Every research career is a long walk into the unknown, illuminated only by curiosity and the people who steady our steps. This image shows me and my partner walking beneath the glow of a lighthouse, a symbol of direction in the shifting tides of academic life. My journey has carried me from Turkey to the United States and finally to the United Kingdom, each transition demanding resilience, reinvention, and hope. None of it would have been possible without the unwavering support beside me. This photo honours the companions who help us navigate the darkest nights and celebrate the brightest discoveries.

Over the last 3 years as a post doctoral researcher on the SUBDENSE suburban densification project I have journeyed to project meetings in Dortmund (via Brussels, Cologne & Bochum), Paris, Strasbourg and Dresden (via Prague & Berlin), plus international conferences in Munich and Cardiff and national conferences in Glasgow, Reading & Belfast. Some of these cities I am familiar with, but many are new to me. My travels have involved all sorts of trains (large and small, fast and slow, over ground and underground), numerous trams of all shapes and sizes, a couple of boats/ships, but only 4 aircraft. Oh,
and a monorail! Amazingly, there were few dramas and things mostly ran on time. As a town planner, I find traveling across boundaries to new cities immensely exhilarating and endlessly fascinating. I use this time productively by reflecting, reading, working on presentations and writing papers.

Research can often feel like a solitary pursuit. Long hours spent in quiet rooms surrounded by notes, books, and half-formed ideas. My project explores the role of sound design and music in shaping representations of disability in film and television, with a particular focus on chronic illness and invisible disabilities. I spend much of my time thinking about how sound can express what isn’t seen — the inner worlds of fatigue, pain, and resilience.

One cold, rainy afternoon, deep in analysis, I had an unexpected visitor: a very wet pigeon. It landed by my window, bedraggled and shivering, and I couldn’t help but take it in. As it warmed and dried, I realised how this small interruption mirrored my research — a reminder that even the unseen, the overlooked, can suddenly make itself heard. In that moment, the quiet solitude of research felt unexpectedly alive.

Buoyed with a full conference scholarship to HIV Glasgow2018, I longed for the trip from Nigeria. I had hoped to present results from my MSc research and meet potential PhD supervisors. However, my hope was short-lived as I was refused the short-visit visa to the UK. It was a difficult yet defining moment for me. Amidst the self-doubt, a flicker of hope remained. Two years later, I won the Duncan Norman Research scholarship, out of 80 applicants, to study at the University of Liverpool. In 2022, I presented my PhD research at HIV Glasgow2022.

A journey of four years
A tale of tears
A chance grasped
Became a dream
Lost amidst gasps
And fears became real

Down and back up
Some renewed hope
Buried in work
A way to cope

Emotions run high
Looking at my shadow
As I watch the sun rise
Beside a crown jewel of Glasgow 

An academic life is often an itinerant one. I moved to the Magic Mountain in 2020, shortly after starting my PhD. With lockdowns in full force, many of my neighbours were finally finding time do to their long-promised “spring cleanings.” Those projects to de-clutter basements and garages made for a great time to furnish my new apartment, turning the Magic Mountain into a beautiful refuge from the challenging times of disease and doctoral study. When I decided to move continents for my fellowship, the time had come for me to do my own spring cleaning. Bittersweet, it is: painful to part with beloved reminders of projects and moments, but liberating to be lightened of material bonds. After all, you carry the memories; the stuff is just stuff. I’ve done spring cleaning many times before, and I’ll probably do it many times again.

Binary is a mixed-textile sculpture that visualizes the tension between visibility and invisibility within disability narratives. Rooted in my lived experience with chronic illness, the work reflects the shifting identities shaped by medical devices, mobility aids, and the perceptions of others. My broader research asks how sound design and music in screen media reinforce or challenge dominant understandings of disability—particularly those shaped by the Medical Model, which defines disability as an individual defect. Translating that inquiry into a physical form, Binary interrogates the language that categorizes, confines, and “others” disabled bodies. In a culture obsessed with efficiency and clarity, the piece reclaims space for ambiguity, discomfort, and contradiction—the very qualities that make us human. Through layered textures and materials, Binary resists neat binaries of able/disabled, normal/abnormal, and visible/invisible, inviting the viewer to question how they perceive and define difference.

