Tiff works in the Insect Ecology Group of the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge and is the Henslow Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. She is particularly fascinated by insects, and how museum collections can be used to understand long-term biodiversity change and inform conservation action today. She completed her PhD at the University of York and Natural History Museum (UK), where she focussed on the butterflies of Sulawesi and examined their long-term change using museum collections.
Tiff’s current project is focussed on examining the UK macromoth communities using the Cambridge Zoology Museum’s Insect Collections. She is interested in disentangling the relative impact of anthropogenic threats, such as street lighting, climate change and land-use change, on species and communities over the past two centuries. In particular, her project aims to identify how species and communities have responded to the different transitions in artificial lighting (e.g. duration, intensity and colour of lighting) and provide timely and novel insights to inform effective conservation policy and practice.
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Dementia is a topic of considerable public interest. How empirical evidence has contributed to this societal awareness and indeed fear will be covered in this talk. It will span research from the 1980s when not much was understood about dementia up to contemporary perspectives. The focus will be on the epidemiological and public health evidence base, and how this relates to the results published from clinical and lab based research. The findings from UK and other high income countries of reduced age specific prevalence (%) will be explored, and the implications of results from brain based studies that dementia is not inevitable in the presence of ‘alzheimer’ type changes. The role of inequalities, risk varying across countries and time and our knowledge about protective factors have strengthened during recent years, and the balance of high risk with whole population approaches to reducing risk for society will be considered.
The structural mechanics of shape-changing structures: from bending armadillos, self-deploying satellites, to roll-up displays.
Most structures, e.g. buildings & bridges, are designed to be near rigid when loaded: in view of high winds or heavy traffic, their movements are barely noticeable. Formally, they are stiff, strong and stable, in terms of their “structural mechanics” – the study of their loaded deformation. Large movements from material weakness, overloading, or bad design, typically portend failure & eventual collapse. Embracing large movements, i.e. deliberate changes in shape, can admit new behaviour if safe and reversible, to yield transformer-like technologies and simple explanations of biological morphology, for example. In this talk, I will describe several structural mechanics principles for making shape-changing structures, out of ordinary materials, complete with physical demonstrations.
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