Tiff works in the Insect Ecology Group of the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge and is the Henslow Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. She is particularly fascinated by insects, and how museum collections can be used to understand long-term biodiversity change and inform conservation action today. She completed her PhD at the University of York and Natural History Museum (UK), where she focussed on the butterflies of Sulawesi and examined their long-term change using museum collections.
Tiff’s current project is focussed on examining the UK macromoth communities using the Cambridge Zoology Museum’s Insect Collections. She is interested in disentangling the relative impact of anthropogenic threats, such as street lighting, climate change and land-use change, on species and communities over the past two centuries. In particular, her project aims to identify how species and communities have responded to the different transitions in artificial lighting (e.g. duration, intensity and colour of lighting) and provide timely and novel insights to inform effective conservation policy and practice.
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Kipling’s “Iron‒Cold Iron‒is master of them all” captures the familiar importance of metals as structural materials. Yet common metals are not necessarily hard; they can become so when deformed. This phenomenon, strain hardening, was first explained by G. I. Taylor in 1934. Ninety years on from this pioneering work on dislocation theory, we explore the deformation of metals when dislocations do not exist, that is when the metals are non-crystalline. These amorphous metals have record-breaking combinations of properties. They behave very differently from the metals that Taylor studied, but we do find phenomena for which his work (in a dramatically different context) is directly relevant.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, U.K. policy-makers claimed to be "following the science". Many commentators objected that the government did not live up to this aim. Others worried that policy-makers ought not blindly "follow" science, because this involves an abdication of responsibility. In this talk, I consider a third, even more fundamental concern: that there is no such thing as "the" science. Drawing on the case of adolescent vaccination against Covid-19, I argue that the best that any scientific advisory group can do is to offer a partial perspective on reality. In turn, this has important implications for how we think about science and politics.
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