Theme: The Future is Now

"The Future is Now" aims to explore how we as human beings shape our presence and how it determines our future. The Age of Information has both its benefits and risks for society. Technology develops at an unprecedented pace, enabling humanity to reach unthinkable horizons. On the other end of the spectrum, however, people become more distant from each other, building high walls between themselves.

The speakers that TEDxLancasterU gathers come from a wide range of disciplines. They are fascinating thinkers, creators, and doers.

Nuffield Theatre
Lancaster University, Great Hall Complex, N Spine
Lancaster, Lancashire, LA14YW
United Kingdom

Ben Schogler

CEO of Skoogmusic

Dr Ben Skoogmusic PhD is co-founder and CEO of Skoogmusic. He started the company in 2009 with Dr David Skulina, following an educational research project at the University of Edinburgh that aimed to address the fact that there were no musical instruments designed for children with physical or learning disabilities. This led to their first invention – the Skoog, a ground-breaking, tactile musical cube that anyone can play. A successful first funding round in 2010 allowed the company to begin manufacturing Skoog at the company’s workshop in Leith, and in 2013, Skoog 1.0 launched online with the Apple store across the EU. Today Skoog has developed from an education and disability-led innovation into ‘the musical instrument that anyone can play’, with the potential to unlock the fun of making music for all children and families.

David Ellis

Psychology Academic

David Ellis holds a 50th Anniversary Lectureship in Psychology at Lancaster University and an Honorary Research Fellowship at The University of Lincoln. Much of his work considers how recent methodological developments in technology and data collection (often referred to as digital traces) can reveal information about individuals and their behaviour. He has published on these topics in The Lancet Public Health, the International Journal of Neural Systems, Computers in Human Behavior, Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking and other journals.

Joanne Roxburgh

VP Academic Services

Joanne is passionate about learning and education. Currently VP Academic Services for a higher education company, a part-time PhD candidate, MOOC addict, and voracious reader, she is a former teacher with over twenty years’ experience in online education. Her work and study have provided her with up-close and personal, first-hand experience of the opportunities and challenges faced by life-long learners. In the last two months alone, she has boarded trains and planes to travel to face-to-face training sessions on two different continents, used smart phones and computers to access online courses, both synchronously and asynchronously, interacted with an instructional chatbot, and donned “goggles ‘n’ gloves” to attend classes in Social VR. With a strong allegiance to “whatever works” in education, she is confident that all of these modes of learning will continue to have important roles to play in the future of education

Kevin Turner

Artistic Director at Company Chameleon

Kevin studied formally at The Northern School of Contemporary Dance where he gained his first class degree. His professional engagements include working with Rambert Dance Company, Scottish Dance Theatre, Phoenix Dance Theatre, CassaniDance, Rubberbanddancegroup (Canada), Henri Oguike Dance Company, Company Decalage, Mad Dogs Dance Theatre and Roda. In the summer of 2007 Kevin was awarded the prestigious Danceweb Scholarship under the framework of ImPulsTanz, Vienna. Turner has worked in collaboration with Gansango in Seattle USA, Crossfade in Budapest, Hungary and Navala Chaudhuri in London. He has taught in most major British contemporary dance institutions, as well as Canada, The USA, Spain, Hungary and the Caribbean.

Salom Lloyd

Founder of Naturally Tribal Skincare Ltd

A Global Leader in the Pharmaceutical Industry and proud Founder of Naturally Tribal Skincare Ltd, Shalom Lloyd holds a BSc and MSc Pharm from the Ukrainian Academy of Pharmacy and an MBA from the University of Liverpool. With a keen interest and passion for people, business and trade in emerging markets with a special interest in Africa, Shalom is an active mentor, supporting women to connect and find their voice through networking, developing relationships and championing trade. Leadership to her means combining the ‘what’ with the ‘how’ and the ‘who’ - looking at opportunities that present themselves, putting and connecting with the right people and doing this courageously, continuously challenging the status quo, with integrity, passion and fairness. A proud CommonwealthFirst Export Champion, Precious Award 2017 Outstanding Woman in STEM, Finalist 'Female Entrepreneur' Women Leaders MK Awards 2017 and Women4Africa Awards 2018 finalist.

Saskia Vermeylen

Critical Legal Scholar

Dr Saskia Vermeylen is a critical legal scholar working in the area of property theory and resource frontiers. She joined Strathclyde University’s Law School in July 2016 as a Chancellor’s Fellow. She studies indigenous peoples’ cultural expressions as a source of law and is currently finishing a monograph on critical property theory drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. As part of her interest in property theory she’s also embarking on a new research project on the legal and ethical meaning of ‘common heritage of mankind’, a concept that is currently much debated in the context of outer space mining. She has just been awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to study the relationship between Utopian Literatures and Space Law.

Simon Clark

Science Communicator

Simon Clark is a recovering academic, having recently completed his PhD in atmospheric physics at the University of Exeter. Prior to this he attended the University of Oxford, being the first member of his family to attend university. As a result of this unusual academic background, he established the YouTube channel SimonOxfPhys to help students from similar backgrounds apply to prestigious universities. The channel has since accrued more than 120,000 subscribers and received over 9 million lifetime views. Since finishing his PhD, making video blogs about the experience every step of the way, he has become a full-time science communicator across multiple platforms. He has a keen interest in the interplay of online video and society, and the changing way in which we interact with the media we consume.

Sylvia Walby OBE

Distinguished Professor of Sociology, UNESCO Chair of Gender Research, and Director of the Violence and Society UNESCO Centre at Lancaster University

Sylvia Walby OBE is Distinguished Professor of Sociology, UNESCO Chair of Gender Research, and Director of the Violence and Society UNESCO Centre at Lancaster University. She is the recipient of the Anneliese Maier Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation, 2018-2023. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, UK; and Chairs the Sociology Sub-Panel for HEFCE REF 2021. She was the founding President of the European Sociological Association. She has published on theories of society in Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities (Sage 2009) and Crisis (Polity 2015). Other work concerns gender relations, such as The Future of Feminism (Polity 2011), and violence, including, with colleagues, The Concept and Measurement of Violence against Women and Men (Policy Press, 2017)

Velislava Petrova

Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre

Dr Petrova is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her research is based at the biggest genomics centre in Europe – The Wellcome Sanger Institute - where she studies the role of genetics in the immune responses during infection and inflammation. She was born in Bulgaria, but moved to the UK to complete a bachelor degree in Virology and Immunology at the University of Bristol. Her academic journey continued with a PhD at the University of Cambridge where she developed tools to study how our body develops defences against viruses. She is actively involved in a range initiatives aimed to mentor and nurture young talent. She is passionate about science communication and raising awareness about the importance of vaccination and the use of novel genomics approaches for personalised medicine.