Join us for a walking tour through the museum and discover some of the inspiring research taking place at the University of Sydney, brought to life through unexpected connections with the museum's exhibits.
The inaugural Research Encounters: Museum exhibits through a new lens is a creative public engagement event featuring a series of short talks by early to mid-career researchers.
Based on the award-winning ‘New Perspectives’ program at the University of Nottingham, the event will take audiences on an interdisciplinary journey through the museum’s collection, offering fresh perspectives on both the exhibits and research taking place at the University of Sydney.
This event is organised by the Researcher Development Unit in collaboration with the Chau Chak Wing Museum.
*Please note this is a walking tour within the museum where you'll be guided between different exhibits, and involves standing to listen to each of the 8 short presentations.
Learn more about the researchers who are sharing their work with you as part of this Research Encounters event.
Dr Imogen Harper is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies and Charles Perkins Centre. For Research Encounters, she will be talking about young people’s experiences of chronic illness, and how assumptions about both young people and chronic illness can hinder access to medical and social support. She will consider what it feels like to be at the centre of silence, including how illness can come to feel like something you should keep hidden, and the power of speaking about these shared experiences.
Dr Jessica Orchard is an Associate Professor and NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow at the Sydney School of Public Health, where she leads ARENA, the first Australasian registry of athlete screening ECGs. ARENA is building the evidence to make screening more accurate, with the ultimate aim of preventing sudden cardiac death in young people. Her Research Encounters talk begins with Pheidippides, the Greek runner who collapsed and died carrying news of victory from Marathon to Athens, and asks one deceptively simple question: how do we reliably tell which young athletes are at risk? Along the way, she unpacks the exercise paradox, how ARENA is building the data we've been missing for female athletes, and why everyone should know CPR.
Dr Monica Liu is a dietitian and early career researcher at the Charles Perkins Centre. Her research focuses on nutrition interventions, food environments, and supporting people with diabetes to achieve remission and sustainable health behaviour changes. In her Research Encounters talk, Monica will draw connections between the ancient Pompeii city and today's food environment, exploring how modern surroundings make weight gain and chronic disease more likely. She will also share her team's current research on an innovative online program that is helping people with diabetes work towards remission through dietary change.
Dr Neda Mohammadi is a Sydney Horizon Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the School of Project Management. Her research lies at the intersection of humans and infrastructure systems – how humans interact with city systems like mobility, energy, healthcare and communication at various scales. Neda's Research Encounters talk will explain smart city digital twins and their potential benefits to society. (TBC)
Dr Peggy Polias is a composer working with music to explore ways that historic myths, stories and artefacts resonate within contemporary society. Peggy’s Greek familial heritage has led to a particular interest in unravelling and transforming the stories of women in ancient Greek and Roman myth. For Research Encounters, she will talk about her creative research into themes of safety and secrecy in sound, and the parallels between communicating as a composer and women’s reflections on communicating and moving through public spaces.
Dr Sam Jeralds is a Lecturer in Algebra in the School of Mathematics and Statistics. A native of east Tennessee, he has been part of the School of Maths since February 2024. Sam's Research Encounters talk examines how we encode intricate information into understandable models, both in the contexts of his research in Representation Theory and more broadly.
Birds do not sign branding agreements, yet Australian companies have been borrowing their images, voices and personalities for generations. In Borrowed Wings, Dr Suwen Chen, an entrepreneurship and management scholar at the University of Sydney Business School, explores how living birds are transformed into organisational names, logos and stories, and what becomes obscured along the way. Her talk asks a deceptively simple question: when an organisation borrows a bird’s identity, what does it owe the bird in return?
Dr Zsuzsanna Dancso thinks about knots for a living. She is an Associate Professor in Mathematics and Statistics and a quantum topologist. In this short visual journey into knot theory, she’ll explore what a simple piece of string can teach us about mathematics. Come and discover why knots are not only useful for artists, sailors and climbers, but can be used to understand the deep structure of shape and space.
