Andrew Shorthouse Katy Merrington: cultural gardener Before she was appointed as cultural gardener to the Hepworth gallery in Wakefield, Katy trained at Harlow Carr and worked in the prestigious Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh, Tresco Abbey Garden and Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. She has been central to the development of the public garden at the Hepworth Gallery from … Read more
Gareth introduced his excellent talk by outlining his admiration for Ken Hawley whose Sheffield tool collection rests at Kelham Island. Ken’s main interest was not just the finished Sheffield product but more the manufacturing process, which eventually led to a massive collection of more than 100,000 artefacts. Ken Hawley’s family were in the tool business … Read more
This was every bit an informative talk laced with some quite challenging mathematical concepts which inform on best bridge design. Computational modelling and optimisation are able to predict how a bridge’s components and structures will behave under specific conditions, and thereby improving design, efficiency and manufacturing technique e.g. with 3D printing What are the span … Read more
Early life Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (neé Pierrepont) is recognised as one of the great female intellectuals of the 18th century. She was the daughter of the Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull, born in 1689. Between 1692 and 1700 she went to her grandmother at West Dean near Salisbury, then to Thoresby Hall … Read more
Dr Marek Szablewski What a fantastic, emotionally charged talk by Marek about his family origins in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation of Poland! Marek himself grew up in Sheffield in the 1960s, leaving for Durham in 1992 for an academic career in applied chemistry and physics. Much of his talk centred on the wartime experience … Read more
Nick Verber is a research registrar working for his PhD at the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience Institute (SITraN), University of Sheffield. He gave an excellent talk, very successfully overcoming the temptation of many medics to litter their lectures with clinical jargon. It was clearly delivered and easily followed by a large Zoom gathering of … Read more