Category: This is us

How would you describe your role?

Somehow herding cats sprung to mind! I manage one of the schools within the faculty of Life Sciences. As a school we have undergraduate programmes, postgraduate programmes, research students, staff research projects, commercial work, a whole range of things that the university is involved in, focusing on archaeology and forensics. My role is to coordinate all of that, to facilitate people working within the school to do the things they want to do, both staff and students.

I have been with the University of Bradford for probably 25 years! I came on a one-year contract, initially to run adult education classes in archaeology, and then moved into a lectureship and moved my way through to my current role. Time has gone really quickly.

It’s always exciting to interview someone who has been with the university for so many years.

How has the environment and atmosphere around campus changed over the years?

Physically, the campus has changed beyond recognition. The quality of the environment, the green spaces around campus and the buildings have improved enormously to better fit what we do. The general feel around campus feels a lot more open yet integrated. The atrium has helped as well, it has made the campus feel more friendly.

How has the lockdown affected you and your work?

The main challenge has been the uncertainty. At the point at which we first went off campus in March 2020, it was challenging as teaching online was new for all of us, but we knew what we were trying to achieve. The difficult times have been the uncertainties around whether events were going ahead on campus or not, whether teaching would return to campus by a certain date or not. It had a massive impact on the students, and that was very challenging to start with, particularly for postgraduate students because it was very difficult to deliver their master’s projects. We tried to reconfigure what they wanted to do and make sure that they were happy with what they got and that we did the best for them despite not being able to carry out their original plans. Also, some international students were required to return home by their governments which added to the uncertainty. For other international students, it was important to make sure they didn’t feel very lonely, suddenly locked down in Bradford without the stimulus of lectures and interactions with staff. Initially, we spent quite a lot of time reassuring students and trying to provide as much online contact as possible. At that point, it was very challenging because we just didn’t know how long it was going to be a problem for, so the open-ended nature of the situation was difficult.

Personally, I enjoyed working from home because I got into some good habits like going for a walk in the mornings instead of the usual train commute. But the novelty wore off eventually and what I missed most was being around colleagues and being able to talk about things with colleagues and students face-to-face. Being cut off from people was the hardest bit, I missed bumping into people and catching up over a coffee.

What exciting projects are you working on right now?

As a school the most exciting thing that has happened recently is that we were awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Archaeology. We found out just before Christmas and it’s very exciting! The process of writing the submission was exciting because we brought together lots of things we have been doing in archaeology over years and were able to step back and realise how interesting and important it all is. It ranges from Stonehenge to refugee camps in the middle east, from very technical developments in scientific methods, to working with people with bereavement. The award comes with a series of events, like an invitation to the formal dinner at the Guildhall in London to celebrate, and we’re planning events in Bradford as well.

Research wise, being head of the school does mean less time on my research but that’s the price you pay. My research specialism is scientific dating, so telling people how old things are. I’ve worked on projects all over the world; currently in Orkney, the Northern Isles of Scotland. The school has a big excavation project there but haven’t been able to visit the site in two years due to Covid. There’s a chance we’ll make it over in 2022, so I’m really looking forward to getting back to an archaeological site to collect samples, process them and talk about what has happened in the past. We’ve really missed it in the last two years!

You mentioned a few projects, for example, one around a refugee camp and another around bereavement.

How does your field interact and work with those themes?

Another person you might enjoy speaking to is Dr Karina Croucher, this is her research, and she can talk to you about it in detail. Part of the research we’re doing is about the wider impact of archaeology, for example, we have a specialism in digital heritage, particularly recording archaeological sites and producing virtual reality interpretations of them. One of our projects has involved collecting data from photographs of sites that no longer exist in locations like Syria, that have been destroyed as part of the war, and creating 3D virtual reality experiences of them. The project team has been to refugee camps in Jordan where there are people who have lived amongst those archaeological sites and have now been displaced and we shared the VR experience with them. This has been really powerful. It’s partly about saying that the heritage was really important and is still recorded in some way, even though it’s not the same thing at all. It’s also about people in those refugee camps being able to show their children where they lived and what it was like. The children can’t remember it now but can at least get some experience of it. It’s about making sure people understand how much that heritage is valued.

In Archaeology we deal with death and burial all the time, and one of our main sources of evidence is skeletons. In fact, we have the largest collection of human remains in a UK archaeology department in Bradford, we have 4,500 skeletons in the store here. That’s a large source of information about people in the past, their diet, how they died, how they were buried and what accompanied their burial and so on. People are often happier to start a conversation about that than their own death and their own burial. What we’ve been trying to do is put these ideas together using archaeological examples as a tool to get people to talk about what they would like to happen when they die or how they would like to remember people that they were close to who have died. For example, we’ve been running Death Cafes, where people talk about all this but starting with the archaeology as a way to open up about subjects that are difficult but important to talk about.

These projects really show how archaeology underpins so many different things. Another example is a project that colleagues are working on around wind farms. There are a lot of wind farms being developed off the coast of the UK and when these offshore wind farms are put in, the archaeological deposits under the sea are being destroyed. Therefore, it is really important that we find a way to record the archaeology before the wind farms go in so that we don’t lose those resources, this presents a lot of technical challenges. This is what attracted me to archaeology in the first place, the wide-ranging things you can do with it.

It had never dawned on me that archaeology could be used across such an array of themes. My mind is a little bit blown!

One of my main jobs is to get that across to potential students and school leavers because it’s a really varied field.

