Sugars, Immunity, and Activity

When the Lionesses lifted the trophy at Euro 2022, they didn’t just win a tournament—they changed the conversation around women’s football in England. Record-breaking crowds and increased media coverage suggested a turning point. But what happens after the final whistle? In this talk, we explore what really brings fans through the turnstiles of the FA Women’s Super League.

How does the body turn signals into pain or pleasure? In this talk, we explore how the brain interprets touch, injury, and reward — and why similar signals can create very different feelings. A quick, accessible journey into the science behind our most fundamental human experiences.

Our cells are all covered in sugar molecules, forming an important network which helps them interact with the world around them. Sometimes, non-human sugars from the food we eat and the bacteria we’re exposed to can become a part of this network, acting like tiny Trojan horses which affect how our cells behave. In this talk, I will explore how these sweet impostors get smuggled into our cells, what our immune system can do about them, and- most importantly- how we can use them to our advantage to help fight disease.

In my talk I will be providing an interactive demonstration on what chemical probes are and why they're so important in science, especially for Chemists! I will do this by relating my PhD; to chemically build probes, that help me catch proteins/enzymes that I want to study, to similarities in techniques people use to fish. I will specifically talk about these probes as they are related to sugars that impact health and wellbeing through chronic diseases such as Muscular Dystrophy.