Loughborough Institute of Advanced Studies Podcast

Dr Robert Emmett Alexander (aka Barefoot Bob) - Community Engaged Communication for Reduction of Disaster and Climate Risks Using the Arts

IAS Residential Fellow Dr Robert Emmett Alexander (aka Barefoot Bob) delivers a seminar on their research, fully titled "Community Engaged Communication for Reduction of Disaster and Climate Risks Using the Arts" -
This presentation explores processes of locally appropriate communication of disaster and climate risks and good practices to address them through steps of first external and local knowledge co-creation of messages for context-specific good practices for vulnerability reduction and then contests using locally relevant art types to spread these messages for improved discussion, decision-making and action. Conceptual frameworks first explicate roles of knowledge co-creation communication approaches, components of them for effective community-engaged resilience strengthening that overcomes social and behavioral change communication constraints and rationale for arts contests designed for this purpose. Explanation of methodology development with relevant examples of processes, lessons and sample drawings and song, theater and poem videos from contests in East and Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and the Philippines will provide basis for discussion of opportunities and challenges for implementation locally in different contexts. The seminar will conclude with description of the book being developed on this topic.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias 

Professor Anne Stiles - Marie Corelli, Marie Curie, and the Wonders of Radium

IAS Visiting Fellow Professor Anne Stiles delivers a seminar on their research -
This talk addresses bestselling British novelist Marie Corelli (1855-1924) and her admiration for Nobel prize winner Marie Curie as a paragon of feminine scientific accomplishment. Though Corelli was neither a feminist in the traditional sense nor a scientific materialist, she viewed Curie’s discovery, the element radium, as a substance with near-divine properties that could restore health, life, and spiritual vitality. Corelli’s later novels The Life Everlasting (1911), The Young Diana (1918), and The Secret Power (1921) demonstrate the author’s gradual evolution from an unqualified embrace of radioactivity to a growing awareness of its dangers, including the possibility that it could be weaponized on a large scale. Corelli’s shift from optimism to ambivalence parallels a gradual change in attitudes towards radiation among the British public during these decades. Yet Corelli’s attitude towards Curie remained strongly positive, judging by her portrayal of courageous female scientists in The Young Diana and The Secret Power.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias 

Professor Ama de-Graft Aikins - Creative arts and the psychopolitics of global health in Africa

IAS Guest Speaker Professor Ama de-Graft Aikins (The London School of Economics and Political Science) delivers a seminar on their research -
Arts-based global health interventions in African settings - for HIV/AIDS, malaria, Ebola, COVID-19 - employ conceptual approaches that have been described as ‘instrumental’. Typical projects lead communities (and artists) into ‘participatory’ and ‘co-created’ arts - dance, theatre, drawing - that have already been planned for them. I will argue these dominant global health approaches have roots in colonial medicine and deeply held representations of Africa as ‘a familiar alien threat’. Drawing on Fanon’s idea of the “psychic life of the colonial encounter” - how African psychological realities were conditioned by relations of racialized power and violence - and Ghanaian examples, I show how the “psychic life of the colonial encounter” has morphed into “the psychic life of the contemporary global health encounter”. Developing transformational approaches to global health interventions in African settings, whether mediated by arts or not, require that these psychopolitical dynamics are understood, worked through and transcended.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias 

Dr Nataliia Tofan - Beyond Pharmacotherapy: Lifestyle-Based Strategies for Improving Cardiometabolic Health

Council For At-Risk Academics (CARA) Research Fellow Dr Nataliia Tofan delivers a seminar on their research -
Hypertension and cardiometabolic disease are commonly managed through pharmacological control of clinical targets. However, achieving numerical targets through pharmacotherapy does not always correct underlying molecular abnormalities. My early research in clinical pharmacology examined how blood pressure responses in elderly patients with hypertension and coronary heart disease reflect intermolecular interactions and complex homeostatic shifts. These findings prompted a broader question: how can cardiometabolic health be improved, and adiposity reduced, through modifiable lifestyle factors such as sleep, physical activity and diet?
At Loughborough University, this question has evolved into a research programme investigating how sleep extension affects blood pressure and glucose metabolism, alongside research on the interaction between exercise, appetite regulation, sleep and obesity and its implications for cardiometabolic disease. Together, this work contributes to an evidence-based lifestyle medicine framework aimed at improving cardiometabolic outcomes in addition to or beyond pharmacological management.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias

Mr Sumit Dugar - Failure Café

IAS Residential Fellow Mr Sumit Dugar delivers a seminar on their research -
This format builds on a successful session I had facilitated at the ‘Global Dialogue Platform on Anticipatory Action,’ in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Reading, UN Agencies, and the Red Cross. The seminar will explore how to openly discuss research failures and challenges in evidence uptake within international development programming. Participants will reflect on instances where well-intentioned applied research failed to achieve its intended impact and consider how these experiences can strengthen future research-policy-practice interfaces. The session aims to foster a safe and collaborative environment where scholars and practitioners can share candid reflections on the limitations and lessons of research-led programming.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias 

