Festival fever hits the streets of Swansea
This week we’ve been busy hosting Europe’s longest-standing science event.
The British Science Festival kicked off on Tuesday 6 September, bringing thousands of people, including the world’s leading scientists, to our Singleton Park Campus to celebrate all things science.
The broad spectrum of topics up for discussion during the four day long festival has covered everything from engineering and the environment to society and space.
The Singleton Park campus was buzzing with activity throughout the event with talks and debates taking place across all of the key event spaces . Festival goers got to choose from an amazing variety of talks during the main event as well as joining leading academics to debate and discuss all the latest scientific innovations set to change our future.
Over the course of the 4 days, the Faraday building played host to all kinds of talks and presentations from “masters of the genome” to “medical maggots”. In the Taliesin, visitors got to explore “Why we laugh” and enjoyed learning from NASSA’s George Abbey about “50 years of human spaceflight”. The Wallace lecture theatre provided the arena for some really informative talks covering a diverse range of topics from “social egg freezing” to “food and nutrition”; while in Glyndwr, the public got to take part discussions which ranged from “caring for wounds” to “the future of farming”.
All of the events featured in the cutting edge event programme have been free and open to the public who have been flocking to our Singleton Park Campus in their hundreds.
The festival will culminate this weekend in a fantastic, fun-packed family weekend featuring hands on activities, workshops and productions at Swansea’s National Waterfront Museum.
Swansea University’s Head of Development and Science Festival Project Manager Ben Lucas said:
“This is a fantastic event for both the University and the City. We expect to have welcomed many thousands of visitors to Swansea this week.
“This has been an amazing opportunity for the University to showcase its scientific research. We are delighted to have been able to join forces with the British Science Association and help them make science accessible to the general public.”
The science festival, which is being supported by Siemens, was first held in York in 1831 and is returning to Swansea for the fifth time this year, having been previously hosted by the City in 1848, 1880, 1971 and 1990.
The prestigious scientific event has been the stage for many iconic moments in science history, including the famous debate between Thomas Huxley and the Bishop of Oxford in 1860 over Darwin’s theory of evolution.