UCL Minds

This week we’re looking at Twitter, the Online Safety Bill, and the limits of free speech. Is it a good thing that Twitter is promoting free speech - or would more regulation be better? How much of a problem is disinformation for society and democracy? Might there even be a moral duty for social media platforms – or the state – to tackle disinformation and otherwise harmful speech? EPISODE NOTES T...

This week we have a special episode looking at democracy in the UK today, not with one of our academic colleagues, but with the leader of a UK political party. EPISODE NOTES Regular listeners know that normally on this podcast we have conversations with our academic colleagues here at UCL. But this week we’re doing something a little bit different. In the first of what we hope will be an occasiona...

Mehiyar Kathem talks to Mabast Amin, lecturer at the History department, University of Garmian, Iraq about his research which focuses on the early prehistoric sites in Iraqi Kurdistan. Mabast completed a Nahrein Network - British Institute Visiting Scholarship at University of Liverpool. For more information and to access the transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/nahrein/media/podcasts/transcript-conversation...

Mehiyar Kathem talks to Dr Hamed Samir, Head of Architecture at the University of Basrah about safeguarding and reviving the local identity of Basrah. Dr Hamed completed a Nahrein Network - British Institute Visiting Scholarship at University of Loughborough. For more information and to access the transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/nahrein/media/podcasts/transcript-conversation-hamed-samir Date of episode...

Join hosts Doctor Xand van Tulleken and Dr Rochelle Burgess for Season 3, Episode 4 of Public Health Disrupted with Prof Joyce Harper and Rachel Lankester. “We’re more valuable to our communities post-menopause as leaders than as breeders.” How does our society value menopausal women? The lack of public awareness around this natural phase in a women’s life has resulted in the menopause being assoc...

Date of Lecture: Thursday 18 May 2023 About the lecture: This lecture will describe recent research that exposed the fact that there is no convincing evidence to support the claim that depression is caused by low serotonin. It will describe the author’s previous work which challenges the general idea that the drugs prescribed for mental health problems work by targeting an underlying biological ab...

Date of Lecture: Thursday 11 May 2023 About the Lecture: Complaints at the high cost of ‘childcare’ keep coming - but high cost is just one symptom of a dysfunctional early childhood system in England, spanning services and parenting leave, a system that fails children, parents and society. Successive governments tweak and fiddle, avoiding the hard work of analysing and fixing systemic faults. Bas...

Date of lecture: Tuesday 2 May 2023 About the lecture: Anxiety can be physically, emotionally and socially debilitating. Left untreated, anxiety is associated with other serious illnesses and self-harm. This lecture summarises the recent increase in anxiety recorded in primary care, compares available drug treatments, and examines the treatments used for anxiety in UK primary care. We will also di...

Date of Lecture: Thursday 8 June 2023 About the Lecture: The UK is experiencing its biggest wave of industrial action in over a decade following a long period of wage stagnation for many, particularly in the public sector. At the same time union membership has been in decline for four decades, raising questions about the future of trade unions. Just how relevant are they in the modern workplace? W...

Date of Lecture: Tuesday 23 May 2023 About the Lecture: Taking action to reduce health inequalities is a matter of social justice. In developing strategies for tackling health inequalities we need to confront the social gradient in health not just the difference between the worst off and everybody else. There is clear evidence when we look across countries that national policies make a difference...

Date of Lecture: Thursday 15 June 2023 About the Lecture: Several neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric circuit disorders are characterized by intermittent episodes of pathological activity. Although genetic therapies offer the ability to modulate neuronal excitability, a limiting factor is that they do not discriminate between neurons involved in circuit pathologies and ‘healthy’ surrounding/in...

Hear Health and the Public Impact Fellow Sharon Cox describe how her research into smoking cessation for people experiencing homelessness is informing more joined up working between clinicians, service users and researchers. For more information and to access the transcript: Date of episode recording: 2023-05-25T00:00:00Z Duration: 00:11:55 Language of episode: English Presenter: Rosie Anderson Gu...

