Owen is a PhD student affiliated with Anglia Ruskin University and the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge. Before beginning his doctoral studies, he worked as a biopharmaceutical fermentation scientist and food microbiologist and holds an MSc in Food Technology from Wageningen University.
His PhD project focuses on advancing biotechnological approaches to plastic recycling by using enzymes to break down plastics into their constituent monomers, enabling the materials to be reused as feedstock and supporting a circular economy. The research begins with identifying novel enzymes capable of degrading PET plastic, with an emphasis on samples collected from cold environments—an underexplored area that may yield enzymes with desirable properties. The project then moves to recombinant production and kinetic analysis of both known and newly discovered enzymes, employing the Inverse Michaelis-Menten kinetics framework to evaluate their ability to degrade highly crystalline PET, a significant technical challenge in the field. Finally, the study investigates displaying these enzymes, along with others, as synergistic pairs on bacterial spores to potentially enhance their efficiency and sustainability.
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Dementia is a topic of considerable public interest. How empirical evidence has contributed to this societal awareness and indeed fear will be covered in this talk. It will span research from the 1980s when not much was understood about dementia up to contemporary perspectives. The focus will be on the epidemiological and public health evidence base, and how this relates to the results published from clinical and lab based research. The findings from UK and other high income countries of reduced age specific prevalence (%) will be explored, and the implications of results from brain based studies that dementia is not inevitable in the presence of ‘alzheimer’ type changes. The role of inequalities, risk varying across countries and time and our knowledge about protective factors have strengthened during recent years, and the balance of high risk with whole population approaches to reducing risk for society will be considered.
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