Most of us probably think of sleep as shutting down for the night – but it’s just as busy for our brains as being awake. During deep sleep, our brain sorts out what to store in our long-term memory (like our best friend’s birthday) and what to discard (like that radio jingle or what we had for lunch last Tuesday). To mark Dementia Awareness Week, Liz Coulthard, Professor of Cognitive Neurology at the Bristol Medical School, explains how this night-time neural activity has informed her ground-breaking research into Alzheimer’s Disease. Snorers read on… 

Why poor sleep could be putting your brain at risk  

There’s now really clear evidence that poor sleep is linked to a higher risk of developing dementia. We don’t fully understand all the reasons yet, but there’s a very prominent hypothesis that the deep, slow-wave sleep (the kind we get earlier in the night) helps the brain to clear out amyloid and tau proteins. These are the same proteins that build up in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s. 

If that deep sleep is disrupted or cut short, it may interfere with the brain’s ability to do this essential ‘cleaning’ process. And over time, that could be one of the factors that increases the risk of dementia. 

Why snoring might be more serious than you think  

Sleep apnea (sleep disordered breathing), often linked to snoring, is another important piece of the puzzle. People with moderate sleep apnea are actually deoxygenated at least 15 times an hour while they sleep. That triggers micro-awakenings – tiny interruptions that you might not even be aware of, but that stop you reaching the deeper stages of sleep. We think that’s particularly harmful for the brain.

We’re launching a major study across six UK sites to explore this further. There’s already quite convincing data suggesting that sleep apnea increases dementia risk. We don’t yet have the data to show that if we treat it, we slow down dementia. So, we’re at a really important point for clinical research.  

The Bristol Brain Centre: research and care side by side 

The Bristol Brain Centre brings together clinical care and research under one roof, so people coming to us with memory or cognitive concerns get expert care as well as the chance to take part in cutting-edge research. I lead the ReMemBR group (Research into Memory, the Brain and Dementia) comprising neurologists, psychologists and researchers. Everyone brings something different, and that’s key to both our care and our research.  

We focus on early diagnosis, because we believe that gives people the best chance of preserving their future brain health. We haven’t yet got a proven way of putting that into practice so as to actually reduce people’s risk of dementia and improve quality of life. So, we want to take the laboratory findings, test them in clinical populations and then find out what works. 

How early diagnosis has become a game-changer 

Since I started working in this field, I’ve seen huge developments in our ability to diagnose. We’re one of the only services, certainly in the south west, using fluid biomarkers through lumbar punctures to test spinal fluid for amyloid and tau, enabling us to detect Alzheimer’s earlier. And a new blood test has just become clinically available, which could soon mean fewer invasive tests. While diagnosis is getting easier for Alzheimer’s, other dementias like Lewy body can still be tricky to pick up early, especially when Parkinson’s-like symptoms haven’t appeared yet. So there’s still more to do. 

Where AI might come in  

What’s exciting is we’re now using artificial intelligence to personalise sleep advice. In one study, we tracked people’s activity, light exposure, noise and so on, then used AI to spot patterns: for example, someone might consistently sleep worse after using screens late at night. That kind of insight could help us offer individual advice to improve sleep and possibly reduce risk. 

We’re also hoping to work with colleagues at Cambridge using AI to analyse clinical data and flag people who are more likely to have Alzheimer’s, so that we can prioritise further testing where it’s needed. It’s promising. 

Dementia isn’t inevitable and there’s a lot we can do  

I think it’s important for people to know that dementia isn’t an inevitable part of ageing. There are real, proactive things we can all do to reduce risk, like managing blood pressure, staying mentally and physically active, eating well, limiting alcohol and getting quality sleep. People still fear a diagnosis, but early assessment is where we can make the biggest difference and offer treatments that we think might improve the quality of life to people who already have it. 

The sooner we see people, the more we can help. 

More inclusive research and care  

The University can really help to raise awareness of dementia by speaking in ways people understand, involving patients and the public in research, and raising awareness in underrepresented communities. Right now, certain groups aren’t even making it into clinic, so they’re missing out on care and trials.  

Dementia carries a stigma, and we can work to highlight the fact that being assessed for memory is a useful thing. There are things we can do to try and delay dementia and to improve cognition. So demystifying the process is helpful for everyone. 

Why dementia research is a brilliant career path  

Dementia research is such a rewarding field to be part of, and there are so many different avenues you can pursue. There’s a thriving laboratory research team at Bristol, but all around the country there’s an increasing recognition that neurodegenerative disease is one of the last frontiers of medicine that we really haven’t cracked yet. So, you get to be part of a growing business, as it were. 

There’s a real lack of people in a position to implement laboratory findings in the population, so I’d really encourage clinical researchers to get involved in this direction. It’s a privileged position where you get to work closely with all sorts of people including patients, medical doctors and scientists, and I hope we’ll be able to offer more positive treatments as we go on over the next few years. 

You can find out more about Professor Coulthard’s work via the University’s research pages. 

Where academia meets the games industry, things are afoot. Dr Mike Samuel, Lecturer in Digital Film and Television and Co-Director of the Bristol Digital Game Lab, explains how gaming can be a vehicle for public good – and recalls the role of the Atari 2600 in his own upbringing. 

The Bristol Digital Game Lab is a focal point for conversations between academia and industry about video games and culture – responding to a need, especially among our student body, for someone to broker those kinds of connections.  

In the last year, we’ve held lots of conversations with industry (including with the lead writers behind 2023’s Game of the Year Award-winning Baldur’s Gate 3), as well as ‘game jams’ where we bring people together to discuss and even create games with industry professionals and external parties. For example, we ran a successful game jam with Dr Edward King exploring the potential for games to respond creatively to the theme of algorithmic bias. Most conversations feed into further research; others result in working prototypes. We never know on the day – that’s one of the great things about it.  

We’re in an era of convergence, both in academia and in technology. It’s an exciting time to work in the intersection of different fields and consider the possibilities.   

Let the games begin 

My academic life began in film and television studies, but I’ve always loved and valued games. My Nan first introduced me to gaming when I was very young. She was a keen gamer, so on weekends we’d bond over the Atari 2600. Luckily, the rest of my family embraced games as well: for my sisters, it was The Sims and Rollercoaster Tycoon, and for my father, Vigilante8 and Grand Theft Auto. 

I was the first generation in my family to go to university: I was born into the fallout of Thatcher, in a South Wales post-mining town. We didn’t have much money, but my parents made time for art and for movies, and for talking about them as well. I guess that was their way of enabling us to escape our surroundings and to take pleasure in images and stories. On reflection, it was very much a humanities upbringing. 

That pleasure in talking about things has stayed with me. Some of our coders who come to our sessions are quite product-oriented: their end goal is to create a prototype – and that’s fantastic. But for me, the exciting product is the conversation itself, spending time with people and thinking through some of those bigger questions through the optic of games. It’s also beautiful to see some of those ideas articulated, whether or not they result in a new game.  

Birth of a notion 

Actually, we have started to create a game ourselves, about postnatal depression (PND). This has really been my baby (aside from my other babies, human or otherwise). It came out of a frustration: after I became a new father three years ago, I personally experienced depression. What little information and resources I did find were the traditional pamphlets with condescending language and mindfulness imagery – the sort of thing I’ve always been allergic to. So, I started out by asking myself: how would I like to find this information? I also had a wider interest in engaging men more in conversations about mental health, and to create a tool that they’re likely to use. 

I started working with a talented digital artist, Dr Danny Bacchus, and with my colleague, Dr Richard Cole, and we had early discussions with third-sector mentors and found statistical research confirming that men are more willing to access information if it’s both visual and interactive. That’s the definition of a video game right there! And we’re clearly not alone; indeed, over the last decade, various games have engaged with mental health (see Firewatch, Depression Quest and That Dragon, Cancer, to name just a few), and others have been used in therapy (for instance, the use of first-person shooter games in post-traumatic stress treatments for army veterans).   

Rather than writing a narrative for our game (as there’s no single narrative around postnatal depression), we settled on creating a spatial experience. Within everyday spaces (a park, a supermarket, a kitchen, a bedroom), players’ experiences are shaped by randomly generated symptoms which affect the gameplay mechanics, from altering player movement through spaces to distorting the visual elements. 

The long game 

Now that we have a working videogame prototype, it’s time to work with partners and connections in the health sector and the third sector to test the product’s potential within the context of PND support and talking therapy, and to liaise with others to ensure its longevity as a resource. 

There’s more we want to try – for example, immersive tech (if it’s not too immersive for a complex, sensitive topic like mental health). But most importantly, we see this game as part of the Bristol Digital Game Lab’s wider philosophical and commercial agenda as a source of inspiration and a platform for the creation of games as a public service. This is something I’m passionate about, and we’re definitely making it a reality. 

---

You can find out more about the Bristol Digital Game Lab’s recent work – including the game jam on algorithmic bias – in their 2024 end-of-year summary and the accompanying video.  

‘Clean water shouldn’t be a luxury – it’s a fundamental right,’ says Dr Jagannath Biswakarma, Senior Research Associate in the School of Earth Sciences. For him, this mission is deeply personal, driving his research and advocacy to tackle arsenic contamination, with promising outcomes already emerging.

My research at the University focuses on understanding the complex molecular-scale processes that occur in soils and waters – especially where they interact. These processes directly impact water quality and treatment. With Associate Professor James Byrne and our team here, I’ve been working on a project that explores arsenic contamination in groundwater and how arsenic behaves under different environmental conditions.  

Areas in South East Asia – particularly northeastern India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Vietnam – are highly prone to geogenic arsenic contamination. Arsenic is deceptive: it doesn’t give any colour or taste to the water, so if you extract water from the ground and it’s clean, clear and tasteless, it’s not necessarily safe to drink. We recently discovered that the highly toxic, dominant form of arsenic in groundwater can be converted into a less mobile, less toxic form. 

Puzzle pieces on the career path 

I grew up in Assam, a region rich in biodiversity and natural resources but burdened by arsenic contamination in groundwater. Looking back, it feels like every piece of the puzzle has had a purpose in shaping me. When I was 15, I wrote an essay on environment and water pollution for my school magazine. It felt like a small act, but it gave me a sense of purpose. I had initially planned to become an aeronautical engineer and was even accepted into a program. But my grandmother gently encouraged me to reconsider. Around the same time, my mathematics teacher introduced me to biotechnology, and I found myself drawn to the environmental applications of science. I went on to study industrial biotechnology in Chennai.  

My studies took me to Japan for an internship with the Hiyoshi Corporation, where I focused on soil and water quality analysis. After returning to India, I joined the Defence Research Laboratory, investigating medicinal plant extracts as sustainable alternatives to chemical fertilizers to mitigate fungal infections in agriculture. Following graduation, I went back to Hiyoshi and helped to build a start-up in Chennai dedicated to environmental monitoring. 

After that, I spent nearly a decade in Switzerland, pursuing my postgraduate to postdoctoral studies at Eawag and in ETH Zurich, where I deepened my knowledge of geochemistry, water sustainability, and environmental regulation – and crucially, I also acquired the language of diplomacy. This skill has proven essential in transforming scientific findings into actionable policies. From there, I arrived in Bristol in 2022 at the School of Earth Sciences, which opened the door to new research and innovative approaches to addressing the arsenic problem. 

The Ronaldo of arsenic 

Research can be humbling: one day, I feel brilliant for designing an experiment, and the next, I’m rethinking everything because it didn’t work. But those challenges make the breakthroughs even more meaningful. Science isn’t interested in pleasing our egos! But it’s great at making us approach a problem in innovative ways. My friends fondly call me the ‘Ronaldo of arsenic research’ because I’m always chasing goals to mitigate this invisible crisis. And it’s true – I’m driven. 

This February, I was back in Assam to collect more groundwater samples to gain better understanding of the factors that affect the mobility and toxicity of arsenic in the region. In one village, I watched a family drawing crystal-clear water from a well that I knew was laced with arsenic, which strengthened my resolve to alert the community, as we always do in these cases. Many of these sources are also used for irrigating crops like rice, which can absorb arsenic from the water. The contamination enters the food chain, compounding the risk. But scientific research alone is not enough! 

The science diplomat 

Arsenic of any type or concentration is toxic: chronic exposure causes illnesses such as skin lesions and cancers. To solve the whole problem, we need decentralized treatment plants with a thorough protocol, skilled human resources, policymakers, nongovernmental organizations, and behavioral change experts. In short, solving the arsenic problem isn’t just about chemistry – it’s about people and policies. So, government interventions are crucial. 