Hear Health and the Public Impact Fellow Rana Conway talk about how she has influenced campaigning and policy on baby food labelling and ultraprocessed baby foods in partnership with the Food Foundation. For more information and to access the transcript: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/culture/sites/culture/files/rana_fellowship_int_final.pdf Date of episode recording: 2023-05-22 Duration: 00:10:53 Language...

Hear Health and the Public Impact Fellow Lion Shahab describe how he is building networks of clinicians, service users, researchers and funders to make sure smoking cessation services benefit from the latest high-quality research. For more information and to access the transcript: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/culture/sites/culture/files/lion_fellowship_int_final.pdf Date of episode recording: 2023-05-18...

Health and the Public Impact Fellow Libby Sallnow describes how her research into death and grieving systems is helping communities worldwide map how they support people at the end of life and their loved ones. For more information and to access the transcript: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/culture/sites/culture/files/libby_fellowship_int_final.pdf Date of episode recording: 2023-06-12 Duration: 00:14:26...

Hear Health and the Public Impact Fellow Jo Blodgett talk about her project co-creating personalised exercise tools with older people. For more information and to access the transcript: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/culture/sites/culture/files/jo_fellowship_int_final.pdf Date of episode recording: 2023-06-12 Duration: 00:15:22 Language of episode: English Presenter:Rosie Anderson Guests: Jo Blodgett Produ...

Hear Health and the Public Impact Fellow Emma Beard talk about how she is applying her research findings to the challenge of presenting health statistics in ways that help the public better understand risk and certainty. For more information and to access the transcript: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/culture/sites/culture/files/emma_fellowship_int_final.pdf Date of episode recording: 2023-06-05 Duration:...

Health and the Public Impact Fellow Baowen Xue explains how she has worked with the Carers Trust to turn her research findings into materials to support young carers making the transition to higher education. For more information and to access the transcript: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/culture/sites/culture/files/baowen_fellows_interview_final.pdf Date of episode recording: 2023-05-16 Duration: 00:11:0...

Health and the Public Fellow Annemarie Lodder describes her project helping research funders provide better outcomes for patients by recruiting more diverse participants in clinical trials. For more information and to access the transcript: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/culture/sites/culture/files/annemarie_fellowship_int_final.pdf Date of episode recording: 2023-05-18 Duration: 00:13:06 Language of episo...

This week we’re looking at the impact of war on rates of infant mortality. How big is it? And can it be mitigated? It seems obvious that war harms civilian populations, not least children. But research can reveal much more about the nature and scale of those harms and perhaps also about what can be done about them. This week we’re focusing on a new study of the impact of war upon rates of infant m...

Mehiyar Kathem interviews Dr Mustafa Doğan of Batman University. Doğan completed a Nahrein Network - British Institute Visiting Scholarship at Reading University. The podcast covers Doğan's research in the UK and his plans to establish an eco-museum in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. For more information and to access the transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/nahrein/media/podcasts/transcript-conv...

This week we’re looking at a new way of thinking about the role of the state in our society: the idea of the ‘precautionary state’. What is it? What are its implications? And is it a good thing? At a time of breakdown in our public health service, unaffordable childcare bills, and a cost of living crisis, questions over how our society should be governed, and what the state should provide, are pre...

In this interview from the Department of Statistical Science at UCL, we speak with Sam Tickle who is a Data Science Research Fellow at the Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research, based at the University of Bristol. We discuss Sam’s research in changepoint detection, his new method called OMEN and the study of the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) that inspired it, and some milestones of his c...

We discuss the aftermath of the Turkey/Syria Earthquakes and the politics of global precarities in catastrophes with Dr. Aslı Zengin, Dr. Omar Al-Gazzi and Dr. Sumrin Kalia. We talk about what has been done, and what should be done in response to catastrophic events such as the earthquakes that occurred in Turkey and Syria on February 6th, 2023. To support the earthquake relief efforts in Turkey,...

On this episode, we are hosting three figures, Nazan Üstündağ; Özlem Göner and Sardar Saadi, about four Kurdish regions and the rising violence in them. Please join us to understand the current issues in the regions. For more information and to access the transcript: Date of episode recording: 2022-12-16 Duration: 56:10 Language of episode: English Presenter:Dr. Sertaç Sehlikoğlu Guests: Nazan Üst...