In seeking to attain equity of access to research, we realised that some groups face particular intersectional inequities. Therefore the Womens’ Inclusive Services for Health (WISH) project aimed to explore and address barriers to seeking maternal care and HIV care for women with disabilities in Uganda. This participatory work involved leaders of community networks and involved focus groups and key informant interviews with women, their husbands and caregivers and communities. The photograph shows researcher Francis Ociti interacting with a member of the Gulu Disabled Persons Union following a focus group which took place in the shade of a mango tree. Co-creation workshops identified the key messaging that people with disabilities wished to use in posters and wider communications. A key message from northern Uganda was that ‘Disability is not a curse’, and that with support, people with disabilities can live full and productive lives.

The traditional earth building crafts of Southern Morocco are on the brink of extinction, threatened by social, economic and climate change. Adopting a participatory research approach, we worked with communities of practitioners in the historical oasis of M’Hamid to develop a unique digital, interactive, multimedia construction manual: Heres. Designed as a flipbook-type e-publication, Heres documents the local traditional earth building methods and sheds light on the socio-cultural and religious practices associated with their execution as well as the hidden role played by women. Through Heres our aim is to safeguard traditional earth building crafts by digitally aiding knowledge transfer and application and complementing experiential learning, to revive interest, revitalise craftsmanship, develop and enhance skills, while fostering deeper engagement with intangible cultural heritage education. Heres offers a solution to counter the loss of know-how and workmanship, thus supporting earth-built heritage resilience in the face of social, economic and climate change.

Globally, around 50 million people live with dementia, and is expected to triple by 2050. Genetic, environmental, social and lifestyle factors play an essential role in our ability to think, remember and solve problems as we age. Studying similarities between spouses in diseases and risk factors is a popular way to understand environmental influences; this is known as spousal concordance. Couples often share the same environment, experiences, and health behaviours even though they are not genetically related.

In our study, we explored whether declines in memory and thinking tend to appear in both spouses among elderly couples. Our findings suggested that if one partner experienced cognitive decline, the other was at a higher risk of experiencing it as well, especially in long marriages. A shared intellectual living environment among couples, social engagement, the ecosystem of the house, and shared brain stimulus may help maintain cognitive health.

The AEgIS experiment at CERN is exploring one of physics’ most fascinating questions — how does antimatter respond to Earth’s gravity? Running such an extraordinary experiment is complex, time-consuming, and incredibly expensive. My research aims to make this process smarter through the power of digital twins — detailed computer models that recreate the experiment virtually. These simulations allow us to test ideas, predict outcomes, and fine-tune parameters before running the real thing, saving both time and resources. While these models demand significant computing power, they make it possible to explore the behaviour of antimatter from behind a screen — bringing us one step closer to understanding how our universe truly works. 

The image shows me standing beside the heart of the AEgIS experiment at CERN — the Penning–Malmberg trap, where antiprotons are confined and combined to form antihydrogen atoms. In the lower left, my digital twin of this same trap is displayed, running a Particle-in-Cell simulation both on my local workstation and the CERN computing cluster, helping us model and refine the experiment virtually before it happens. 

Centring the Past brought together craftspeople and academics to investigate medieval ribbed vaulting and the timber formwork, or “centring,” that enabled its construction. Merging practical craft knowledge with scholarly analysis, the project bridged gaps between theoretical understandings of historic building methods and the lived expertise of contemporary heritage builders. The team reconstructed the centring that would have been used for 13th-century vaults at Chester cathedral to test current hypotheses about how such vaults were raised. Throughout, academics practiced the heritage construction skills while timberwrights and stone masons engaged with the digital and historical analyses of which underpin our understanding of historical buildings. The hands-on reproduction, paired with engagement events involving heritage craftspeople illuminated the collaborative process of medieval building design and highlighted the value of digital modelling in for informing heritage conservation today. Pictured here is the academic and craft team marking joints according to the research.

