Leverhulme Research Centre For Forensic Science

Shows

The Nature Recovery PodcastA Developer, an Ecologist and a Social Scientist Walk into a Habitat Bank…Send us a textGuestsNatalie Duffus (DPhil student, Dept. of Biology)https://naturerecovery.ox.ac.uk/people/natalie-duffus/Matti Troiano (Research Assistant, School of Geography and the Environment)https://naturerecovery.ox.ac.uk/people/mattia-troiano/Host: Stephen Thomas (Centre Manager, Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery) In this illuminating episode, we tackle the increasingly tangled web of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) and get an update on what is happening with its current implementation. We also look at the Nature Restoration Fund — two maj...2025-06-2346 min

London FuturistsAnticipating an Einstein moment in the understanding of consciousness, with Henry ShevlinOur guest in this episode is Henry Shevlin. Henry is the Associate Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, where he also co-directs the Kinds of Intelligence program and oversees educational initiatives. He researches the potential for machines to possess consciousness, the ethical ramifications of such developments, and the broader implications for our understanding of intelligence. In his 2024 paper, “Consciousness, Machines, and Moral Status,” Henry examines the recent rapid advancements in machine learning and the questions they raise about machine consciousness and moral status. He suggests that public...2025-05-2842 min

The We SocietyMorality in UK prisons with Alison LieblingWe probe the UK prison system with Professor Alison Liebling, a Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Cambridge and the Director of the Institute of Criminology’s Prisons Research Centre. In this episode, she discusses the complexities surrounding prison officers, their often-underappreciated skills, and the critical role they play in maintaining order and humanity on the wings. Professor Liebling’s research on prisons spans over three decades with a particular interest in the moral landscapes of prison life. Her research has led to a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. This Fellowship allows...2025-05-2828 min

ResearchPodHow digitality is changing our spacesSpace is a key feature of social life. But does the digitalisation of society affect its spatial dimensions, and if so, how? In this podcast, Leverhulme Visiting Professor Theodore Schatzki discusses his work exploring digitality, different types of space and notions of virtual realities, such as cyber space.With Dale Southerton and Leverhulme Visiting Professor Theordore Schatzki.This podcast is brought to you by the Centre for Sociodigital Futures – a flagship research centre, funded by the ESRC and led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with 12 other Universities in the UK and glo...2025-05-0130 min

The Nature Recovery PodcastNature Finance – Opportunities, Challenges, and What Comes Next?Send us a textNature Finance – Opportunities, Challenges, and What Comes NextIn this episode, we delve into the fast-evolving world of nature finance — with a focus on schemes emerging in England, and insights relevant to the global shift toward blended finance for nature recovery. As governments increasingly look to private investment to complement public funding, what’s working, what’s not, and where is this movement headed?We explore the key challenges facing nature finance today, from market design to policy uncertainty, and discuss promising innovations that could shape the future o...2025-04-2936 min

The Nature Recovery PodcastUncovering Ohio Nature Recovery: Part 2Send us a textDiscussing Ohio's beautiful forests and northern Ohio nature recovery efforts with Jessica Miller Mecaskey, Consulting Forester at Holden Forests and Gardens, one of the U.S.'s largest and foremost arboretums. Bio:Jessica Miller Mecaskey was born and raised in Northeast Ohio and is a forestry and natural resource professional with specialization in woodland ecosystems, experienced in forest management from every part of the management cycle. She currently assists landowners as a Consulting Forester out of the Holden Arboretum, assisting private woodland owners to meet their goals to keep f...2025-04-2859 min

London FuturistsHuman extinction: thinking the unthinkable, with Sean ÓhÉigeartaighOur subject in this episode may seem grim – it’s the potential extinction of the human species, either from a natural disaster, like a supervolcano or an asteroid, or from our own human activities, such as nuclear weapons, greenhouse gas emissions, engineered biopathogens, misaligned artificial intelligence, or high energy physics experiments causing a cataclysmic rupture in space and time.These scenarios aren’t pleasant to contemplate, but there’s a school of thought that urges us to take them seriously – to think about the unthinkable, in the phrase coined in 1962 by pioneering futurist Herman Kahn. Over the last coupl...2025-04-2343 min

