(In order of appearance:)
Fiona Hamilton is involved in therapeutic writing with people in the NHS and complementary healthcare, and in reflective practice and creative writing with diverse community groups. She is Arts Lead for the Portland Centre for Integrative Medicine, where she works with people using creative techniques to enhance wellbeing. Her publications include poetry collections, pieces for radio and public art.
Danny Pandolfi is the founder of Raise the Bar, a spoken word events night and YouTube channel, based in Bristol. It began as a series of events Danny put on while a student, and has aimed from the start at being a scene, and not a collective, offering everybody the opportunity to develop and be heard -- to raise the bar -- while bringing some of the biggest spoken-word artists in the UK and the world to its shows.
Mandeep Singh is a rapper and psychiatrist-in-training, with a particular interest in conscious rap. He also manages The Prop Up, London's neurodiverse urban music night, which pairs artists using music in mental health recovery with talent from London's underground jazz, hip-hop grime and soul musicians. He has worked with a wide variety of health organizations, opened the 2019 TEDxNHS with the NHS ELFT Choir at O2, and has been featured on BL@CKBOX.
Trevor Thompson is a Professor of Primary Care Education at the University of Bristol. His passion is for educational interventions that inform, challenge and inspire. He is co-founder of the Whole Person Care course for first-year students. He is also a GP partner at Wellspring, a multi-cultural practice set within an innovative healthy living centre. In 2012 he co-authored Sustainable Healthcare which explores the part medicine can play in easing our current environmental predicaments.
Jeff Brunstrom is Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol's Nutrition and Behaviour Unit. His research focuses on the psychobiological controls of food choice and food intake. One recent project is Nudge-it, aimed at better understanding the factors that drive food choice. Another involves cross-disciplinary resarch with a cultural anthropologist, looking at the diet of the Samburu, semi-nomadic pastoralists who live in Kenya. How culturally specific are the factors that drive food choice?
Ally Jaffee is the co-founder of Nutritank, an information and innovation hub for food, nutrition and lifestyle medicine focused on bringing change to medical education. Nutritank's current aim is to persuade each UK-based medical school to commit to increasing the time spent on nutrition and lifestyle education within the curriculum. There are now over twenty NutritankSocs at different medical schools. Ally is a Bristol Medical Student and the College of Medicine's student nutrition lead.
Anthony Warner is a professional chef, blogger and author of The Angry Chef (2017), a Guardian Best Food Book of the Year. In The Truth About Fat (2019) he turns his attention to what or who it is that makes us fat, what sort of a problem that is, and what should and shouldn't be done about it. He also writes the ‘Angry Chef' column for The Sunday Times and in 2017 was named on the Telegraph's Food Power List of tastemakers changing the way we eat and drink. He lives in Nottinghamshire, blogs at angry-chef.com and you can follow him @One_Angry_Chef.
Juliana Buhring's first book, Not Without My Sister (2007), written with her sisters, gives the details of their lives growing up in, and leaving, the Children of God. This Road I Ride (2016) is the story of how she set the first Guinness World Record for the Fastest Woman to Circumnavigate the World by Bicycle. She was the only woman to race the inaugural Transcontinental Race, coming in 9th place overall. She is the organizer of the The Two Volcano Sprint, a not-for-profit 1100km, 24,000m+ event promoting eco-sustainability in south Italy. You can follow her @JulianaBuhring.
Emily Chappell is a former cycle courier, the first woman home in Transcontinental No.4, a 4,000km bike race across Europe, a founder member of The Adventure Syndicate, and lead cyclist for @rideleloop. Where There's a Will (2019) takes us into the mind of the ultra-distance racer, a strange place of joy, self-doubt, sleep deprivation, liberty, and all-round intensity of emotion that is hard to grasp. 'Emily Chappell is one of the most inspiring athletes on the planet. This book makes us see just how much is possible.' - Chris Cleave (The Other Hand). You can follow her @emilychappell.
