Professor Dorita Hannah
Dorita Hannah (NZ) is an award winning performance designer specialising in theatre architecture as well as spatial and event dramaturgy. Hannah’s trans-disciplinary practice in the visual, spatial, performing and culinary arts involves curating live events, creating ephemeral installations and devising performative exhibitions, as well as consulting on the development of cultural environments. Hannah’s artistic residency from April until July 2021 will centre around three key activities: Mentorship (for staff and PGRs); Public Research events; and developing funding bids.
For the first visit, Hannah will offer a seminar on developing practice research projects for PGR. The second visit will focus on one-to-one feedback on work in progress, open to staff and PGR, and developing funding bids for postdoc study. The third visit will be part of a symposium, ‘For Scenographics: Worlds, Scenes, Atmospheres’ where Hannah will act as a public keynote.
Dr Ciaran Lahive
Ciaran Lahive is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Green Chemical Reaction Engineering Research Group within the Engineering and Technology Institute Groningen (ENTEG) at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). Ciaran’s background is in organic and pharmaceutical chemistry (BSc Hons – The Chemistry of Pharmaceutical Compounds – University Collage Cork, Ireland) and in green and sustainable chemistry (PhD on the Catalytic Depolymerisation of Lignin – The University of St. Andrews, UK). His research interests and expertise concern the efficient processing of biomass and the sustainable production of chemicals from biomass.
He is visiting Surrey this summer to initiate a new collaboration with Dr Madeleine J. Bussemaker (The Sonochemistry Ultrasonics Research Group) on a series of projects entitled “Sounding out ultrasonic effects on lignin extraction and modification”. Efficient and sustainable processing of biomass for the production of high-value chemicals for applications in such things as polymers and pharmaceuticals is a key enabling strategy as society strives to reduce its dependence on fossil-derived chemicals and transitions towards renewable, sustainable carbon sources. This research will probe the use of ultrasound to tackle the valorisation of one of nature’s most abundant but recalcitrant biopolymers; lignin.
Dr Irene Zorzan
Irene Zorzan‘s research centres on concepts of multi-agent systems, consensus under switching topology and compartmental systems. Her particular focus is on the broad class of positive systems (which includes compartmental systems, positive switched systems, compartmental switched systems), a class of systems characterized by the fact that state variables represent intrinsically nonnegative entities, and hence assume only nonnegative values. Positive Systems Theory has Biology as one of its main application fields, being the concentration levels of biological species intrinsically nonnegative.
The IAS Fellowship project that will be developed by Dr Zorzan under the direction and supervision of Dr Matteo Barberis (Systems Biology, FHMS) aims at the understanding of how the cell cycle network can be modulated, through identification of molecular designs that are responsible for its precise timing. Specifically, molecular designs will be investigated for the occurrence of a definite pattern of enzymatic activities, which regulate cell cycle progression unidirectionally. Furthermore, effects of cell-to-cell interactions will be tested for homogeneous and heterogeneous populations. Since these enzymes continuously shuttle between nucleus and cytoplasm, diffusion will also be analysed, for the occurrence of definite spatial patterns.