The Nature Recovery PodcastUncovering Ohio Nature Recovery: Part 1Send us a textThis podcast covers topics including current environmental threats to Ohio's habitats and species, nature recovery work being undertaken in urban and rural areas, as well as ways people can become involved in Ohio nature recovery. In Part 1 of our Ohio Nature Recovery series, we will be talking with Anna Zaremba, the Nature-based Solutions Sustainability Manager for the City of Cleveland, Ohio as well as Dr. Lara Roketenetz, Biological Field Station Director for the University of Akron, and Dr. Randall Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Akron. 2025-04-1646 min

The Cluster F Theory Podcast39. Public/Publics- Merve EmreMerve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Merve is the author of a host of books including Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) The Personality Brokers (Doubleday: New York, 2018), which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, the Economist, NPR, CBC, and the Spectator, and informs the CNN/HBO Max documentary feature film Persona. She is the editor of Once and Future Feminist (Camb...2025-03-2050 min

The Numberphile PodcastCounting Crayons - with Po-Ling LohPo-Ling Loh is an American theoretical statistician based at the University of Cambridge. She discusses her childhood, choosing a university, and her path to higher dimensional statistics and differential privacy.She also compares life as an academic in the US and UK.This episode was made possible by the Leverhulme Trust, a UK-based organisation which funds ambitious blue skies research across various disciplines - https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/Professor Loh was the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize. More about her prize here - https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/news/philip-leverhulme-prize-winners-2023 2024-12-1439 min

The Nature Recovery PodcastLeading From The Front: the role of the public sector in delivering nature recoverySend us a textThis week I'm joined by Andrew Allen, the lead policy advocate on land use for the woodland trust. We will be discussing their new report out on the 3rd of December and how it attempts to encourage more debate as to how we go about recovering nature.You can find a link to the report here:https://www.naturerecovery.ox.ac.uk/projects/exploring-the-role-of-the-state-in-achieving-nature-recovery/The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners.2024-12-0325 min

Israel and Palestine UnpackedEp. 6 Human Rights and Palestinian Youth - Dr Erika JiménezIn today’s episode we are speaking with Dr Erika Jiménez, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Law and a Mitchell Institute Fellow, Queen’s University Belfast. Dr Jiménez has just published a book called Rethinking human rights: critical insights from Palestinian youth, which looks at how Palestinian teenagers from the West Bank make sense of human rights when their lived experiences outside of the school environment contrast with what they learn about human rights within the school setting. Erika is currently leading a resear...2024-11-1223 min

The Nature Recovery PodcastStakeholder engagement for landscape-scale recoverySend us a textThis month sees the publication of The Nattergal Report on Stakeholder Engagement Best Practice for Landscape-scale Nature Recovery Projects. Developed for the Boothby Wildland Landscape Recovery project, and funded via the DEFRA Landscape Recovery Development Phase, the report was led by the Countryside and Community Research Institute (CCRI) at the University of Gloucestershire and the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Agile Initiative projects at Oxford University, with the objective of establishing a framework for enhancing and embedding stakeholder engagement into nature restoration.Ben Hart, Head of Operations at Nattergal said: “As...2024-10-3044 min

The Nature Recovery PodcastFinancing Community Nature Recovery with Christoph WarrackSend us a textWho pays is a challenging question in any nature recovery project. In this episode we chat with Christoph Warrack of Woodland Savers (https://woodlandsavers.org/) about how they use a mix of finance sources to enable community ownership of natural areas. Reports referenced:The Lawton Review - Making Space for Nature (2010), and The State of Natural Capital report (2024).The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners. ...2024-10-1447 min

The Nature Recovery PodcastSocial Justice, Conservation and Complexity with Professor E.J. Milner-GullandSend us a textOur guest this week is Professor Dame E.J. Milner-Gulland who is the Tasso Leventis Professor of Biodiversity at Oxford. She leads the Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science, founded the Conservation Optimism organization and co-founded the Saiga Conservation Alliance. In June 2024 she published a perspectives piece entitled Now is the time for conservationists to stand up for social justicehttps://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002657In this podcast we discuss some of the questions she raises in that piece and a range of i...2024-08-1224 min

