Alejandro De Coss-Corzo
Alejandro is a Lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath. He is a qualitative researcher, interested in the possibilities of ethnography in telling stories that enable us to better understand the worlds we inhabit. At the moment, he is studying questions of urban techno-politics in Mexico City, and is looking to continue researching the relations between technology, work, urban life and social change in other geographies.
Anca Salagean
Anca Salagean is a PhD student; her main research interests are at the intersection between psychology and computer science. She is part of the CREATE lab and the CAMERA studio at the University of Bath, where she investigates the factors that modulate the sense of embodiment in relation to virtual avatars and the behavioural, attitudinal and cognitive effects of this phenomenon. Ethical considerations around embodiment and immersive technologies are another focus of her work.
Georgina Brown
Georgina works at the University of Bath as the Head of Equality, Diversion and Inclusion. Her role involves networking with all walks of life and thinking of creative ways to encourage inclusivity into student communities.
Johann Rymill
Johann Rymill is a recent graduate and an entrepreneur who has been through his share of ups and downs in the business world.
Kajal Sanghrajka
Kajal is a passionate advocate of building entrepreneurial skills for university students, co-founding Columbia University’s first incubator for graduate entrepreneurs and this year, designed and launched the London School of Economics first accelerator for impact driven start-ups. She launched her first business in New York while studying for her masters and through her successes and failures in multiple ventures, she won the Churchill Fellowship in 2017 to progress her work and travelled to 25 cities interviewing over 100 founders on the topic.
Over the past 7 years she has worked as a mentor and advisor, working with businesses on growth, fundraising and managing mental health through the ups and downs of entrepreneurial life. She also writes about her experiences on entrepreneurship in the monthly newsletter The Transatlantic Post.
Kajal is a current mentor for Techstars and advisor to many institutions including a Board Advisor for LSE Generate Entrepreneurship and a Research Advisor for The Entrepreneurs Network. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and holds degrees from the London School of Economics and Columbia Business School.
Olga Isupova
Dr Olga Isupova focuses on developing ways to use machine learning and AI to improve the world we live in. Her main research interests include machine learning for disaster response and environment protection and anomaly detection.
Dr. Isupova has received the Specialist (eq. to M.Sc.) degree in applied mathematics and computer science in 2012 from Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia, and the PhD degree in 2017 from the University of Sheffield, U.K.
She started as a Research Assistant in the machine learning field in the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, before joining the Computer Science Department at the University of Bath as a lecturer.
Pete Walker
Dr. Walker is a chartered civil engineer and a member of both the Institution of Engineers Australia and The Institution of Civil Engineers (UK). His current research interests include bio-based construction materials, materials for improved indoor air quality, structural masonry and innovative timber engineering.
He is currently Editor of the ICE Construction Materials journal and editorial panel member for Building Research & Information journal.
Rachel Forrester-Jones
Dr Rachel Forrester-Jones is a Professor of Social Policy and Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Policy. She has published widely on the topic of social networks and social inclusion and provides consultancy to local authorities, charities and NGOs in the UK and to governments internationally. She has also previously done some stand-up comedy!
Research exploring the lives of people with Tourette's syndrome has shown how jokes about Tourette's are viewed by many participants as simply reiterating stereotypes.
In this talk, she discusses how working with comedians who themselves have Tourette’s provides a richer understanding of the condition. This research was reported recently in the UK The Guardian & Observer
Samuel Johnson
Dr. Samuel Johnson conducts research in cognitive science, focusing on heuristics and strategies that people intuitively use to evaluate hypotheses. He finds that these same principles guide very different psychological processes, including causal reasoning, categorisation, and visual perception; that they are used by young children; and that they feed into complex social processes, such as mentalising, stereotyping, and moral judgment. For this research, he was was awarded the 2017 Robert Glushko Dissertation Prize from the Cognitive Science Society.