Bright Club Southampton Podcast

Episode 20 features Tony Kinsella. As well as being a teacher and our friend, Tony is a stand-up comedian and has compered and performed at multiple Bright Clubs across the country including at one of our shows. Tony tells us about how he got into comedy, who his influences are, and about his recent stand-up shows about Scandinavian ways to find happiness.

Episode 19 features Maria Ramos Suarez who performed at our eleventh show in March 2018. Maria tells us how she could have been making money working for an oil company, but how she is instead doing rubbish research – research on making useful things out of food waste. Maria also told us about why she came to the UK from Spain, how close she is with her family, and about why she no longer thinks PhD students are smart.

Episode 18 features Anna Hurley-Wallace who performed at eleventh show in March 2018. Anna told us about how studying the psychology of pain misleads people into thinking that she wants to hear about their psychological pain or that she might be some kind of pseudoscientist. She also tells us about studying body dysmorphia and having to get her head around medical jargon in order to collaborate with doctors in her work studying pain in children who have survived cancer.

Episode 17 features Lisa Jones who performed at our ninth show in September 2017. Lisa gave us some tips for anyone thinking about doing or doing a PhD and told us about some of the mistakes she made along the way. She also tells us about how her work studying how diet during pregnancy can affect the lifelong health of the offspring and how her research might be transferable to people. Lisa has a blog that you should check out at https://inascienceworldblog.wordpress.com/.

Episode 16 features Grace Andrews who performed at our ninth show in September 2017. Grace told us how studying climate change makes her a miserable presence at parties, but that knowing her gives people the feeling that they’re doing enough to fight climate change. Grace also told us about her travels to Greenland and why she has to work in a metal-free lab.

Episode 15 features Shona Waddell who performed at our tenth show in December 2017. Shona talked about the experience of working on a project that didn’t seem to be working as well as expected, despite the prestigious publications, and why she has spent the last few years trying to grow stem cells on tiny pits and dumps, and on oyster shells. Shona also tells us a bit about how she got to go to Glastonbury for science communication reasons and about how her surname provides her with motivation.

A Bonus Episode for the week of our 9th show! Dave Christensen performed at Bright Club Guildford earlier this year and told jokes about how his upbringing has affected the way he treats his stem cells in the lab. Here is that set.

Episode 14 features Nuria Garcia Casacuberta who performed at our seventh show in February 2017. Nuria compares herself and her own experiences of going on archaeological digs with Indiana Jones and describes the pain of sorting mosaic tiles by colours when they are all the colour of sand. Nuria also tells us about how being a classicist/archaeologist can let you skip the queues into the beautiful libraries of Florence and Venice and how they don’t actually want you to handle old manuscripts with gloves.

Episode 13 features Sadie Jones who performed at our eighth show in May 2017. Sadie talked about what those black holes might be doing, the advantages of working in astronomy and being able to go up on the roof to the telescopes, and about the quotes from her mum that went into her thesis. Sadie also tells us about her work in outreach, the accuracy of science in films like Interstellar and The Martian, and about the exciting year ahead of her as she’s going to be getting more training and opportunities in the world of science comedy!

Episode 12 features Chris Allen who performed at our seventh show in February 2017. Chris tells us about how easily distracted he can be by the internet when he’s supposed to be doing research on the use of the internet to improve the lives of patients with long-term illnesses and how he tried following cats on twitter to get away from the stress of modern politics and just ended up seeing political cats shouting at each other. Chris also talked about how beneficial the internet could be in helping people meet others with similar conditions to develop support networks and about the potential problems relating to who runs the websites that provide this patient support. Chris made reference to a story about a citizen tweeting with the President of Ecuador and I’d like to recommend this podcast on that story: https://soundcloud.com/replyall/25-favor-atender

Episode 11 features Andrea Ravagli who performed at our sixth show in November 2016. Andrea tells us about the difficulties of getting used to southern English accents after living in Scotland, how he wanted to study glass for his PhD because he’d never been taught about glass during his undergraduate chemistry degree, and about how he has come to love custard and marmite. Andrea also talked about how he’s using glass to make lasers and how much it annoys him that people seem to think glass is a liquid!