Inside Forensic ScienceSeries 3: The VerdictWhat did our experts and the jury of the day decide? How can people make a decision when experts disagree and who can be an expert in criminal cases? This episode covers all of the details and also answers the question of what happened to Scott and Monson after the trial. Join us on Facebook to see further resources and discuss the podcast or visit our website. Inside Forensic Science is an Adventurous Audio Ltd production for the Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science (LRCFS) at the University of Dundee and was funded by The Le...2024-08-0138 min

Inside Forensic ScienceSeries 3: The ExperimentsContent warning: graphic descriptions of injury and death involving a gun and mention of suicide Accident or murder? To determine which is the most likely explanation for Hambrough’s death, experts in both 1893 and the present carry out experiments to test what distance the shot could have come from. What exactly can these experiments tell us about what happened on that fateful day and what are their limitations? Join us on Facebook to see further resources and discuss the podcast or visit our website. Inside Forensic Science is an Adventurous Audio Ltd production for t...2024-07-2544 min

Inside Forensic ScienceSeries 3: The MotiveAlfred John Monson is accused of the murder of young Dudley Cecil Hambrough. For over 3 years Monson had acted not only as Hambrough’s tutor and guardian, but as his friend. What motive could there have been for Monson to commit murder? The prosecution say money. Join us for this episode as we scrutinise personal accounts, financial documents and the arguments made by both the prosecution and defence regarding Monson’s motives for murder. View our Facebook page for further resources and discuss the podcast or visit our website. Inside Forensic Science is an Adve...2024-07-1832 min

Inside Forensic ScienceSeries 3: The Postmortem and the GunContent warning: this episode contains graphic descriptions of the autopsy process. A young man has been shot dead on a hunting trip; his two hunting companions are suspected of murder. With Monson arrested and Scott on the run, attention turns to the body. What can an autopsy tell us about how someone died? Can the postmortem and knowledge of ballistics tell us whether this death was truly a murder or an accident? Join us on Facebook to see further resources and discuss the podcast or visit our website. Inside Forensic Science is an Ad...2024-07-1143 min

Inside Forensic ScienceBonus Episode for Series 3: VR and Forensic ScienceThis is a bonus episode designed to accompany Episode 2 of Series 3. It features an interview between Pennie Stuart and Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science Senior Research Engineer Vincenzo Rinaldi about the application of Virtual Reality in forensic science. 2024-07-0519 min

Inside Forensic ScienceSeries 3: The SceneThe police believe the death of Cecil Hambrough was no accident. His tutor Alfred John Monson is arrested for his murder 20 days after the incident. Scott, the last member of the hunting party has disappeared. Now it is up to the experts to gather what evidence they can from the scene. But after all that time, is there any evidence left to find? This episode discusses what evidence may have been lost from the Ardlamont scene and what steps we take today to preserve a crime scene. Join us on Facebook to see further resources an...2024-07-0443 min

Inside Forensic ScienceSeries 3: A DeathThe early morning of Thursday 10 August 1893, a party of three men leave to hunt rabbits on the Ardlamont estate in Tighnabruaich—only two return. The youngest, Lieutenant Dudley Cecil Hambrough has died from a bullet to the back of his head. The local doctor decrees the death an accident, but is the story really so clear cut? In this episode, we question what evidence might have been lost following Hambrough’s death and what steps investigators take today to confirm whether a death was accidental or the result of a crime. Join us on Facebook to see...2024-06-2739 min

People Behind the Science Podcast766: Dr. Jo Dunkley: Cosmic Conquests – Seeking to Answer Key Questions About Our UniverseDr. Jo Dunkley is a Professor of Physics and Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University and author of the book Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide. She received her MSci with First Class Honors in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge and her PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Oxford. Afterwards, she conducted postdoctoral research and was subsequently a Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University. Before joining the faculty at Princeton University, Jo served on the faculty at the University of Oxford. Over the course of her career, Jo has received numerous awards and honors including the Maxwell Me...2024-06-2431 min