Dr Ashley Ajumoke Stewart - Archives in Motion: Reimagining Graphic Heritage for Wellbeing and Social Memory

IAS Residential Fellow Dr Ashley Ajumoke Stewart delivers a seminar on their research -
This seminar will explore my ongoing interdisciplinary research on civic graphic heritage from Nigeria, focusing on how visual communication artifacts—such as signage, public information materials, and typographic styles—can be repurposed through design-led inquiry and AI tools to foster community wellbeing and social memory. I will share initial insights from archival fieldwork, prototype concepts, and collaborative methodologies developed with Loughborough's Graphic Design Research Unit and computer science colleagues.  The seminar will invite reflections on the possibilities and ethical dimensions of using AI in cultural heritage research and participatory design.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias 

Dr Amelia Carr PGR Workshop: Opportunities for International Collaboration in Sport Performance Research

IAS Residential Fellow Dr Amelia Carr delivers a workshop for Postgraduate Researchers (PGRs) -
This hybrid event is held jointly by the LU School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences and Deakin University’s School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences and has a primary focus on sport performance research in female athletes. The event is held online to facilitate opportunities for real-time communication between researchers based at LU and Deakin University. PhD students and early to mid-career researchers from both institutes are invited to present short, 3-minute ‘flash talks’ to showcase their research. The seminar also includes an allocation of time for researchers and PhD students to discuss possibilities for collaboration.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias 

Dr Amelia Carr - Women in Sport: Opportunities for International Collaboration and Impact

IAS Residential Fellow Dr Amelia Carr delivers a seminar on their research -
Olympic Games, Paralympic Games, and World Championship events are increasingly held in challenging environmental conditions, particularly hot and humid weather, exacerbating the physiological demands for athletes. These environmental conditions can interact with athletes’ use of evidence-based nutritional interventions. Athletes and their support teams may consider a range of additional factors, including the evidence of differences in adaptations and performance for female compared to male athletes. In this seminar, Dr Amelia Carr from Deakin University will provide an analysis of relevant literature and evaluate the potential translation of research on specific nutritional interventions in challenging environmental conditions, and for females, to high-performance athletes: (1) moderating variables (e.g., supplement dose and timing), (2) design factors (e.g., use of crossover or matched group study design) and (3) athlete-specific factors (e.g., recruitment of highly trained participants). Dr Carr will also share details of Deakin University’s research programme, including the Female Physiology and Performance Initiative.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias 

Professor Yan Yin - Design of Polymer Electrolytes for Green Hydrogen Energy Technologies

IAS Visiting Fellow Professor Yan Yin delivers a seminar on their research -
Hydrogen energy is widely recognized as a key pillar for global carbon neutrality and sustainable energy transition. Polymer electrolytes play an important role in improving performance of ionic membrane-based fuel cells and water electrolyzers, which are key enablers for smooth conversion between green electricity and hydrogen. For both devices, ionic conductivity and stability are crucial for long-time operation with high efficiency. Polymer electrolytes, as either membranes or ionomers, serve as the conducting carriers for ion transportation. Microstructure of polymer electrolytes influences the ionic conductivity, stability and the evolution behavior for the catalyst layers where ionomer acts as binder to fabricate membrane electrode assembly (MEA). In this seminar, oriented ion exchange membranes, quaternary ammonium (QA) based or microporous polyelectrolytes as well as ionomers are introduced to elaborate the microstructure-property relationship under long time fuel cell or water electrolysis operations. MEAs with low precious catalysts and self-made polyelectrolytes for hydrogen devices will be discussed towards high performance. Ultimately, these advances aim to reduce system costs and enhance environmental sustainability, contributing to the global effort for clean energy and a low-carbon economy.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias 

Dr Eilis Lanclus - Outdoor Recreation and Climate Challenges: Human-Environment Relations in Trail Sports

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Eilis Lanclus delivers a seminar on their research -
Trail sports – hiking, running, off-road cycling – are gaining increasingly in popularity in Western contemporary societies. These sports are often celebrated as ways to immerse oneself in “wild(er)” landscapes and to measure personal endurance against nature. But the climate crisis has begun to unsettle this relationship. On trails, climate change is felt not as data but as sensory disruptions: the crackle of dead undergrowth, flood-strewn trails, or snowless winters where snow once marked the season. How can these sensory and lived experiences on trails invite a shift from trail sports as acts of personal conquest or consumption of landscapes to practices grounded in care, attention, and ecological responsibility? This seminar presents my postdoctoral research project which examines the duality between the growing desire of trail sport participants to engage with “wild(er)” landscapes and the ecological pressures these activities put on those landscapes.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias