Tell us about the BepiColombo project?
We’ve built one of the instruments at the University of Leicester that’s going there,
that’s why we’re so excited about it.
The challenges are manifold, we in the universities have got to drive digital literacy further than we currently are.
Suzie what does innovation look like to you in Space?
When we start thinking about sending humans to other planets
there’s a whole different set of challenges that we have to face.
Well today was just an amazing event, it was about 18 months in the making
and we just had such an incredible turn out of descendants of the founding families of this University.
I feel very proud to be a descendant of someone who gave so much to the City of Leicester
and the University in particular.
What I’ve most enjoyed was the very warm welcome we’ve received from the moment we arrived
and then the joy of seeing so many cousins that we haven’t seen for a long time
and learning about the family history.
I have quite a lump in my throat as I’m telling you this because it’s been such a special day in my life.
For anybody or any institution to know where you’re going you have to know where you came from
and so this has been a chance for us to really connect with our roots,
because that’ll help us shape the University for the next 100 years.
Since attending the Attenborough Arts workshops I’ve found myself back
into the environment of the arts community and it’s given me great confidence.
It’s a great hub for people just to come and socialise and to be able to make great connections.
The artwork that’s at the DeStress Fest is made out of Copper
and it’s a Copper Brain which is an interactive piece,
for the viewer to experience what I go through on a day-to-day basis.
The brain is made out of Copper Leaf which is decomposing,
similar to how my brain is decomposing with my memory loss.
Since the accident and since coming to the Attenborough Arts Centre I had to change my approach
in art and how I could be able to produce and make pieces of work
that still had the same consistency of my values,
that wouldn’t have happened without attending the Attenborough Arts Centre.
I’ll shut up now.
We organised the Big Sleep in partnership with the Bridge homelessness to hope,
who are a local homeless charity, with the view of raising money for homeless people
but also raising awareness of homelessness in Leicester City.
So we’ve got students, we’ve got staff and we’ve got people from Gateley Plc
who are a local solicitors firm to support the charity.
It’s called the Big Sleep which means we’re out from 8pm till 8am in the morning,
I’m here along with my colleagues and students from the Department of Criminology
because we want to support a phenomenal charity, we know about the experiences that homeless people have.
So far we have raised £785 but we’re hoping tonight to keep pushing it out there
on various social media platforms and hoping that we’ll raise more.
In terms of raising awareness we’ve got the Homeless Outreach Society involved which are a student group
and we’ve raised awareness of what they do, which is incredible.
And I think from a profile perspective it’s shown that the University is committed to helping the local community
as well as just serving the students that we have.
This is an exhibition called Creativity and Curiosity and it started as a little project
between some artists and a bunch of astronomers at the University of Leicester.
Our idea was to try to find a way of bringing art and science together.
We get great images from the universe and we wanted to get artistic reactions to the data we actually produce.
We always want to try to bring people into science
but what we wanted to do was reach a different set of people.
People who might not have an interest in science already
and the idea of working with artists to communicate about science was something I find really compelling.
People have come up and said how interesting they find it to see the universe through the eyes of the artists
and it’s exceeded all my expectations.