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At the 2021 Virtual Research Day event students and associates joined and presented a 10-minute presentation on a topic of their research or interest. 

Free and open to all, it presented an opportunity for research ideas or outcomes to reach a wider audience; a short Q&A session after each talk enabled participants to dig deeper into specific areas of interest. Each participant was given a 15-minute slot (10-minute presentation + 5-minute Q&A).

You can listen, watch and read about the diverse topics from the day below.

Cracks in aggressive environments: when and how will a turbine lose its protection?

Eleonore Poli, PhD Student in Materials and Metallurgy

Eleonore Poli audio recording

The Lived Experiences of Incarcerated Pregnant Women and Mothers of Babies: A Comparative Study of Mother and Baby Units (MBUs) in England and Wales and Thailand

Preeya Jumnongbut, MPhil Student in Criminology

Preeya Jumnongbut audio recording and research poster

What does a computational biologist talk about when she talks about solid organ transplantation

Sampurna Mukherjee, PhD Student in Computational Biology

Sampurna Mukherjee audio recording

Why bring gender into energy policy? Gender equity and energy access in Pakistan

Rihab Khalid, Postdoc in Architecture, lsaac Newton Trust Research Fellow

 

Describing the "audition" in the French National Police: a Pilot Study

Célestine Robert, MPhil Student in Criminological Research

"Since the discovery of DNA in 1969, Justice miscarriages have been registered in different countries (Gudjonsson, 2012; Malsch & de Boer, 2019). For instance, cases such as the Birmingham six who have been imprisoned for the pub bombing in Birmingham from 1974 to 1991, or, in the US, James Bain who have been convicted for burglary, kidnapping and rape and spent 35 years in prison, have all been exonerated. Different factors such as false confessions have been associated with wrongful convictions  (Malsch & de Boer, 2019). Indeed, in his book, Brandon (2011) found that out of the first DNA exoneration cases, 16 percent were associated with false confession. Models and techniques have been developed to obtain confessions, but their aim can differ from one country to another. For instance, the primal use of the nine steps of the Reid technique is to obtain a confession whether it is true or false. Among these nine steps technique, practices such as minimization of the criminal deed to gain the suspect’s trust, or confronting the suspects with incriminating evidences, genuine or not, are used (Kassin and Gudjonsson, 2004; Malsch & de Boer, 2019). However, such practices have been associated with false confession thus, the Reid technique use raises ethical concern (Malsch & de Boer, 2019). On the other hand, the PEACE model, adopted in 1992 by England and Wales, aims at limiting false confession by respecting three main ideas. The first idea is to seek for the truth rather than obtaining a confession. The second main idea is the presumption of innocence that must be respected for each suspect. The third idea behind the PEACE model is that interviewer is supposed to respect decency standards (i.e., they should not isolate the suspects of manipulate them) (Malsch & de Boer, 2019). Finally, in France, the Gendarmerie Nationale, one of the two Law enforcement institutions, has developed the PROgreai method which is inspired by the PEACE model (Malsch & de Boer, 2019). However, it has been highlighted that this method is poorly respected among members of the Gendarmerie National and that the techniques employed by them were closer from the Reid technique than the PEACE model (Malsch & de Boer, 2019). Furthermore, there are very little information on the practices employed by the second law enforcement institution, the National police, when interviewing (Noc & Ginet, 2020). Fassin (2009) talks of a censorship exerted by the Government to explain this lack of information on the National Police. This study will only focus on France and, therefore, represents an opportunity to tackle the techniques employed by French police officers when interviewing suspects. Through interviews with ten of them working in the “audition” (interview), this paper aims at identifying recurrent techniques used by French police officers when interviewing suspects. Unfortunately, France seems, once again reluctant to conduct empirical studies on its Justice institutions and this study has been postponed to October 2021." 

Other topics from the day were:

Chronic activation of the HIF-1 pathway confers susceptibility to mycobacterial infection

Lauren Lee, PhD Student in Medicine

The role of water in protein misfolding

Amberley Stephens, Postdoc in Molecular Neuroscience

Is PI3K the missing checkpoint kinase underpinning resistance in Malaria?

Monique Johnson, PhD Student in Pathology