In this Academic Seminar, Professor Nicola Wilson shares her passion and insights for collaboration, built up over the course of her career. From her earliest experiences of building collaborative relationships to create new referral pathways, through navigating the geopolitical landscape of trans-European research collaboration and into more recent years of interdisciplinary and interorganisational collaboration, she will share anecdotes and her insights

This talk will consider how the research of DISC and the outreach work of Basis have contributed to a rethink of the official infant sleep safety guidance in the UK to accommodate the needs of culturally diverse families and acknowledge the benefits to mothers and babies of sleeping together while providing information about hazards to avoid.

Most of us get a headache at one time or another. Some of us experience severe, even debilitating pain. But why do we experience headache? And what clues can be found in how we live our lives that can enable us to fight back or even stop them from happening at all?

Body weight and shape ideals are highly variable across time periods and across cultures, and laboratory research shows that our preferences are flexible. Visual media – both traditional and new social media forms – exert particular influence on conceptions of body attractiveness.

Stroke is a prevalent and disabling neurological condition, and visual perceptual impairments including partial loss of the visual field, or difficulties recognising objects or faces, and are a relatively common consequence.

The Covid-19 pandemic has left indelible marks on us all. Psychological and physiological scars that run deep, some that might never heal. For those working on the front line, particularly in healthcare, life has been especially challenging (Maben and Bridges, 2020) with unprecedented strain being placed on healthcare professionals around the globe (WHO, 2020).

In this Keynote, Professor Jane Macnaughton, Deputy Pro-vice-chancellor for Research discusses Interdisciplinary Research, its benefits and its challenges and how we hope to change research culture here at Durham University. 

Environment has a direct impact on how we feel. Research has demonstrated clear links between the visual landscape, patient recovery and general wellbeing. A view on to nature is known to have positive effects, reducing length of stay for hospital patients. For many, however, due to the design of hospital buildings, this is not an option.

The Covid-19 Pandemic created “extraordinary and sustained” pressures and in some cases demands for rationing critical resource including intensive care (ICU) beds, medical equipment and health professionals. Advanced systems modelling and simulation approaches can help.

In this talk, Dr Emily Webster examines the role of slum clearance and urban beautification projects undertaken by the Bombay Improvement Trust between 1898 and its dissolution in 1925 in the spread of plague across the city of Bombay.

Although mental health features prominently in contemporary discourse about human health and wellbeing, there are still critical gaps in historical accounts of twentieth-century psychiatry, related disciplines that led to the adoption of the broader concept of “mental healthcare”, as well as the spaces and places that supported these.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the relationship between the health of the city and good sanitation has never been more important. Sanitation is one of modern urban life’s most neglected issues.

This essay examines the role Dr James Africanus Beale Horton (1835–1883) played as an informatic architect who sought to re-engineer the relationship between data and disease in the media systems the British used to manage health in mid nineteenth century colonial Sierra Leone.

This paper will examine the architecture of the Aga Khan Medical Complex in Karachi in the context of hospital architecture in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It shows how the design team’s purpose was to put forward a different vision distinct from both the capitalist West and the Socialist East. 

Buildings shelter from rain, wind, heat and cold, provide sufficient space, and meet other requirements to serve their purpose. Whether a building achieves this can often be quantified and measured, and thus determined objectively. But what about its beauty and charm? Firstly, it is commonly argued that beauty, like other aesthetic characteristics, is simply a matter of subjective preference.