Matt Jones is a Professorial Research Fellow in Neuroscience at the University of Bristol. His research group are interested in the ways in which the brain manages to integrate experience into memory, and in the key role of sleep - when some parts of the brain are at their most active - in making that integration happen. The research group's ultimate aim is to understand how and why this process of integration can become impaired, and how that impairment may relate to anxiety, schizophrenia, epilepsy and other diseases.
Jonathan Robinson is Lead Applied Exercise Physiologist at Team Bath, University of Bath. Jonathan has providing sport science support, with a particular emphasis on lab-based applied sport science to endurance and team sports athletes, to a wide variety of national governing bodies including: UK Athletics, GB Swimming, GB Cycling, GB Rowing, and Paralympics GB’s Talent Transition Programme. He has also worked with professional sports clubs including: Bath (rugby), Bristol City, QPR, and Premier League Player Development Camps.
Anna Garvey has worked as a small animal Vet in England and Wales. She is passionate about animal behaviour, particularly anxiety in the veterinary practice and finding ways to minimise stress for patients. Having started a Masters by Research last year at the University of Bristol, Anna is working with the Bristol Cats Study to research the effects of stress on cats in the home environment.
Elena Ratschen is a Senior Lecturer in Health Services Research, specialising in applied health research using mixed methods, with a particular interest in developing and testing complex interventions. This has taken her work into the area of Human-Animal Interaction (HAI) and health and is the HAI research theme lead for this topic at the University of York. She has recently been funded to explore animal-assisted interventions and robot pet use in dementia care.
Marian Liebmann has worked at a day centre for ex-offenders, with Victim Support, in the probation service and as director of Mediation UK. She is also an art therapist and has run many training courses in restorative justice and art therapy in the UK and overseas. In 2013 she was awarded an OBE for services to social justice through art therapy and mediation. She currently helps with the Art Table at Borderlands drop-in centre for asylum seekers and refugees. She has written and edited 10 books, including Restorative Justice and Art Therapy and Anger.
Rissa Mohabir is the Founder and Executive Director of Trauma Awareness, a company which offers training for trauma-related service providers. She has over 30 years' experience as a trainer for medical doctors and homeopaths both in the UK and abroad, including in post-conflict Serbia and Croatia (2000-7). Rissa was listed by Bristol Women’s Voice as one of the fifty inspirational women of Bristol to mark International Women’s Day 2017. She is author of Under the Shade of a Tree: Somali Women Speak (2018) and Leaving our Homeland: Syria to the Isle of Bute (2018).
Forward Maisokwadzo works as manager of Bristol City of Sanctuary and is Inclusion Advisor to the Mayor. A journalist by profession, Forward is the current Chair of The MediaWise Trust, an ethics journalism charity. Forward was the first person to receive the European Network against Racism Foundation’s award in the individual category for outstanding achievement across Europe. Forward is driven by the desire to see an end to poverty and racism, and stands for social justice, climate justice and society's upholding of children's and refugees' rights.
Teresa Thornhill is a linguist, author, and child protection barrister with a special interest in the Middle East. She visited and wrote about the West Bank in 1989 and Lebanon in 1999. In 2016 she volunteered at Hara Hotel, a makeshift camp on the Greece–Macedonia border. She met Syrians from all walks of life as she distributed clothing and organized activities for children. Hara Hotel weaves the story of daily life at the camp, the recent history of the revolution in Syria, and the journey of Juwan, a Syrian who walked through the mountains of Macedonia to safety in Austria.
Thanos Tsapas works as a consultant psychiatrist in psychotherapy in Bristol. His practice is influenced by ideas from psychoanalysis and Narrative therapy. His interests include justice doing approaches in psychotherapy and the use of films in medical education. He volunteers for Medical Justice providing medico-legal reports for asylum seekers in detention centres.
