Followed by Pizza Night on Blackett Building, Level 8.
Click here to register for Pizza Night! Professor Mark Burgman
Director of Centre for Environmental Policy, Chair in Risk Analysis & Environmental Policy
What can security intelligence learn from conservation biology, and vice versa?
Security assessments for things as diverse as national security and environmental policy depend on incomplete evidence, pervasive uncertainties, subjective reasoning and expert judgements. Two US intelligence service-funded projects, the ACE and CREATE programs, were developed to explore the quality and reliability of expert judgements in intelligence analysis reports. This presentation outlines those programs and their results to date. It illustrates the common technical and philosophical problems confronting analysts who work on national security risk analyses. There are some useful broader implications for other disciplines, and some useful lessons for intelligence analysts in the experiences of other disciplines including conservation biology. View Mark’s webpage.
Luke Delmas
PhD student, Department of Chemistry
Porous Metal-Organic Framework Materials: Synthesis and Applications
Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are 3D crystalline coordination polymers built from organic linkers and metal-based nodes. MOFs are now a well-studied class of porous materials whose tuneable properties have made them promising candidates for a diverse range of applications including gas separations, drug delivery systems, heterogeneous catalysis, and so on. This work focusses on the use of highly branched organosilicon polycarboxylic acids (organic linkers) and a variety of metals in the construction of novel MOFs. The structures, topological descriptions and properties of these materials will be presented.
Ute Thiermann
PhD student, Centre for Environmental Policy
Investigating the effect of mindfulness on environmental behaviour
Tackling the environmental challenges of the 21st century is not only about finding the right solutions. On the contrary, most of us know quite well what we have to do to reduce our environmental footprint, yet the biggest challenge is to change people’s behaviour in a sustainable way. This means that we need to find ways to change old habits, strengthen core values of humanity, and encourage a fundamental re-thinking on what human well-being and “happiness” entails. Mindfulness might be one such way of getting into deeper levels of human psychology, and mindfulness interventions have become popular for a long list of medical and psychological benefits. Newer research now also shows correlation between mindfulness and improved environmental behaviour. My brief talk will explore this hypothesis and show how my research aims at finding out if we can use mindfulness to make people more sustainable. View Ute’s webpage.