Selected recordings from Festival events

Listen to Morgan Mitchell, a Research Assistant and DPhil student in Clinical Neurosciences at Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging. She is currently investigating how manipulating memory reactivation during sleep can alter the memory consolidation processes underlying motor learning for stroke rehabilitation – and yes, she agrees, her research does sound like something out of a science fiction book!

Find out more: https://if-oxford.com/neurotales-4

Listen to Poly Frangou, a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford. She is interested in developing ways to support Parkinson’s patients who experience visual hallucinations, by understanding the brain processes that go wrong when perceiving the information-rich world around us.

Listen to Marianne van der Vaart, researcher at the University of Oxford who aims to understand how pain perception develops in early human development. She hopes to use storytelling to help explain how measuring brain activity can help us care for babies in hospital.

Alice’s Adventures Beyond the Canal is a new audio play to mark the 150th anniversary of Alice Through the Looking-Glass. Alice has been reimagined and brought to you by IF Oxford and was written by author JC Niala to stimulate conversations about research at a free online event on:

Friday 15 October, 7:30 pm (BST) / 2:30pm (EST) / 11:30am (PST)

Book your free ticket to meet the author and researchers

Alice is now a sassy, 21st century teenager, with a super-cool grandma, who explores brand-new scientific thinking which JC has uncovered by talking to researchers from across the globe, now working in the USA and UK.

Exploring a new world, Alice (by New York-based actor, Kineta Kunutu) meets the Jester who is as characterful as the iconic Mad Hatter and where there was once madness, there’s now science. Alice unearths the importance of blending ancient ways with artificial intelligence for animal conservation in the ocean and heads into the sky to discover a new galaxy, meeting a Kingfisher played by BBC Radio 4 presenter of The Life Scientific and Professor of theoretical physics, Jim Al-Khalili. She learns about bats, and  looks up to the stars above, where she ponders on curious questions of language and voice recognition to solve a riddle of great importance to her.

Alice’s Adventures Beyond the Canal

Written and Directed by JC Niala

Illustrations by Lisa Curtis.

Sound recording and editing by Matthew Dunlop

Produced by Dane Comerford

This story was inspired by the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and the work of AAAS IF/THEN Ambassadors: Abake Adenle, Adele Luta, Beata Mierzwa, Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil, Dorothy Tovar and Gracie Ermi;

It was supported by the U.S. Embassy London and Oxford Playhouse

Cast (in order of appearance):

Narrator and voice of Grandma ….…….. JC Niala

The Jester ………….………………… Dane Comerford

Alice …………………………..….…………. Kineta Kunutu

The Kingfisher ……………..…………….. Jim Al-Khalili

Join the discussion event on 15 October, 7:30 pm, to meet the researchers and explore their worlds from where ever you are:

Book your free ticket to meet the author and researchers

Alice’s Adventures Beyond the Canal is a new audio play to mark the 150th anniversary of Alice Through the Looking-Glass. 

Listen to the full story on Spotify.

Alice is now a sassy, 21st century teenager, with a super-cool grandma. Exploring a new world, Alice (by New York-based actor, Kineta Kunutu) meets the Jester who is as characterful as the iconic Mad Hatter and where there was once madness, there’s now science. Alice unearths the importance of blending ancient ways with artificial intelligence for animal conservation in the ocean and heads into the sky to discover a new galaxy, meeting a Kingfisher played by BBC Radio 4 presenter of The Life Scientific and Professor of theoretical physics, Jim Al-Khalili.

Read the story by searching

IF Oxford Alice’s Adventures Beyond the Canal

Book your free ticket to meet the author and researchers Friday 15 October, 7:30 pm (BST) / 2:30pm (EST) / 11:30am (PST)