In India, the Ministry of Water Resources runs the Jal Jeevan Mission, a national water distribution agency that aims to provide adequate water for everyone – but proper quality control hasn’t been a priority. To convince the government to change that, we the scientists also need to be diplomats and use appropriate language. At Eawag, I learned valuable lessons in translating research into policy from my PhD advisor, Professor Janet Hering, who was a director of one of the world-leading water research institutes in Switzerland (again, those puzzle pieces have fallen into place!).   

These conversations are now happening: in February, I was invited to an investment and infrastructure summit in Assam- Advantage Assam 2.0, inaugurated by the Prime Minister. This provided an excellent platform to share my research insights and advocate for safer water practices. Although our work is rooted in Assam, the insights we gain here at Bristol directly inform global efforts to protect communities facing similar arsenic challenges elsewhere. 

It’s a daunting challenge, but I’m committed to making a difference in these vulnerable communities — the communities I come from. Because, wherever you live, clean water shouldn’t be a luxury – it’s a fundamental right. 

 

Some of our tissues and organs can be pretty handy at repairing themselves – except when they’re not, for various reasons. That’s where regenerative medicine comes in. Dr Helen Weavers, Associate Professor in Cell and Developmental Biology in the School of Biochemistry, takes us into the world of tissue resilience and describes the pleasure of witnessing the wonders of natural tissue repair first-hand. 

In regenerative medicine, we explore ways to either repair or replace damaged organs or tissues in the body, whether that’s because of injury, disease or age. Some tissues in our bodies – the liver, gut and skin, for example – can naturally regenerate themselves very well, and often do so as a matter of course (although this self-repair ability declines as we get older). What can we learn from these organs, and can we extend it to other places in the body? 

The concept has been around for a while, but the technology has accelerated in the last few years, thanks to new techniques that enable us to do things like growing human tissue or an organ in the lab. This, together with our growing biological knowledge, has made the idea of regenerative medicine much closer to becoming a reality in the clinic.  

Art + science = career  

My parents tell me that as a child I always wanted to understand how things worked. I’d take things apart to figure out how they were made, then put them back together again. But I probably liked art more than science to begin with. In fact, to be a good scientist, I think you need to be quite creative and come up with new ideas and approaches. So it makes sense that I’m doing what I’m doing now. 

I studied biological sciences at university, but I didn’t really know I wanted to do research until I had a short summer project in one of the labs when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. I loved developing my own ideas and designing experiments to test them. My supervisor for that project, Professor Helen Skaer, was inspirational – a really successful female group leader who also had a very active family and social life. I stayed on in her lab for a PhD, after which I came to Bristol. 

Getting the group together

Sometimes things align in delightfully unexpected ways. I’d worked on kidney biology during my PhD, then at Bristol I switched to something completely different – skin wound repair and inflammation. When I was thinking about what I wanted to focus on in my own research lab, I started exploring where else these important pathways for skin repair might be useful or important for. I hadn’t thought about the kidney for quite a few years, but after generating some intriguing data, it suddenly struck me that these two processes – how a kidney works and how skin heals itself – might actually have lots of similarities. Kidneys are constantly under stress and employ similar ‘resilience’ pathways to stay healthy. So I started my lab on that basis, and it’s what we work on now. 

The lab is in constant flux but currently has eight members. Having a whole team of people, all interested in the same fundamental biology and helping to develop the projects with their own unique ideas, makes the whole experience really exciting. Many of the PhD students and some postdocs that I supervise, work jointly with other labs and group leaders in the Faculty, which offers great opportunities to collaborate with other groups; and the students and postdocs get to experience how other groups approach research.  

Science, life and the future

I’d always read that embryos and young children heal very quickly, often without scarring, and that we lose some of that ability as we get older. But I’d had no personal experience of it – until recently, with my baby. They’ve got surprisingly sharp nails, and they often scratch themselves accidentally, and it’s amazing to see a bad-looking cut one day and think: ‘Oh my goodness, how have they done that to themselves?’ – then to find the next day that their skin is perfect again. I think it’s really cool that all these things I talk about in lectures or read about in textbooks I can now actually see for myself. 

With modern medicine enabling people to live longer, the field of healthy ageing is growing massively. There’s a big drive to make those later years healthier, for example by improving older people’s kidney, brain, or heart function. So we want to understand why a kidney works well, and then why it doesn’t work so well when you get older or have a particular disease. And then we want to use that basic science insight to come up with therapies that might, for example, prevent a kidney in an older person from losing its function as much as before. 

