A list of all SciBar events in reverse chronological order

  • 11th December 2023 – Radiation: the good, the bad and the ugly

    Catharine West is Emerita Professor of Radiation Biology at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on trying to predict how cancer patients respond to radiotherapy with a particular interest in measuring radiosensitivity and hypoxia. continue reading

  • 13th November 2023 – Diagnosing the scent of Parkinson’s with Mass Spectrometry and Joy

    The speaker for this meeting will be Professor Monty Silverdale, who is a consultant Neurologist at the Manchester Centre for Clinical Neurosciences and a Professor of Neurology at the University of Manchester. This is Professor Silverdale’s summary of his talk: continue reading

  • 9th October 2023 – The Use and Misuse of Science in the Development Planning Process

    This month’s meeting will be about efforts to protect Danes Moss, an SSSI and nature reserve managed by Cheshire Wildlife Trust, from adjacent building development. The development will adversely affect the peatland, which is a carbon sink. The Moss lies continue reading

  • 11th September 2023 – Colourful Fungi

    Jeanette Maddy will talk about the ways in which fungi present us with colour, how that colour can be useful to them and to us and about some research directions around fungal pigments. Depending on what fungi are available at continue reading

  • 10th July 2023: Future Medicines – what have we learned from mRNA vaccines?

    The Covid vaccines are estimated to have saved 20 million lives since the start of the pandemic. Two of these vaccines used a revolutionary biological approach to generating a medicine rapidly and flexibly (mRNA), and a revolutionary innovation in delivering continue reading

  • 12th June 2023 – The use of embryonic stem cells in clinical treatments

    Sue Kimber is Professor of Stem & Developmental Biology, Division of Cell Matrix Biology & Regenerative Medicine at the University of Manchester. Her research focusses on how the human embryo develops and the use of human embryonic stem cells (hESc) continue reading

  • 15th May 2023 – The discovery and development of propofol (“Diprivan”)

    Note this session is on the third Monday of the month, a week later than usual because of the Coronation bank holiday on the second Monday. Propofol (marketed as Diprivan) is now a widely used intravenous anaesthetic.  Iain Glen, its continue reading

  • 17th April 2023 – Coping with Stress

    Please note the date for this session. As Easter Monday falls on the 2nd Monday in April, the SciBar session will be on the 3rd Monday. Postponed from October 2022, Dr Clare Jonas returns to describe her study of how continue reading

  • 13th March 2023 – Materials Challenges in a Nuclear Reactor

    Alex Carruthers is a post doctoral researcher in nuclear metallurgy at the University of Manchester. His specialism is analysis of irradiation-induced microsctructural changes in Zirconium alloys. He will talk to us about the challenges of using such materials in a continue reading

  • 13th February 2023 – The End of Everything

    Dr. Steve Barrett, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool makes a welcome return to SciBar. In March 2021 he gave us a Zoom talk entitled “The Beginning of Everything”.  Now he finishes the story in person with a continue reading

  • 9th January 2023 – Making the Tiniest Machines

    Professor David Leigh leads the Leigh Group at the University of Manchester.  The Group explores, invents and discovers fundamental ways to control molecular-level dynamics and topology.  In simple terms, they are making machines out of molecules. David says “Perhaps the continue reading

  • 12th December 2022 – Bio-inspired Optical Materials

    Developing sensors by mimicking nature’s colour mechanisms Dr. Ahu Gümrah Dumanli-Parry is a Materials Chemist and the first recipient of the bp-ICAM Kathleen Lonsdale Research Fellowship in 2019 for her work on bio-inspired advanced materials. Dr Dumanli-Parry’s research group (Bio-inspired Functional continue reading