This half-day event will start with a keynote talk by leading expert Dr Ekaterina Hertog who will talk about how to make your research impactful and to engage your work with the public. This talk will be followed by a panel discussion with four more social scientists from range of disciplines and career stages who will talk about their own experiences in impact and engagement. The event will be interactive with lots of time for questions as well as a lunch provided for those in attendance. 

There is the option to join online as an audience member, however, we strongly recommend coming in-person (where possible) to get the most from the event.

Keynote:

Dr Ekaterina Hertog is the Associate Professor of AI and Society at the University of Oxford. Her research interests lie at the intersection of digital sociology and family sociology. Her current research explores how digital technologies transform family life, with a particular focus on the adoption and impact of AI and digital technologies in childcare. Her recent work examines the societal implications of digital monitoring technologies, investigating how these technologies affect parent-child relationships, children’s autonomy, and family well-being.

She has published a position paper on “Data Driven Parenting” as part of the British Academy Digital Good Society series and is developing a research programme on digital technologies in childcare. Her work on parental control technologies has received widespread media attention, including features in a BBC Ideas short film and podcasts by the Oxford Internet Institute and ParentZone.

This research builds upon her ESRC-funded DomesticAI project, which investigated how emerging technologies could free up or redistribute time currently devoted to childcare and housework, and examined individual attitudes toward domestic automation. The project generated several highly sighted papers in journals including PLOS ONE, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, and Community Work and Family.

Panel Members: 

Professor Louise Mansfield is Professor of Sport, Health and Social Sciences and Vice Dean for Research in the College of Health Medicine and Life Sciences. She is Director of the Centre for Health and Wellbeing across the Lifecourse.  Her research focuses on the relationship between sport, physical activity and public health and wellbeing. Louise's expertise are in partnership and community approaches in sport and physical activity and issues of health, wellbeing, inequality and diversity. She has led research projects for the Department of Health, Youth Sport Trust, sportscotland, Economic and Social Research Council, Medical Research Council, Macmillan Cancer Support, Public Health England and Sport England. She sits on the editorial boards for Leisure Studies, Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health and the International Review for the Sociology of Sport and is Managing Editor of Annals of Leisure Research. Louise is known for developing evidence to inform policy and practice.

Dr Maria Paula Prates is a medical anthropologist interested in the embodied inequalities of the Anthropocene, specially that concerning Indigenous Women in lowland South America. She has been working with and among the Guaran-Mbyá in the last 20 years. She has ongoing research projects in reproductive justice, encompassing birthing, unconsented episiotomies, sterilization and c-section, and on the imbricated relation between Tuberculosis and environmental degradation. Dr Prates came to the UK in 2018 as a Newton International Fellowship (British Academy and Newton Fund). Before joining the Department of Anthropology at UCL, I was Adjunct Professor in Anthropology of Health at UFCSPA, Brazil. 

Dr Doug Leasure's research spans demography, population ecology, Bayesian statistics, and GIS/remote sensing. He specialises in developing novel methods to map population sizes and demographics with high spatial resolution in data-sparse settings by supplementing traditional survey data with innovative new data sources including social media activity and space-based Earth observations. His work developing bespoke hierarchical Bayesian modelling approaches aims to account for uncertainty in demographic estimation processes to support informed decision-making for crisis response, census support, government services, and global health initiatives. To promote research with real-world impacts, Doug is committed to open science and enjoys developing web applications that translate scientific results into easy-to-navigate interactive maps and tools to facilitate uptake by stakeholders globally.

Professor Jenn Dowd is a quantitative social and health scientist with interdisciplinary training in demography, economics, epidemiology and infectious disease. Her research seeks to understand how social and biological processes interact over the life course and how social factors “get under the skin” to impact health. She has studied how socioeconomic status shapes immune function and risk of infections as well as links between infections and chronic diseases of aging. On-going projects include understanding the social determinants of the human microbiome and the causes of stalling life expectancy in the US and UK as Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Project MORTAL. She is currently researching social and demographic factors related to COVID-19, and is also part of an all-female team of PhD health scientists interpreting and curating COVID-19 and other science for a general audience at Those Nerdy Girls. 

10:00    Coffee and Welcome

10:15    Keynote: Ekaterina Hertog 

11:00    Talk Q&A 

11:20   Comfort Break

11:40    Panel discussion: Katya Hertog (Oxford), Louise Mansfield (Brunel), Maria Paula Prates (UCL), Doug Leasure (Oxford), Jenn Dowd (Oxford)

12:40   General Q&A

13:00    Lunch provided