On 20 January 2025, the Vice-Chancellor’s Research Day took place on campus, providing an opportunity for some of our early career academic staff to showcase their research.

Professor Sarah Hainsworth, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research & Enterprise), who chaired the session, said:

This event is always a highlight in the research calendar and makes me proud of the great breadth of high-quality research we have at Bath. It was wonderful to showcase and celebrate the work of the twelve early career colleagues who took part and I’m looking forward to following what they do next.

Read the full presentations here

Biogenic carbon in environmental assessment

Dr Sam Cooper is a lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His work relates primarily to the energy, industrial, and agro-food sectors. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an evolving framework for assessing environmental impacts in a holistic and robust way. This research aims to develop global consensus around appropriate ways to account for and handle the effects of biogenic carbon (i.e. carbon dioxide emissions that were previously absorbed by biomass) within this framework. Specific issues include the approach to accounting for recycling biomass-derived materials, and appropriately recognising the value of delaying emissions.

Animating Comic Art with Visual Computing: Bridging the Gap Between Static Art and Dynamic Narratives

Dr Deblina Bhattacharjee is a lecturer (assistant professor) affiliated to the Visual Computing Group at the University of Bath, UK. Her research, bridging Computer Vision and Visual Arts, focuses on domain adaptation, depth understanding, multitask learning, multimodal learning, and 3D view synthesis. This talk explores how AI, specifically visual computing, can transform comic art, a traditionally static medium, into dynamic, engaging experiences. Comics combine illustrations and storytelling, but their format has limited interactivity. Animating comics manually is expensive and time-consuming, so this research leverages AI to bring motion to comic panels while preserving their original essence.

A creative ethnography of public transport for passengers living with dementia

Dr James Fletcher has a background in medical sociology and gerontology. He is interested in digital ageing and creative methods, with a focus on cognitive impairment and inclusive data generation. His research covers several areas of the political economy of ageing and digitalisation, with an emphasis on using social theory and creative methods to understand later life disability as a political entity. Contemporary approaches to creating dementia-friendly public transport largely rely on top down educational and infrastructural interventions. His research uses creative methods to support passengers with dementia to generate data about their experiences when travelling.

Feminism Saves the World: feminist foreign policy and the crisis of liberal international order

Dr Jennifer Thomson is senior lecturer in Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath. Her research focuses on gender and foreign policy; gender and security; and reproductive rights in international policy. Gender equality is a clearly stated aim for national and global governance. In recent years, many states are now referring to their foreign policy as ‘feminist’. What does this mean, and how might it change international affairs?

Prosthetics and Nerve Interfaces: The Path to Natural Sensations

Dr Leen Jabban is a lecturer at the Department of Electronic and Electronic Engineering. Her research interest is in biomedical engineering, focusing on user-centred design, prostheses, and neural stimulation. Imagine a future where prosthetic limbs can provide sensations almost identical to natural ones. Transcutaneous electrical stimulation is a technique that sends small electrical signals through the skin to stimulate nerves, aiming to restore these natural sensations. This talk will explain the basics of how this technique works, including how electrical signals can activate nerves and the challenges of making these signals precise and comfortable.

Understanding antibiotic action and resistance with time-resolved structural biology

Dr Catherine Tooke is a Prize Fellow in Antimicrobial Resistance in the Department of Life Sciences. Her research uses interconnected approaches of microbiology, biochemistry, structural biology and computational chemistry to study how these antibiotics interact with protein targets and resistance enzymes. In this talk she presents how exciting developments in new, powerful, X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) seek to visualise a moving picture of enzymes engaged in catalysis. These insights will help us understand antibiotic resistance and how we may rationally design our next antibiotics.

Learning Resilience in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

Dr Mariachiara Barzotto is an Associate Professor of International Management at the University of Bath, School of Management, and a recipient of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellowship. Her research examines skills, labor markets, knowledge processes, and technological change, with a recent focus on artificial intelligence, coworking spaces, and regional development. As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes integral to knowledge work, over-reliance on its black box processes threatens to erode essential human expertise and hinder future innovation. This talk explores how to safeguard critical human knowledge, embrace change, and forge stronger collaborations with AI, creating a future in which humans and technology co-exist and thrive together.

Mitigating the Health Impact of a Famine: Evidence from the 1985 Ethiopian Emergency Food Aid

Dr. Kyungbo Han is a lecturer in Economics. As a development and environmental economist, he mainly examines ex-ante and ex-post coping strategies against climate change in low-income countries. One of his research projects studies the long-term mitigating impacts of emergency aid on health status. He digitises a historical map that shows the location of relief camps after the 1984 Ethiopian famine and employs additional survey and satellite data. Through economic modelling and quantitative analyses, he finds that access to emergency aid in early childhood can lead to better health and labour productivity in adulthood. Using the food aid response to the Ethiopian famine in 1984 as a case study, this talk will highlight the long-term mitigating impacts of emergency food aid on health and labour productivity.

One-atom-thick membranes for advanced chemical separation

Dr Shiqi Huang joined the University of Bath as a lecturer in Chemical Engineering in January 2024. Her research focuses on developing high-throughput single-layer graphene membranes for gas separation and light-enhanced mass transport in 2D materials. Energy-efficient non-thermal separation processes, such as membrane separation, are predicted to reduce energy use by up to 90%, but current membranes still face challenges in achieving such energy savings. This presentation will explore the use of one-atom-thick membranes to create highly efficient separation processes, aiming to transform the current energy-intensive industrial sector into a more energy-efficient one.

470 million years of design-engineering optical meta-surfaces

Dr Rox Middleton is a researcher in experimental optics looking at photonic structures in plants and other optical biomaterials. They are researching how plants produce optical metamaterials as coatings, what those coatings can tell us about optical modelling, and how we can reproduce those structures in the lab, and for engineering application. Land plants are the world’s most prolific solar harvesters, as well as performing almost every engineering feat you can imagine. Their surfaces are covered with myriad tiny wax structures which interact with light. In their research they ask why, how, and can we do that?

On the Politics of Responsibilization

Dr Friederike Döbbe is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Business & Society at the University of Bath’s School of Management. Her primary research interest explores the politics of responsibilization, aiming to better understand how responses to and responsibility for addressing socio-ecological crises – such as climate change and unsustainable food systems – are constructed, shifted and contested. Who is deemed responsible for addressing socio-ecological crises like climate change, and how are these responsibilities constructed? This presentation explores how responsibility is assigned—often to individuals as ‘consumers’—and how such allocations are contested.

Creating sensory-inclusive spaces for Autistic people

Dr Keren MacLennan is a Lecturer in the Department of Psychology. Her research focuses on understanding Autistic people’s sensory experiences and finding ways to make environments more inclusive and supportive of wellbeing. Many environments, such as supermarkets and public transport, can be extremely disabling for Autistic people, commonly due to sensory-related factors. In this talk she outlines what we have learned about challenging and enjoyable environments and the resources we have developed to help make spaces more inclusive.

Professor Phil Taylor, who hosted the day, said:

I was truly inspired by the depth and breadth of the work presented by some of our most promising early career researchers. The afternoon has provided me with some incredible examples of our world-leading research with global impact here at Bath. I would like to offer my thanks and congratulations to the presenters, and look forward to following their careers as they develop.