I’m on maternity leave at the moment, and I love spending time with my baby son, but I haven’t stopped thinking about science. I really like my keep-in-touch days when I come into the department to catch up with my lab and discuss their research. The fact that I still want to talk about the science, even during maternity leave, has made me realise this is the right career for me. 

---

You can read more details of Dr Weavers’ research at tissueresilience.com, and in a news article about her Women in Cell Biology Early Career Medal 2025.

 

To mark International Women’s Day, Ololade Adesanya, a member of the University’s Board of Trustees and Chair of the Board’s Audit and Risk Committee, shares her reflections about her mentors, turning points, and what needs to be done to create a truly diverse and equitable environment for women in business. 

‘Cats are an oddity’, says Dr Emily Blackwell, who should know: she’s Senior Lecturer in Animal Behaviour and Welfare at Bristol Veterinary School and Director of the Bristol Cats Study. Dr Blackwell discusses matters canine and (mostly) feline, and how her work can sometimes require skills associated with a certain fictional Victorian detective. She begins with two ‘career origin stories’, in the interests of balance: a dog one and a cat one.  

When I was a child, our school playing fields backed onto our garden and I used to hear my dog howling sometimes if Mum had gone out and left her at home. At the time, I didn’t know that dogs could have separation issues, but it got me interested in the different ways our pets behave, especially ways that make life uncomfortable – both for us and for them. 

My grandma had a rescue cat called Rusty who would hide under the bed, and if you had bare feet, she would come out and attack them. My brother and I were desperate to stroke her and play with her, but she was just too frightened. Feeling sympathy for Rusty probably sparked my interest in cats and their psychological needs.  

When I started my research into companion animal behaviour and welfare, it was mainly with dogs, because the Dogs Trust funded my first lectureship. Then about seven years ago I began managing the Bristol Cats Study. I don’t have much time for clinical work these days, but in my spare time I treat pets with various behaviour problems, and I teach on our veterinary and vet nursing courses.    

Kittens of the 2010s 

The Bristol Cats Study is ‘the cat version of Children of the 90s’. It was set up in 2010 on a shoestring, then Cats Protection started funding it, and now we also have funding from Waltham Petcare Science Institute. We recruited kittens aged between eight and 16 weeks – 2,400 of them in the end, quite impressive before social media was a thing – and we have just under a thousand left, which isn’t bad. Some, sadly, have died, others’ owners have dropped out of the study or moved. 

Everyone involved in the cat world always says that cat owners go above and beyond, so if you’re interviewing a cat owner, allow double the amount of time you would a dog owner. But they’re amazing – without them we couldn’t do the study.  

Bristol Cats has had a direct impact on policy: for instance, Cats Protection want to find out whether early neutering impacts upon a range of health issues, including obesity, and the results of that study will be published soon. Also, we’ve characterised the feline gut microbiome for the first time, and two papers on that are due this year.  

Sanity claws 

Cats are an oddity. Their ancestral species is the African Wildcat, which is solitary, but through domestication they’ve developed an ability to form social groups. Pet cats can live relatively harmoniously, providing they’ve got the right household environment and resources, but there are things that owners might not notice – for example, that one cat might be sitting staring in a doorway and blocking the other cat’s access. 

The biggest cause of stress for pet cats is probably other cats. We usually do home visits for cat behaviour problems, and we ask questions about how they interact or react to different things: how do they react to strangers, to familiar people, to dogs in the household? Do other cats stare at them through the window? My favourite thing about being a clinician is that you’re a bit of a Sherlock Holmes, looking for clues and trying to work out how certain behaviour has developed, and how we can unpick that.

If you’re leading an observational study rather than doing clinical work, it can be a little frustrating: you’re observing what happens in the natural time course of the cats, and it’s really important that you don’t intervene. Owners will often say ‘There’s something going on between our cats’, and I’ll be longing to get in there and work it out. Obviously, if there’s a serious problem, we’ll direct them to an appropriate place, but we have to refrain from stepping in. 

