Loughborough Institute of Advanced Studies Podcast

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

Part of a week of activities for the IAS Research Summit - Rethinking Urban Inequalities.
This opening session lays out our collective provocation for the week: that computational approaches now sit at the centre of how urban inequality is studied and governed, often without interrogating who builds these tools, what they render visible, and who they serve. Following a collective framing exercise on what brings each participant to this work, five global fellows set the scene across two sessions, examining how deprivation indices and frameworks emerge from an economic reasoning that treats inequality as a deficiency to be optimised rather than a structural and political condition. These sessions establish the conceptual space for the rest of the summit.
Featuring IAS Visiting Fellows -
David Jacome Polit, Delft University of Technology Associate Professor Esra Suel, University of Zurich Dr Anastassia Vybornova, IT University of Copenhagen Rico Henri Herzog, HafenCity University Hamburg Dr Caitlin Robinson, University of Bristol
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias
----- Chapters -----
00:00:00 - Intro & Welcome00:11:50 - David Jacome Polit00:36:23 - Esra Suel 01:01:00 - Anastassia Vybornova 01:26:29 - Rico Henri Herzog 01:45:01 - Dr Caitlin Robinson

IAS Guest Speakers Dr Sophia Lin, Associate Professor Sally Nathan & Sam Lloyd delivers a seminar on their research -
Sport-based positive youth development programs are increasingly used worldwide to support the psychosocial wellbeing, engagement, and life skills of young people experiencing social and economic disadvantage. Yet, despite their widespread adoption, significant questions remain about how such programs should be designed, how their impacts should be evaluated, and whose perspectives shape definitions of “success”. This seminar draws on a long‑term research partnership between academics at the University of New South Wales with Creating Chances, a large Australian social enterprise delivering sport‑based youth development programs. The seminar will bring together three complementary areas of work to explore how evidence can be generated in ways that are both methodologically rigorous and practically meaningful.
First, we reflect on the realities of evaluating large‑scale programs in real‑world settings, including the methodological tensions that arise when randomisation, individual tracking, and experimental control are not feasible. Rather than aiming for idealised study designs, we explore how evaluation can still generate credible, decision‑relevant evidence under these conditions.
Secondly, the seminar presents findings from a large evaluation examining how program design features such as duration, attendance, and sustained engagement are associated with psychosocial outcomes.
Finally, we describe a co‑production process in which practitioners and young people were actively involved in shaping what outcomes are measured and how. This work demonstrates how participatory approaches can improve the relevance, acceptability, and usability of evaluation tools, while also addressing power dynamics between researchers, organisations, and participants. Taken together, this seminar argues for a reframing of impact in youth development research, moving beyond narrow outcome metrics toward context‑responsive that supports development and meaningful social change. While grounded in sport‑based youth development, the insights have relevance across education, health, and community‑based intervention research.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias

Fulbright Fellowship Scholar Dr Lucy E. Dunne delivers a seminar on their research -
Electronic textiles and wearable technology offer the ability to dynamically control the space immediately surrounding our bodies: controlling temperature, supporting our physical capabilities, providing therapeutic interventions, collecting and communicating information. This vision has engaged the research and industrial communities intensively for at least the last 25 years, yet some of the most exciting potential has yet to be unlocked. This talk will discuss the nuance of this intricate interrelationship between electronics and human bodies, discussing examples including clothing developed to treat neonatal jaundice and to support physical therapy and rehabilitation, with a focus on the challenge of preserving thermal comfort in cold environments through on-body heating. 
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias 

IAS Residential Fellow Professor Justin A. Haegele delivers a seminar on their research -
Visually impaired youth are often enrolled in integrated educational environments, specifically within physical education (PE), but seldom experience feelings of inclusion (acceptance, belonging, and value) within those spaces. Rather, they often identify experiencing issues with marginalization, discrimination, and ostracization within PE, and that pedagogical practices that are implemented within this educational space are perceived as inappropriate and belittling because they do not take their needs or opinions into consideration. To address these issues, this work-in-progress seminar will share research that aims to explore how visually impaired students experience specific pedagogical strategies and curricular content, and re-imagine PE for blind and visually impaired youth while co-producing resources with visually impaired youth to be disseminated to PE teachers support feelings of acceptance, belonging, and value. This study centralizes disabled people and their voices as critical parts of the research process, and is guided by the conceptual lens of inclusion as intersubjective experiences.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias

IAS Visiting Fellow Dr Robina Begum delivers a seminar on their research -
Crosslinked polymeric particles loaded with metal nanoparticles are called hybrid microgels. These fascinating materials have properties of both organic and inorganic components and have gained significant attention due to their potential applications in catalysis and environmental science. Our group at University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan in collaboration with international researchers from different countries including UK has developed hybrid microgel systems with different compositions/architectures. We have incorporated nanoparticles of different metals into the microgels made of different monomers and co-monomers. We have studied potential of the hybrid systems towards degradation of toxic chemicals and catalytic organic transformations. This talk is an introduction of our work published in recent years.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias 

IAS Residential Fellow Professor Giuseppe Saccomandi delivers a seminar on their research -
We present a critical overview of constitutive modeling in nonlinear elasticity, with particular emphasis on isotropic incompressible materials. Starting from the historical foundations and the seminal contributions of Rivlin, the talk revisits the motivations behind invariant-based strain-energy functions and their experimental interpretation. The widespread proliferation of constitutive models is discussed in relation to several recurring pitfalls, including over-parameterization, identifiability issues, and an excessive reliance on analyticity. Special attention is devoted to Ogden-type models, whose remarkable descriptive capabilities are contrasted with their well-known limitations in predictive reliability. By reconsidering classical experimental data and multiscale arguments, alternative modeling perspectives are outlined, with the aim of clarifying the principles that should guide constitutive choices in nonlinear elasticity and their applications to soft materials, biomechanics, and wave propagation issues.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias 

Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) is an international scientific programme co-sponsored by the International Science Council (ISC) and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR). IRDR International Centres of Excellence (ICoEs) are established to make direct contributions to IRDR’s mission in advancing research and capacity building, supporting the implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals. The International Centre of Excellence in Informatics and Disaster Resilience (ICEIDR) is one of the most recently approved IRDR ICoEs. It brings together six world-leading institutions — Loughborough University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Delft University of Technology, Kyoto University, RWTH Aachen University, and Zhengzhou University — to address pressing global challenges in disaster risk reduction through advanced smart informatics approaches. This event will mark the official launch of ICEIDR. It will be followed by presentations from the six partner institutions and discussion to shape the future direction of ICEIDR, including its role in advancing informatics for disaster risk reduction, building global capacity, and influencing international research agendas and policy.