Watts on your mind?

Hydrogen fuel obtained from splitting water using sunlight can shape the world's energy landscape, providing green fuel for transport, heating, and electricity. In this talk, we discuss the recent advancements, opportunities, and challenges associated with hydrogen production, storage, distribution, and utilization on a large scale, and what it would require for the hydrogen economy to take off.

What’s it like to have your life stopped in its tracks? To go from being a busy, outdoor person, to someone who can hardly take a step or even read? This was Laura’s experience and in this talk she will tell the story of her struggle to regain her mental and physical health and return to work. Anca, Laura’s colleague, (who did Laura’s job for the year or so that Laura was off work!), will then look at current treatments for this overlooked illness.

Dr. Anca Covaci joined the Foundation Year Life Sciences Team at Keele University in 2021. She is an entomologist (looks at bugs) by training and has studied extensively in Romania, but now at Keele enjoys teaching and sharing her love of learning with our wide range of students.

Dr. Laura Hibberts has taught Foundation Year Life Sciences at Keele University since 2016, and as a result of her training in Microbiology, prefers studying diseases rather than having them herself. She has had a number of roles in education and health, including cleaning up in operating theatres, but the toughest job of all was being a parent.

Although drug treatments for brain and mental health disorders are widespread and well known, not all patients respond well to them. In these cases, researchers and doctors are seeking other ways to modify brain activity. Electrical and magnetic brain stimulation are emerging as effective alternative treatment options for Parkinsons's disease, major depression, stroke, and more. This talk will introduce how these brain stimulation techniques work and give an overview of how they are being used in treatment and in facilitating better understanding of the brain.

Joe grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the US and has had a long-standing interest in cognition, brains, and science more generally. After spending his PhD years in Northern California working on visual attention and how this affected in patients with brain injury, he made the jump across the pond to join the UK's thriving cognitive neuroscience research community. Since then, his work has included behavioural studies on visual perception (e.g., including visual illusions like #TheDress), measurement of brain signals using electroencephalography (EEG), and some magnetic and electrical brain stimulation techniques.

My philosophy of life? Have a good time all the time. In this session I will show you how to harness the power of psychological flow to make all aspects of your life more engaging, more enjoyable and more meaningful. What is flow? It is being “in the zone” or “on a roll”. Flow happens when you are doing an activity that presents a “just-right” challenge – neither too easy (boring!) nor too hard (stressy!). Common activities linked to flow include driving, sports, music, studying and working. Flow is when you get so involved in the activity that you lose track of time, sometimes even forgetting to eat. Flow is also a very enjoyable experience linked with wellbeing, such that researchers are currently attempting to harness the power of flow to improve peoples’ lives. In this session I aim to demonstrate the benefits of experiencing flow as often as possible to making your life more fun and enhancing your psychological well-being.

Dr Richard Stephens is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Keele University and has been involved with psychology for more than 3 decades. Richard researches the psychology of swearing including why people swear in response to pain. He is Chair of the British Psychological Society Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee (since October 2020) and a former chair of the British Psychological Society Psychobiology Section. Richard was winner of the 2014 Wellcome Trust/ Guardian Science Writing Prize. Richard’s first book Black Sheep The Hidden Benefits of Being Bad was winner of the British Psychological Society Book of the Year Award (Popular Science) 2016.