Plants versus bugs for making drugs: Professor Ian Graham, Department of Biology

Flowering plants have been evolving a treasure trove of chemicals for the last 150 million years and humans have been experimenting with plants for medicines in the relatively short time we have co-existed.

Over the last 15 years, in partnership with global charities and the pharmaceutical industry, Professor Ian Graham has been exploring the inner workings of plants to discover novel ways to improve the yields of medicinal crops. As a result, hybrid Artemisia varieties that have produced the drug to cure millions of people suffering from malaria and Poppy varieties that produce 80 per cent of the world’s supply of a drug used to suppress coughs – equivalent to 1.6 billion doses – are the direct result of molecular genetic research based at York.

In this talk he shares the thrill of the race for discovery and how plants and bugs will both be needed to realise the potential of nature’s chemical treasure trove.

Indoor air pollution: the dirty secret lurking in our homes? Professor Nicola Carslaw, Department of Environment and Geography

Air quality legislation has been focused almost exclusively on regulating the outdoor environment – from industrial smog to diesel exhaust fumes – but Professor Nicola Carslaw shows how the pendulum is swinging towards tackling potentially harmful air pollutants in the places we feel most secure: our homes.

As covid makes working from home and hybrid working the new norm, it’s not just cleaning obsessives that need to be aware of the chemical agents lurking beneath the kitchen sink. From so-called ‘air purifiers’ to ‘natural’ cleaners and dog grooming sprays, the home is a market place for a largely unregulated industry.

Professor Carslaw will show how the University of York is leading efforts to explore indoor air pollution and its impacts and to provide solutions for better air quality in our homes.

Clean, green manufacturing’s coming to town: Professor Peter Ball, York Management School

The twin challenges of levelling up the economy and achieving net zero carbon emissions require seismic shifts in investment and policy making.

Professor Peter Ball argues that wealthy economies and manufacturing are inseparable, but we seem trapped in the past, where factories are viewed as huge, grim, smoke stack buildings. Modern, digitally driven factories, by contrast, are clean, energy efficient and flexible, enabling us to produce goods in facilities that could fit into something as small as a shipping container and be located anywhere. Data rich, cloud based technologies also allow us to model and control these factories from anywhere, on a tablet or a phone.

Harnessing these technologies, where small is beautiful, could be the key to making our towns and cities vibrant, entrepreneurial and productive places to live and work.

That sinking feeling: how tropical forests are losing their power to reduce carbon emissions: Dr Aida Cuni-Sanchez, Department of Environment and Geography

Every year, undisturbed tropical forests remove about 15 per cent of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, helping reduce global warming.

Small increases in air temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations can increase tree growth - which results in more carbon being accumulated by these forests. But there is a limit, and we are reaching it faster than we thought. Dramatic changes in temperatures and rainfall patterns are increasing tree mortality, which means less carbon being removed from the atmosphere.

Dr Cuni-Sanchez reveals how direct ground-based measurements of these forests show that existing climate-driven vegetation models are inaccurate: the intact tropical forest carbon sink peaked in the 1990s. That means we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions soon if we are to limit the global heating of Earth.

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