Episode 10 features Nic Percivall who performed at our seventh show in February 2017. Nic tells us about how she ended up doing research into the father/son relationships in medieval Viking societies and why she then left academia after her PhD. Nic also has great stories about finding out bridge spotters exist, how history students fought to get onto the course they wanted, and how one Viking Earl of Orkney was killed by a dead Scottish chieftain!

Episode 9 features Phil Wiles who performed at our eighth show in May 2017. Phil tells us about his interests in hormones, obesity, and parasites. He also tells us how he uses his twitchiness to fight weight gain, why Labradors are so easy to train, and about one of the drugs that has been used to tackle obesity. Phil was an undergraduate biomedical scientist at the time of his Bright Club performance and for some reason decided to spend the week before his exams preparing to perform at our show!

Episode 8 features Tom Hunt who performed at our second show back in November 2015. Tom tells us about why he ended up doing a Masters in History, why he’s now moving towards studying Physics, and how little funding there is for academic research in History. He also tell us about the explorer Sir Richard Burton, who was apparently seen as a pornographer by some of his contemporaries, and a bit about the East India Company. Tom’s Bright Club set was mostly one-liners and his jokes span across time from the Vikings to Queen Victoria!

Episode 7 features Jamal Kinsella who performed at our sixth show back in November 2016. Jamal tells us about his experiences working in multiple different labs with different research focuses and how he moved from psychology towards engineering by studying human response to vibration and what causes car accidents. He also tells us how weird it is to get paid to shake people, why he had to take photos of peoples’ thighs while they were sat on his motion simulator (which he nicknamed Little Twitchy), and about the difficulties of getting quantitative data when asking people how comfortable or uncomfortable they are.

Episode 6 features Katherine Crawford who performed at our second show back in November 2015. Katherine tells us about how she ended up studying archaeology and in particular about her interest in underwater archaeology and the use of modern computational techniques to model the way people move around cities to study ancient religious processions. She also told us about how little she likes comparisons with Indiana Jones, about how she’s never found a dinosaur, and about how she isn’t looking for Atlantis.

Episode 5 features Natt Day who performed at our third show back in February 2016. Natt tells us about how she only found out that she has asthma after starting her PhD studying asthma and the common cold, why she has a DVD of the inside of her lungs, and how she got into wearing Pac-Man dresses, as well as teaching us a lot about how to work with lung epithelial cells and how she compared cells taken from asthmatic patients and healthy volunteers.

Episode 4 features John Lapage who performed at our second show back in November 2015. John is a developmental biologist who studied the mammalian skull and jaw for his PhD and although he is still looking to publish his results and didn’t want to share much detail, he did explain why research into how the skull grows is important and tell some very funny jokes about his subject! John also explains why Southampton should still have a grudge against Monaco and his theory that the quality of a research project is directly related to the quality of the chat-up line you can make based on it. Please send us your research-based chat-up lines!

Episode 3 features Nikhil Mistry who performed at our first show, back in July 2015. Nikhil tells us about how he got into underwater acoustics, how bubbles might be used to destroy tumours or reduce noise pollution in the oceans, why he does public engagement, and how he put together his Bright Club set. In his stand-up, Nikhil tells us a story of his brother imitating whales using bubbles to trap fish and how an immature person might use a reverberation chamber to record the echoes of a fart, which contrasts nicely with how he says NASA uses a reverberation chamber to test the ability of a satellite to withstand high pressures.

Episode 2 features Dave Christensen who performed at our first show back in July 2015. Dave tells us about how he ended up in stem cell research, where his research is going, and why Minecraft doesn't provide a good analogy for stem cells.

Episode 1 features Jess Spurrell who performed at our first show back in July 2015. Jess tells us about how she got into cryogenics research, why it is important for the running of the Large Hadron Collider and what she might do next after finishing her PhD. She also talks a bit about being a woman in STEM and unconscious bias. In her stand-up set we hear a great story about starting a fire in the lab, about how helium was first liquified, and how that led to the first superconductors.