Moving furward  

I’ve done quite a lot of TV work, which has been fantastic: I can see clients one-on-one in the clinic, which is really rewarding, but I can only see so many, whereas the first programme that I did – for a Channel 4 series called Dogs: Their Secret Lives – had two million viewers, and I had a full inbox the next day. A bit overwhelming, but it really opened my eyes to the impact you can have as an expert by working with the media.  

Anyone can call themselves a behaviourist, but I’ve spent most of my career trying to establish recognised ‘gold standard’ qualifications, and now our Veterinary Nursing degree is accredited with a professional body for clinical animal behaviourists. I sit on the committee for that organisation and help to set standards, which has been really gratifying. 

With Bristol Cats, what we want to do next is follow kittens from birth. That’s trickier, but early-life environment is critical to later behaviour. We also plan to look at rescue cats that are rehomed: what makes for a successful rehoming, and if it goes wrong, why? I’m quite excited about that side of things.  

As the University announces that it is taking the first steps towards opening a second micro-campus in Hartcliffe, Tara Miran, Civic Engagement Manager for the University’s Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus (TQEC), traces her path to this point, reflects on her drive to connect people, and looks to the future as she takes on the management of the University’s Barton Hill micro-campus. 

In a way, what has fuelled my desire to work in community engagement is my heritage. I’m Kurdish but I grew up in London, so I also identify as a Londoner and as a Bristolian.  

Kurdistan’s history over the last 100 years has seen war, displacement, genocide, civil unrest and colonisation. It’s now divided into four areas of land between different countries, and South Kurdistan, where I’m from, is the only one with an established Kurdish regional government (KRG), following elections in 1992. The Kurdish people’s ongoing struggle for fairness and justice drives me in a lot of what I do.  

I worked in the Voluntary Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector, then I went into Community Development at Bristol City Council. I worked with great grassroots initiatives that communities of the global majority and equalities groups are driving across our city, and I was able to serve as a bridge between these groups and the Council. I’d conducted some research for Bristol Women’s Voice and the Women’s Commission, interviewing women from the global majority who live around Temple Quarter about the barriers they faced to their career aspirations. In the process, I met Vanessa Kisuule, a city poet who was commissioning some poems for the Temple Quarter project, and she invited me to write one – which I did. So when this civic engagement post came up at the University, it had my name all over it.  

Community, family – and dentistry 

Lots of communities around the world can’t speak up for justice or fairness. I think that if I have the privilege and the ability to effect positive change, then I should be doing it. When it feels like the right thing to do, it doesn’t always feel like ‘hard work’, but there are the days and the nights where you’re physically tired and frustrated. That’s why it’s important to remain persistent and hopeful. 

Everyone should have access to basic services, like a dentist. When we were campaigning to save the St Paul’s Dental Practice, sometimes it was just me and my children handing out flyers or having conversations with local people. I would tell myself “Carry on, there’s going to be a light at the end”. Eventually, I’d get phone calls from media outlets, asking for an interview, and The Bristol Cable supported us all along. Gradually, like-minded people joined the campaign; when people also start giving back good energy and contributions, it fuels you to carry on. Community action is powerful and magical.   

I always have a group of people around me with similar passions and energy. And I have to give credit to my family: my children are always up for a good cause, and my husband is like my backbone. But people like me who are sometimes called ‘activists’ don’t want to always be campaigning for basic provision and services for our communities; we want to enjoy life. That’s why it’s important that we work effectively together to bring about positive change.  

Bristol bridges 

Coming into this job supporting civic engagement around Temple Quarter, I wanted to be a bridge between diverse local communities and the University, and a catalyst for meaningful conversations. Some communities are referred to as those of multiple deprivation, but they are also full of diverse, rich assets and possibilities! I’d like to think that people know me as someone who gets things done, who’s authentic, who is of these communities. I’m visibly a Muslim woman, and I’m in a minority in many places, including at the University, so representation and inclusion are very important to me.  

Now that I also manage Barton Hill micro-campus, working with the Civic Engagement team, we can continue the great things that have been going on there. I’ve got quite a wide network because of my previous work within Bristol – it’s like a directory in my head – so I’m keen to see how I can further enrich and contribute to the micro-campus’s journey.  

We’re also using everything we’ve done at Barton Hill and engaging with our civic partners and networks to think about how we’re creating the civic spaces at TQEC. How do we make them inclusive, so that there’s equity of use for city partners, equalities groups, staff and students when the campus opens in September 2026?   

