Inaugural Lectures

The lecture will focus on Marcus’s academic life as an applied researcher and practitioner.

Unique observations and experiences whilst working with a diverse range of performers, including Olympic boxers and world-class musicians, will be provided.

Examples of innovation to overcome methodological challenges whilst undertaking research will be highlighted, along with the presentation of key findings from selected peer-reviewed publications.

His presentation will share examples of recent research findings that have contributed to enhanced health and wellbeing among vulnerable groups, concluding with a signposting to exciting areas of future collaboration.

Professor Victoria Hunter will provide an overview of her career and research in site dance – an area of dance research that explores dance performance in non-theatre spaces.

She discusses her work in relation to intersectional themes and ideas concerning embodied experiences of space and place, and she will reflect on a range of theoretical ideas and practical experiences that have shaped her research and career trajectory.

Drawing on examples from her practice-based research and writing, she provides an overview of her work to date and outlines future research trajectories.

In this lecture, Professor Dunkerley will be reading from his own poetry and talking about how poetry can help us situate ourselves in deep time.

The idea of deep, or geological time, is challenging on many levels. How do we, as short-lived creatures, conceive of the stretches of time it has taken for life to evolve?

Does an understanding of deep time, and the changes the planet has gone through in the far past, help us to view our current environmental predicament more clearly?

In particular, he will examine the often uneasy relationship between science and poetry.

How can poets bring the ‘facts’ of science to bear on our attempts to understand our place in the more-than-human world?

In this inaugural lecture, Professor Mike Lauder will take you on a journey of problems and solutions for the analysis of sports technique in challenging environments.

For decades, the barrier due to water has presented issues for biomechanical analysis methods, leading to the analysis of technique in sports such as swimming and kayaking to lag behind other land-based sports.

The lecture will present solutions that have helped overcome research in water-based environments and also demonstrate how doing ‘hard’ research can inform research leadership.

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a condition in which cognitive changes that are greater than those expected for age and education level are experienced. These are not severe enough to significantly interfere with daily activities or independence, yet affect memory, attention, language, and other cognitive functions, and may be a precursor to more serious conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.

Many people with MCI will progress to dementia. That is why timely medical attention when experiencing cognitive changes is key, as early intervention and treatment can improve outcomes.

This Lecture will constitute an opportunity to explore cost-effective, non-invasive techniques that can lead to earlier and more precise diagnosis, but also to discuss the potential of easily implementable and widely applicable interventions that might support independent living across the adult lifespan.

The aim of the lecture is to examine a contemporary and urgent concern underlying the following question: how can resource-starved public sector organisations retain an experienced workforce in order to meet the daily demands of delivering health and social care services?

Employers concerned with keeping staff require a whole systems approach, which includes consideration of the needs of all workers at all levels. This may involve review and revision of existing policies, such as those on inclusivity and widening participation, for applicability to and impact on employees.

Management and Leadership Development: learning from mistakes, successes and the ripples we cause.

Leading is about people, theories get us so far, but in the end we have to act. Sometimes this works, sometimes it does not, or at least not as we intended. Either way, there are lessons to be learned if we choose to notice them.

I will explore the importance of creating nurturing learning opportunities where leaders explore and reflect together on what they do in the workplace and in doing so create further possibilities to take action that might develop leadership practice and in turn their organisations.

Personnel working in the Armed Forces, Emergency Services and certain industries are required to complete physically demanding job tasks, which often also have technical and cognitive requirements.

Professor Sam Blacker has worked on projects including the development of role-related physical employment standards (PES), use of wearable sensors to quantify the physical demands of work and training, analysis of risk factors for injury and investigating nutritional strategies to support physical development and recovery.

This inaugural lecture will summarise research conducted in the laboratory and field, which has informed evidence-based interventions and changes to policy and practice for the safe and effective selection, training and work practices of personnel employed in physically demanding occupations.

Drawing out emotion: Exploring children’s and adolescent’s drawn and graphed emotional communication.

This lecture will present a research agenda that examines experimental parameters around how we may systematically interpret children’s and adolescent’s drawings of single and complex emotional experiences.

It will consider influences that determine aspects of children’s affective drawings that may be misinterpreted by the viewer and propose questions that can be asked to inform closer interpretation of intended visual communication.

The lecture will also present research that examines children’s and adolescent’s representations of mixed emotion experiences and the impact the findings can have on emotional assessment work with young people.

This lecture aims to explore how Professor Lakes initial aspirations of becoming an exercise physiologist were turned on their head after taking an introduction to sports biomechanics module in 2002.

A fascination with Olympic weightlifting biomechanics set development of the common, accessible language for force plate data that he is known for in motion. This 20-year obsession has contributed to the development of force plate technology, national and international research collaborations, and practical, real-world application of biomechanics with work that has made NASA question training strategies during interplanetary travel, informed military employment standards, and helped coaches manage the physical capacity of athletes including those at clubs like Real Madrid FC, Spanish Weightlifting, and the 2019 Stanley Cup winning St Louis Blues National Hockey League.

We often tend to assume that our own society today is essentially the same as British society a hundred years ago.

Many of the institutions that were present then are still with us; indeed, they continue to govern us, fashion our sense of identity, but the age of liberal democracy which created so much of this inheritance was a distinct civilization.

While it sought social and economic improvement in ambitious public reforms, it also sought to free individual thought and experience from old oppressions and constraints by fostering a love of ideas, literature, music and art.

The public educationalist, Albert Mansbridge, wrote of ‘the kingdom of the mind’. For Mansbridge, and many others, public religion played a vital part in inspiring learning, cultivating moral understanding and inspiring ambition.

The purpose of this lecture will be to suggest several approaches to this striking age in British history. If its defining ideals have since been altered, challenged and even undermined, how has this occurred? Indeed, has the kingdom of the mind changed – and all society with it?

Our connections with nature change the kind of people we are. Typically, those who embrace nature take more responsibility for their environment and speak out for it.

In the same way, our connections with different kinds of people help us understand ourselves and our community and make us more willing to speak out when things are wrong.

As teachers and educators, one of our key roles is to help people connect with nature and with each other. When we get it right, the impacts can go far beyond our expectations.

Here I explore how we could do it better, and some consequences it can have. I draw on my own experiences in UK, Sudan, USA, South Africa and Lanzarote. But today I focus mostly on Seeley Copse based on visits of perhaps a thousand University of Chichester students to these woods in the last 15 years.

This lecture outlines my contributions to amyloid-ß research, a key player in Alzheimer’s disease.

My research began in parasite immunology before transitioning into Neuroendocrinology during my PhD, where I investigated brain-derived peptides for their diagnostic and therapeutic potential. Further training in molecular and computational techniques enabled me to secure funding to focus on amyloid-ß.

Through bioinformatics and laboratory work, I identified a highly toxic phosphorylated form of amyloid-ß, plus its interactions with antioxidant and kinases enzymes.

I also discovered a novel neuropeptide, kissorphin, which blocked amyloid-ß toxicity.

Additionally, the body’s endocannabinoids were shown to have neuroprotective effects against amyloid-ß.

These discoveries support the idea that the body has built-in defences against amyloid-ß toxicity, offering potential to exploit in Alzheimer’s disease.