Dr Andrew Blades is Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. He works predominantly in the field of medical humanities, and on the literature of HIV/AIDS in particular. His current research is on 'Retroviral Writings: Reading American HIV/AIDS Poetry' and centers on the work of Thom Gunn, James Merrill and D.A. Powell. His most recent publication, on a completely unrelated theme, is a co-edited collection of essays, Poetry and the Dictionary (2020).
Robert Spencer is an expert on hospital and evironmental public health microbiology. For many years he was Consultant Medical Microbiologist at Bristol Public Health Laboratory and a member of the Medical Advisory Group at Porton Down. He has been President of the Institute of Decontamination Services, and the Chair of the Hospital Infection Society. Since retiring in 2013, after involvement with the London Olympic Games in 2012, he has worked with USAid and on DFID projects; since 2015 has worked in Gaza on behalf of the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.
Gareth Williams is Emeritus Professor and former Dean of Medicine at the University of Bristol. He has written or co-authored over 20 books, including the Textbook of Diabetes (BMA Book of the Year, 1997). He is the author of Angel of Death: The Story of Smallpox (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize of 2010) and Paralysed with Fear: The Story of Polio (2013). His most recent book is Unravelling the Double Helix (2019). He is also often to be found playing the flute or saxophone in and around Bristol.
Adam Ockelford is Professor of Music at the University of Roehampton, London. He has had a lifelong fascination for music, as a composer, performer, teacher and researcher. He works with children at the extremes of the spectrum of neurodiversity and is interested in how we all intuitively make sense of music, without the need for formal education. Comparing Notes (2018) draws lessons from neurodiversity to explore how we all experience music. His TED talk with Derek Paravinci, a long-time pupil and friend, has been watched 1.5 million times and translated into 26 languages.
Lauren Stewart is Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths University of London where she founded the MSc in Music Mind and Brain and co-leads a research group in this area. She has published widely on topics including learning and the plasticity of the brain, congenital amusia (the absence of musical ability), earworms and the therapeutic aspects of music. She enjoys citizen science projects, and has worked with the Science Museum and Radio 3.
Ashleigh Turleigh is a music student and pianist. She developed a love of music at a very young age, and can play almost any piece after hearing the music a few times. She has performed at the Houses of Parliament, the Bank of England, and the Royal Albert Hall, and has appeared on BBC One’s The One Show. She can also play saxophone, drums, guitar and the organ to a high standard. Recently, she has started composing her own pieces. Ashleigh has been blind since birth, is on the autistic spectrum, and has hearing difficulties.
Rachel Clarke is a current NHS doctor, bestselling author, and former television journalist who cares passionately about standing up for her patients and the NHS. Rachel retrained as a doctor in her late twenties, graduating in 2009. She now works in palliative medicine, believing profoundly in the importance of helping patients at the end of life experience the best quality life possible. In her most recent book, Dear Life: A Doctor's Story of Love and Loss (2020), she considers the world of the hospice and the loss of her own father.
Nathan Filer is a qualified mental health nurse. The Shock of the Fall, his novel about the life of a young man grieving the loss of his brother, won the Costa Book of the Year and has been translated into thirty languages. Now his non-fictional The Heartland: Finding and Losing Schizophrenia invites us to spend time in the company of some extraordinary people whose lives have been affected by this most strange of human conditions. Interlacing first-person encounters with a series of meditative essays, he offers fresh insight into what is traditionally considered to be psychiatry’s heartland: the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia.
Seamus O'Mahony spent many years working for the National Health Service in Britain. He now lives and practises medicine in his native Cork, in the south of Ireland. His acclaimed first book, The Way We Die Now, was published in 2016 and won the British Medical Association Council Chair's Choice Award (2017). Can Medicine Be Cured? (2019) was described by Richard Smith, editor of The British Medical Journal until 2004, as 'The most devastating critique of medicine since Medical Nemesis by Ivan Illich in 1975'.