Scio

09/01/2023

Congratulations and all the best on the new job!

Meet XinRan, our Head of Science, Research and Innovation 👋

🪨 XinRan is focused on building and maintaining a world leading science, research and innovation team to deliver bleeding edge research in the field of enhanced rock weathering.

🔬 XinRan is a multi-award winning particle physicist who has spent over a decade as a professional hunter of the invisible (sadly not as a Ghostbuster), building large scale dark matter and neutrino detectors in some of the deepest science facilities around the world.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 XinRan grew up in Scotland and now lives in Edinburgh with his wife and new baby girl Kate. However, his spiritual home is in Middle Earth.

⛰️ Outside of work XinRan loves hiking, cycling, kayaking and spending as much time in the Scottish Highlands as possible.

🪐 XinRan is deeply passionate about science engagement and outreach. He currently leads the Remote³ project which enables pupils from schools in the most remote parts of Scotland to build, program and operate miniature Mars Rovers in the STFC Mars Yard at the Boulby Underground Laboratory.

✨ Despite being elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in its Bicentennial year, XinRan doesn’t enjoy astronomy questions in pub quizzes as he prefers to do his universe gazing from deep underground.

16/05/2022

Our final speaker for tonight's event is Lorenzo Zanisi who uses machine learning to speed up the delivery of nuclear fusion at the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

An astrophysicist by training, he’s obtained a PhD from the University of Southampton and a BSc and MSc in physics and astrophysics at ‘La Sapienza’ University of Rome. He works on artificial intelligence and data scientist applications in various contexts, including with charities and medical doctors.

Sign up for free here:

https://scio-fusion_may2022.eventbrite.co.uk

15/05/2022

The second speaker of our May event is Julita Inca Chiroque, a HPC software specialist at the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

She has a systems engineering undergraduate degree and a computer science master’s degree from universities in Peru, and a second master’s degree in high performance computing from the The University of Edinburgh.

Sign up for free here:

https://scio-fusion_may2022.eventbrite.co.uk/

13/05/2022

The first speaker of our May event is Bella Boulderstone, the public outreach and education officer at the UK Atomic Energy Authority. She has a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Southampton. Her favorite part of her current role is that she gets to talk to people from all over the world and tell them the good news about fusion energy.

Sign up for free here:

https://scio-fusion_may2022.eventbrite.co.uk/

22/02/2022

Happy palindromic ambigram Twosday 22022022 and even better at 10:02:20 pm it would be 22022022022022!

07/01/2022

Happy New Year Everyone! We are kicking off 2022 on a high with the 2015 Nobel Laureate Arthur B. McDonald telling us why scientist think Dark Matter exist and how they are trying to detect it! Check it out!

When we look around our world, and out into space, there is an enormous variety – trees and birds and planets and stars; however, everything that we can see ...

24/11/2021

Our final speaker is Rosie Graham, a final year PhD student in the engineering group of the Centre for Enzyme Innovation, focussing on learning from the natural world to design and engineer plastic degrading enzymes for efficient biorecycling. Specifically studying ways to combine enzymes to create ‘Super-enzymes’ and target the enzymes to the surface of plastic to enhance the break down plastic waste.

Find out more about how scientists are trying to solve the plastic problem facing the world here:

https://scio-plastics.eventbrite.co.uk/

23/11/2021

Our second speaker is Jo Herbert, a 2nd year PhD student studying the genetics of plastic-degrading bacteria within the Centre for Enzyme Innovation, University of Portsmouth. She specialises in the evolution of bacteria and her current research looks at using the power of bacterial evolution in the laboratory to discover novel enzymes and how they naturally adapt to degrading and using substances such as plastic.

Sign up for free here:

https://scio-plastics.eventbrite.co.uk/

22/11/2021

The first speaker of our November event is Ben Moore, a 3rd year PhD student studying molecular biotechnology within the Centre for Enzyme Innovation, University of Portsmouth. His research is focused on engineering the yeast species (Pichia pastoris) to express and secrete plastic-degrading enzymes. This has involved designing gene constructs computationally, using techniques like molecular cloning to assemble recombinant DNA, and transforming P. pastoris with the complete gene vectors.

Sign up for free here:

https://scio-plastics.eventbrite.co.uk/