaptive Next-Generation Wireless Networks" -
Additive manufacturing and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) are emerging as enabling technologies for highly adaptive, lightweight, and multifunctional wireless systems. This talk will present recent advances in additively manufactured antennas, metasurfaces, and RIS technologies for next-generation wireless networks, with emphasis on millimetre-wave, sub-THz, and 6G applications. The discussion will cover novel 3D-printed and hybrid-material antenna architectures, phase-engineered metasurfaces, beam steering, polarization control, and dynamically reconfigurable electromagnetic environments. Particular attention will be given to the integration of RIS with intelligent control, sensing, and communication platforms to overcome propagation limitations and enhance coverage, capacity, and connectivity. The talk will also highlight practical fabrication approaches, experimental demonstrations, and future opportunities for AI-enabled, conformal, low-cost, and scalable electromagnetic systems for terrestrial, aerial, satellite, and integrated sensing-and-communication applications.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias
 

IAS Residential Fellow Dr Alice Ojwang delivers a workshop for Postgraduate Researchers (PGRs) -#
This interactive workshop equips postgraduate researchers with practical skills to design interdisciplinary lifestyle medicine research and translate findings into real-world interventions. Using the Diabesity Total Lifestyle Change (DTLC) program as a case study, the session covers intervention design, behaviour change strategies, success stories, lessons learned, and implementation challenges specific to low-resource settings. Participants will work in small groups to adapt one behaviour change technique from the DTLC program to a hypothetical low-resource context of their choice, using a provided template. By the end of the session, each group will produce a one-page implementation logic model — a tangible output they can apply to their own research.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias

A discussion panel featuring IAS Fellows Dr Marcelitte Failla and Associate Professor Margaretha Haughwout on witchcraft and magic as practice, epistemology, ontology for anthropocentric, colonialist, and capitalist outcasts. Questions raised at the panel will inform the call for papers in a special issue journal and create potential new relationships/collaborations with staff across campuses.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias
 

Featuring IAS Visiting Fellows from across two overlapping IAS Research Spotlights, Queer Ecology and The Supernatural (Callum Angus & Professor Catriona Sandilands) and Witchcraft as more-than-human Ontology and Decolonial Practice (Dr Marcelitte Failla & Associate Professor Margaretha Haughwout).
Fellows from both Queer Ecology and Witchcraft will meet in International house and be joined by organisers and invited academics working in the connected fields and identified above for a longer discussion and debate of how the two spheres interconnect to produce creative dialogue into the ongoing importance of ecology and the more than human, and the points at which ongoing engagements with the supernatural and folkloric and contemporary witch and shamanic practices can continue making these ideas pertinent in our climate crisis and ecological fall out.
A key question pertinent to all fellows is the ongoing role of creativity, arts and humanities in times of crisis?
The event will be primarily aimed at a specific group of academics but the workshop will be open for anyone to attend online, and there will be a limited number of in-person spaces. The focus of the event will be to workshop and map ideas around the two showcases and discover how they might feed into each other. We will have visual documents, photographs and drawing and mapping, utilising spell making as method, that will be compiled into a map of the day which will be available to be published in the IAS website. The event will set the foundation for legacy building into these themes and will establish Loughborough and the IAS as a key home for these debates.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias
 

IAS Residential Fellow Dr Alice Ojwang delivers a seminar on their research, fully titled "Carbo AI: An Artificial Intelligence-Based Photographic Application to Support Dietary and Lifestyle Education for the Management of Type 2 Diabetes" -
Type 2 diabetes is a rapidly growing global health challenge, with dietary management central to its prevention and control. However, estimating the carbohydrate content of meals remains difficult, particularly for locally consumed foods. Carbo AI is an artificial intelligence-powered mobile application that uses photographic image recognition, computer vision, and machine learning to identify foods, estimate portion sizes, calculate carbohydrate content, and provide instant dietary guidance. The project was led by the Human Nutrition and Dietetics Team in the Department of Health and Biomedical Sciences, Technical University of Kenya, in collaboration with experts in computer science, medical physics, and software engineering. Development was supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure and KENET's High-Performance Computing (HPC) platform. Carbo AI aims to improve carbohydrate literacy, strengthen diabetes self-management, enhance nutrition counselling, and demonstrate the potential of interdisciplinary AI-driven innovations to improve health outcomes.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias
 

