Inaugural Lecture Series

Professor Charlotte Chadderton presented various theoretical approaches she had drawn upon, adapted and developed, to enable us to better understand and potentially challenge the reproduction of racial disadvantage and privilege in education. 

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Professor Ian Whitehead outlined his research over the past 35 years, highlighting how a focus on personal experience has helped to shape more nuanced narratives about Britain and the two world wars of the twentieth century. 

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In her lecture, Professor Siobhan Neary drew on her various roles to examine the challenges that have impacted the careers profession and how her research has helped to develop a greater understanding of the workforce, their motivations and the challenges experienced. She explored the interrelationship between practice, research, policy and identity and what needs to be in place to maximise the opportunities for the next professionalisation project. 

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Professor John Steel's lecture explored recent research which has sought to reinvigorate the promise of journalism and address its contemporary crisis of legitimacy. Looking at examples of his published work drawn from the fields of political theory, critical pedagogy, history, sociology, philosophy, and journalism studies, Professor Steel reflected on his own personal academic pathway and how it has led him to seek to focus on both the theory and practice of some of journalism's key civic responsibilities. 

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Taking place during November's Social and Education Policy Research week, Professor Liz Atkins' inaugural lecture provided insights into issues surrounding the education of low-attaining youth and their implications for social justice. 

In this lecture, Professor Stephan Reiff-Marganiec reflected on and highlighted opportunities and challenges for truly life-changing smart technologies. He considered the underlying technologies and the importance of data processing as a key enabler, placing these in the context of societal issues of these architectures that emerge when considering the demands from the Internet of Things (IoT): a system of trillions of interconnected sensors producing 'lots of little data'. 

He also considered how data processing can be distributed in various ways, and consequently, allowing the ideas from service and cloud computing to be expanded for IoT, touching on the current hot topics of data analytics and machine learning. 

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Professor Gyan Tripathi's lecture focused on presenting his own research development, determining how the experience of genetically engineering bacteria to produce biodegradable polymers, has contributed to solving the fundamental mysteries of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. 

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Vice-Chancellor Professor Kathryn Mitchell provided an oversight of both the scientific and personal journey in a long career of research, which has worked to address how to improve the lives of patients with 'degenerative' or chronic disease. This body of research and foci on people living with a chronic/incurable disease was triggered by a six-month work experience in Karatina, Kenya when Professor Mitchell observed the impact of unmanaged AIDS. 

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In this inaugural lecture, Professor Hakeem Yusuf discussed what has happened to the judicial institution, and the rule of law in societies where there has been no accountability for the judiciary's role in an authoritarian past. 

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This inaugural lecture explored Professor Nicholas Blagden's work over the last 15 years on the experience of imprisonment, rehabilitative intervention, and transition into the community for those with sexual convictions. 

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This inaugural lecture from Professor Josè Arturo Garza-Reyes discussed the operations management concepts and methodologies that have been proposed and adapted by supply chains to address the biggest challenge that we face as mankind, i.e. environmental degradation, and improve the environmental performance of their operations. 

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In this inaugural lecture, Professor Qile He discussed what makes inter-firm collaboration an important research area in business and management. Professor He explored current research areas and theories that support the investigation of this field. 

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How to address productivity and growth for SMEs has plagued governments all over the world, particularly the UK economy where the productivity puzzle has been a particular issue for many decades. This lecture charted Professor Mark Gilman's journey and contributions to understanding productivity and growth for SMEs. 

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In this lecture, Professor Lynn Saunders OBE reflected on her career in the Criminal Justice System as a probation officer, prison governor and charity co-founder and trustee. She explored Criminology from a practitioner's viewpoint and the resettlement of people with sexual convictions from a research perspective, attempting to 'bridge the gap' between practice and academia, providing innovative and practical solutions to real-life challenges. 

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Professor Gerhard Kemp's lecture explained the normative and historical roots of the draft Crimes Against Humanity Convention and linked these aspects to the practical and policy benefits of having an international convention on crimes against humanity. Kemp's role as a legal academic informed part of the analysis; the role of mentors, civil society, students, and affected communities completed the picture and underscored the value of critical, reflective, caring, mentoring, and applied legal academic work. The presentation concluded with some thoughts on the way forward for the draft Crimes Against Humanity Convention. 