Through comparative ethnography, our research produces an anthropological analysis of Head and Neck Cancer trajectories across the condition’s emergence, treatment, and outcome. This photograph, taken during fieldwork in Bootle, captures two recurring themes from the project: waiting and pollution. As dust from the nearby docks settles over the word “WAIT”, it provides a stark visualisation of the entanglement between environmental degradation and temporal uncertainty. 

The Household Support Fund is provided to local councils to help people cope with the rising cost of living. Each council decides how to use this funding — for example, helping families with food, energy bills, or other essentials. This research looks at how councils in Liverpool, Blackpool, Knowsley, and Manchester — where many people face financial hardship, are using the fund to support families with children who struggle to afford enough nutritious food.

We know that many families are finding it hard to make ends meet, and that local councils have limited resources. This project aims to uncover how different areas are using government support to help families in need, and what’s working best. By learning from these communities, the study hopes to provide useful insights to influence both local and national policies, helping councils and the government better support families who are struggling to put food on the table.

Due to ethical and various constraints, pharmaceutical companies often exclude children, pregnant and breastfeeding women from clinical trials. This action has limited the amount of information available to guide clinicians when prescribing drugs to children, pregnant or breastfeeding women. With the advent of physiologically-based pharmacokinetic modelling, researchers can use computers to predict and describe drug behaviour in people with different body characteristics. Such information is invaluable towards ensuring that the right drug at the right dose is given to the right person at the right time. This tool is helping researchers to address inequities in the information available to guide drug treatment for many people. 

In my discipline, process diagrams are often considered the “payoff” of research papers. These six images depict how such a figure evolved in the context of a forthcoming paper about how Indian artisans’ social positions affect their willingness to adopt new production technologies. My coauthor, Aruna Ranganathan, and I began sketching out ideas on some borrowed paper in a hotel lobby. Next, we started to digitise our digital designs. Then, we worked with an online graphic designer, Marcela, in Argentina, who brought our designs to life. Look closely and you’ll see that what changed from panel to panel was not only how we were communicating our content, but that the underlying ideas were evolving, too. In this way, figures are not only tools for communicating findings, but also for iteratively developing theory—we speak through our figures, but we also think through them.

Suburban densification involves small site development to add more homes to existing suburban neighbourhoods which can help prevent urban sprawl, encourage sustainable development and address the ever-acute housing crisis. This form of development is pursued by opportunistic small to medium sized property developer’s cherry picking the most lucrative rather than appropriate prospects, like building in back gardens (so called back land or ‘garden grabbing’ development resulting in ‘town cramming’). Most English suburbs have seen little densification, as these developers encounter barriers pertaining to fragmented land ownership, weak housing markets, financial barriers, design issues, irked communities and planning hurdles from underfunded and reactionary town planners who act as regulators. While planning is often blamed by developers for discouraging house building, these other issues are just as important and combine with one another to create insurmountable barriers to suburban densification. 

We facilitated 33 workshops in England, Scotland, and Wales. Participants from six UK sectors were involved: Consultants; Enterprise; Government; Higher Education; Non-profit; and Public Sector. During the workshops, teams were provided with a bespoke set of LEGO® bricks that were specifically selected to address issues pertaining to data. Teams built LEGO® models based on data-focused challenges and participants explained the nuances of their design and construction. This sharing of the story was recorded, transcribed, and edited; the workshop transcripts comprise the research dataset. Our findings showed the largest concern across sectors is topics relating to data such as the accessibility and trustworthiness. Organisational issues were the second most discussed and include items such as governance and compliance, relationships with external partners, and training and skills. Technology concerns included IT infrastructure, security, and efficient and effective processes. The topic of risks primarily pertained to human error, employee awareness, and external threats.