One of the things I’m looking forward to seeing come to fruition on the Temple Quarter campus is the Story Exchange. This is a place for curating conversations between people with very different perspectives and experiences. It’s designed as a circle, so all perspectives are equal. We do this in different cultures across the world and throughout history– sitting in circles, sharing challenges, working on things together.

This is the focus of one of our current participatory art commissions, Charting Change.  I’m very excited to see how that all develops and how civic engagement will look and feel in TQEC.  

 

Technicians are a breed apart, but they’re also to be found working throughout the University. Fred Hale, Technical Safety Business Partner in Safety and Health Services, bangs the drum for these often ‘hidden’ heroes and heroines, explains Bristol’s commitment to its technical staff, points out one piece of their handiwork on another planet, and recalls his own lightbulb moment. 

When you hear the word ‘technician’, you might picture somebody coming out of a cupboard in an overall and putting some Bunsen burners out. Many of them do set up or run practical teaching sessions, and sometimes Bunsen burners are involved – but our technicians work at every grade in almost every department, and they contribute to teaching design as well.  

Technicians also support sustainability agendas: they worked with our Sustainability team to help Bristol become the first university in the world to achieve Green Labs Certification across the whole institution. During the pandemic, they weren’t just on site keeping the lights on – they also played a big role in developing some of the distance learning. And since they’re not part of the assessment process, technical staff can be a sort of ‘safe space’: they give students a lot of moral support and advice. 

Bristol, Japan, Mars…   

Whenever there’s a practical element, there are technicians playing a key role. That’s as true of departments in Arts as anywhere else – we’ve got technicians running sound studios in Music, working in Theatre, in Archaeology, and so on.  

Our technical staff make all kinds of other contributions behind the scenes. At the Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information, we have very low-vibration laboratories that provide a sort of blank canvas for very small forces, and we were contacted by the Mars InSight mission. They wanted to test a vibrometer they were sending to Mars to measure the vibrations of the inner planet. So our technicians provided the environment, set up the equipment and ran the test. The vibrometer’s still up there, sending back information.   

Not only that, but the technical workshop in the Faculty of Science and Engineering was involved in developing the drones that flew over Fukushima to test the radiation in the area after the 2011 nuclear accident there. They did a lot of work on the design of the drones and their sensors. 

Getting technical

I was very much into aeroplanes as a child. I joined the Air Cadets, and we would fly Chipmunks and gliders out at Weston airport, but we’d also go to RAF stations, look round the hangars and watch the mechanics servicing the aircraft, and learn how the ejector seats worked. Seeing what everyone did to enable those planes to get into the air made me want to be a technician – and I started in the aerospace industry, with an apprenticeship at Rolls-Royce. 

Technical roles can combine intellectual challenge, knowledge and practical application. They’re a lot of fun – you get to play with interesting things and tackle a lot of stimulating challenges. Technicians definitely have shared traits: we enjoy helping people, and we enjoy seeing the light come on in someone’s eyes or watching something being achieved.   

 

There’s a common bond in technical teams. Their disciplines are very different, but their roles are quite similar. They’re often in those roles for their whole career, and very passionate about their subject.  

Making the commitment 

The Technician Commitment came about in 2017, driven by technicians with support from the Gatsby Foundation. Bristol was one of the first institutions to sign up – we already knew that we wanted to be much better in this area and to recognise the value that technicians bring to our work here.  

The Technician Commitment is a pledge from the organisation, and it looks at several pillars: acknowledging technical staff and their contributions; career development; and sustainability. We’ve just won an impact award for our third submission under the Commitment, in which we had to demonstrate how we’re progressing in those pillars and provide action plans signed by the Vice-Chancellor. 

We were quite pioneering at Bristol, and Staff Development and other teams at Bristol – in faculties, in Sustainability and elsewhere – have been very supportive and encouraging from early on. Our technical career framework is used and adopted across the sector as an example of good practice. We have communities and networks for research technicians and teaching technicians, and they often visit each other’s labs and share their approaches.  

The environment is always changing a little bit around us. We keep a weather eye on skills and how young people may enter technical roles, for example via T-levels or other qualifications. Other universities ask us about career frameworks and how they can adopt some of the things we do – I think that’s a sign that we’re in quite a good place.