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Having spent over a decade researching the problem of women's homelessness, Professor Kate Moss found that one of the major precipitators for this is the experience of domestic abuse. Both these phenomena are arguably - to some extent - invisible. Against this background, Professor Moss asked two questions in relation to what she perceives as a crisis of hidden female homelessness: why is women's homelessness hidden and what can be done about it? 

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This lecture presented the legal issues and impact of a novel form of financial integration, Stock Connect, giving mutual market access to Chinese and international investors. Such a cross-boundary investment channel represents numerous 'firsts' in Chinese financial liberalisation and a potential mechanism to be utilised widely in global financial markets. Professor Flora Huang discussed the profound implications of Stock Connect to local and global financial markets and the legal impediments to its implementation. 

Professor Carley Foster's lecture explored how retailers can create a retail experience for customers which reflects the community they serve and embed themselves in the local area by working with key stakeholders. By co-creating a community retail experience and moving away from a sole focus on transactional retailing, retailers can position themselves as a key element of the town centre jigsaw, alongside complimentary services and attractions. In doing this, retailers can begin to protect themselves from a turbulent retail environment and instead have an active role in the evolving, reincarnated high street. 

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Professor Marc Cowling's lecture explored the tax treatment of entrepreneurs and government intervention in the debt and equity market as well as challenging whether entrepreneurs do, in fact, generate things such as productivity, innovation, and jobs. Professor Cowling also questioned how entrepreneurs have fared during the Covid-19 crisis and evaluated whether the government has effectively shielded them. 

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A key theory of how emotion shapes behaviour is known as 'Threat Superiority'. Professor France Maratos presented how she has challenged this with an alternative 'Relevance' theory of emotion and how this shapes our understanding of the neural basis of emotion, as well as her well-being intervention work with teachers and pupils. 

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Dementia is the term for a group of disorders that affect the brain, where Alzheimer's disease represents 64% of cases. Although an incurable, progressive disease, in her lecture, Professor Myra Conway explored how an understanding of the underlying causes can offer new therapeutic approaches to delayed disease onset. She also highlighted the importance of developing new diagnostics with respect to measuring drug efficacy. 

Find out more about Professor Myra Conway's inaugural lecture

Professor Jose Prados' lecture looked at the evolution of cognitive mechanisms. It focused on learning from experience, the essential abilities that allow animals to adapt to the changing conditions of their environments. His research has shown that molluscs and flatworms learn according to the same principles that rule learning invertebrates. In this lecture, Jose expanded the scope and addressed whether these similarities can be extended to other organisms, including plants and unicellular organisms. 

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Professor Stephen Wordsworth's lecture drew on several different but interconnected aspects of his work. Stemming from his experiences working in the operating theatre to the development of standards of practice, and in his involvement in educational design. The lecture reflected on historical developments; and examined the present in relation to roles and responsibilities in the operating theatre, patient care and a culture of safety. 

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Professor Miles Richardson discussed the benefits of a closer connection with nature and why this matters at a time of environmental emergency. The inaugural lecture explained how nature connectedness provides a route for people to develop the new relationship with nature required for a sustainable future. 

War has been central to the human condition throughout history as a means to satisfy strategic ambition, resolve disputes, secure peace, oppress and suppress. It begs the question of whether there are national practices of warfare: Professor Keith McLay provided an answer for 400 years of British history in this lecture. 

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Professor Christopher Sansom explored his career journey in industrial research labs and academia. In this lecture, we found out how his career has involved research on low carbon renewable energy technologies to reduce global warming, developing solar desalination for water-stressed regions of the Earth, as well as working on telescopes to search for Earth-like planets around nearby stars. 

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Developing programmes that can behave and produce results similar to those of human experts was the aspiration of many computer scientists. Natural Language Processing is a field that has seen many developments over the last 80 years. In his lecture, Professor Farid Meziane summarised this journey and the research contributions that he made within this sector. 

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Professor Warren Manning's lecture explored the evolution of modern vehicles and how the innovation and research community responds to various imperatives to improve performance. In discussing the future of motoring and how ready the industry is to respond, Professor Manning highlighted key strategic priorities for Derby, particularly in supporting our students through research activity. 

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This inaugural lecture featured a project Professor Ang Bartram worked on throughout the leap year of 2016 and which contributed to be a work in process that grew in volume since 2017. The focus of this lecture was on the artist's durational practice, how research underpins decision making and intent, and how failure and mishap are often by-products of the process. 

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Professor Ian Turner shared his reflections on the importance of entertainment pedagogy through a series of examples and case studies from his career to date. 

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