IAS Guest Speaker Professor Sergei Gepshtein delivers a seminar on their research -
A community of scientists and architects has been forming for years around the hope that the sciences of perception, cognition, and behavior could deepen architecture’s understanding of people. A significant literature emerged in support of this expectation. But the work remains marginal to both professions. One reason is that science and architecture hold incompatible abstractions of the person. For experimental science, the person is an observer isolated from surroundings and purpose; for architecture, a figure supplied by theory rather than study. With neither abstraction given priority, I describe a way forward in three parts. First, a new basis of inquiry is emerging, different from the assumptions of either field. Second, this basis brings into view questions that science could have asked long ago but did not, for want of occasion. Third, a new model of education must prepare people to work from this basis and pursue these questions.
Dr. Sergei Gepshtein is a scientist and professor whose work spans perceptual psychology, systems neuroscience, and computational neuroscience, with particular emphasis on depth and motion perception, perceptual organization, and the dynamics of biological networks. He is President of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, a professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California San Diego, a founding member of the World Building Institute, and founding director of the Center for Spatial Perception & Concrete Experience at the University of Southern California. His work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Kavli Institute, the Swartz Foundation, and Japan’s National Institutes of Natural Sciences. He is developing interdisciplinary curricula that combine the mechanistic accounts developed in science with the experiential and humanistic perspectives central to design.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias
 

Part of a week of activities for the IAS Research Summit - Rethinking Urban Inequalities.
The morning will open with short showcases of two open-data initiatives — Colouring Cities (our local Loughborough chapter) and Urban Futures Collective (a global and international public-sector initiative) — presenting alternative models for building shared, participatory urban modelling infrastructure. This will lead into an expert panel, "Whose Data, Whose Future? Civic Mapping and the Ethics of AI in Climate Breakdown. The panel probes will probe the epistemological differences between these approaches — what counts as acceptable knowledge, who has authority to produce it, how it is validated — and what happens when both are entangled with AI. The session will close with a critical reflection on building open-source research ecosystems, working toward a summit's manifesto the next day.
Featuring IAS Visiting Fellows -
Dr Polly Hudson, University of CambridgeRico Henri Herzog, HafenCity University Hamburg Dr Anastassia Vybornova, IT University of Copenhagen
And for the panel discussion, chaired by Dr Monia Del Pinto -
Associate Professor Esra Suel, University of Zurich David Jacome Polit, Delft University of Technology Dr Caitlin Robinson, University of Bristol Dr Polly Hudson, University of Cambridge Professor Ksenia Chmutina, Loughborough University Professor Valerie Pinfield, Loughborough University
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias
----- Chapters ----- 00:00:00 - Intro & Welcome 00:03:24 - Dr Polly Hudson 00:21:58 - Rico Henri Herzog & Anastassia Vybornova 00:34:49 - Panel Discussion

Part of a week of activities for the IAS Research Summit - Rethinking Urban Inequalities.
This session will question what "global" means in the study and governance of urban inequality. Juliana Gonçalves will explore how space, knowledge, and technology intersect in shaping collective imaginaries. Jessica Espey will address the building of global observatories and the politics of comparability across contexts. A panel of speakers, including Dr Amalia Sabiescu, Dr Anze Zadel, Dr Viktor Bedo, will follow, each exploring creative, participatory and design methodologies for researching and intervening in public spaces and social infrastructures.
Featuring IAS Visiting Fellows - 
Dr Juliana Gonçalves, TU Delft Associate Professor Jessica Espey, University of Southampton
And Loughborough London colleagues - Dr Amalia Sabiescu, Dr Viktor Bedo, Dr Anze Zadel
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias
----- Chapters ----- 00:00:00 - Intro & Welcome 00:09:25 - Juliana Gonçalves 00:26:44 - Jessica Espey 00:47:56 - Amalia Sabiescu 00:57:06 - Viktor Bedo 00:05:48 - Anze Zadel 01:17:50 - Q&A