A highlight of your time in role

The Queen’s Anniversary Prize is definitely a highlight. Another highlight for me, is graduation. It’s one of the events I ‘ve missed the most during the lockdowns. Seeing students who you have known for three or four years, some of whom have struggled, get to the end and graduate is great. One of the great things about Bradford is that we have students who come from a whole variety of backgrounds. Archaeology departments across the country can be very white middle-class, whereas Bradford is much more diverse. It’s really nice to support these students to make their way successfully through the course and to see their development over that period. Not to mention, meeting their families and supporters and becoming aware of how challenging it has been for some people. For those reasons, graduation is definitely a highlight.

A funny/embarrassing story from your time on campus

The most honest student feedback I’ve had was after a lecture from a student who was not very enthusiastic about the subject I was teaching, I teach quite scientific topics, and he came up to me and said, “That wasn’t as boring as I thought it was going to be.”. I decided this probably counted as a compliment!

A surprising/interesting fact about yourself

That’s quite a hard question. I guess something not many people know about me is that I grew up in Nigeria because my father worked there. I loved living there, it was a great experience as a child and gave me perspective on what it’s like to move from place to place and be a stranger somewhere. I’d love to go back and visit at some point.

What inspires you?

Academically, it’s a combination of the people who have gone before and my current colleagues. I read the work of people who have been in my role before me and I’m inspired by what they have achieved and what they have found out, particularly research-wise. For example, how they have interpreted the archaeological information, how they have developed our understanding of people in the past and how they’ve managed to use that. In the words of Isaac Newton “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”, it feels like I’m building upon the work of people who have come before us. Also, the current people I work with I find inspirational. I find their enthusiasm for their subjects of research and their enthusiasm towards students, it’s inspirational. It sounds cheesy but it’s what has kept me at Bradford for so long and in some ways is what made lockdown difficult, not having in-person contact.

If you could give a piece of advice to your younger self, what would that be?

I think it would be that even when things go wrong you can adapt situations and make it work out for you, for example, I went to university initially to study Physics which was definitely a mistake. But from that, I was able to move to Archaeological Science. At the time, it felt like a disaster, but it was possible to adapt, open slightly different doors and to build from it. When things don’t work out, you can adapt, and move towards something you’re happier with.

If you could time travel 100 years, would you go into the past or the future?

That’s a tricky one. I’d like to go back 1,000 years because there’s a lot that happened 1,000 years ago that we don’t know, we can make educated guesses but there’s a lot of information we don’t know. It would be interesting to see what Bradford was like 100 years ago, it would have been a thriving city with a lot of industry and development going on but I’d like to go 100 years into the future at the moment because it feels like we’re going through a difficult period of time with a lot of uncertainty and I’d quite like to see that things are ok in 100 years’ time and that we’ve managed to address some of the issues around climate change and global inequality. I am afraid that the situation might be worse not better so I’d have to go with the past.

What are you fearful of in the future and what are you hopeful for?

On the global scale, I have to be fearful about climate change because what we see in our archaeology is evidence of climate change that is greater than what we have coped with in the past. The lack of willingness of international governments to deal with climate change and perhaps people on an individual level not realising quite how serious it is, that does make me fearful. That has the potential to disrupt all the ways that we live and much more serious implications for other countries and exacerbating the existing inequalities. My greatest fear is that people don’t realise how big a problem it is until it is too late to rectify, and that’s an impending deadline.

The most hopeful thing in that regard, are the generations coming through. I see in those generations a bit more willingness to not accept the status quo. That’s what makes me most hopeful, and it’s where universities are really important, in providing the generations coming up behind us with the tools to make those changes, it’s a combination of education, awareness and reason.

A recommendation for a book or podcast that you enjoy

My favourite podcast has been “The History of the World in a hundred Objects”, which is done by the British Museum. Inevitable it has an archaeological theme! They went through 100 objects that changed the world, beginning with the earliest stone tools and finishing with solar powered lighting. They discussed how all 100 objects had changed the way in which people lived, it’s a really good insight into how people had changed the world they’re in and how the world changed them.

How would you describe your role?

I started as a Media Technology & Production student back in 1999, graduating in 2002. In 2005 I returned to the University of Bradford as an AV technician in what was then the School of Informatics, and am now a specialist technician in broadcast, audio and video. Mainly, I support teaching in filming and television as well as manage the equipment loan service in the Faculty of Engineering and Informatics. Over the years I have run online broadcasting for the wider university through high profile lectures, hybrid events and graduations. In July 2007 I launched live broadcasts of our graduation ceremonies. In those days we produced DVD’s for sale as well as a live feed. It started out a little bit crude, with overflow audiences watching on a pop up screen and projector in the small hall using a cable routed through the false ceilings and taped under doorways from the dressing room behind the stage! We moved on to producing USB sticks, but since we started offering short personalised stage clips of the individual graduates, no one wants to buy a full ceremony, so our main remit is a live feed for the Horton Barn, and viewers on the web.

How has the lockdown affected you and your work?

Personally, I spent a lot of lockdown on shared parental leave. My wife works in the NHS so she was originally planning to take several months off. Instead, she went back to work and I spent those months off at home looking after a new-born. So for me lockdown was looking after a child which I would have been doing anyway, so I just carried on really.

Over the past year, there has been a huge leap in demand for virtual and hybrid events, and so I used the opportunity to completely reset our television studio and looked at ways to improve the university’s online presence. Being a broadcast specialist, it was horrible to see so many Zoom interviews on TV with terrible lighting and camera angles. And I knew as a university we could do better; we could make events look good online. I started out doing a couple of sessions in the TV studio for our academics, who were delivering online sessions to schools and colleges via Zoom meetings. So I fed these from our OB set up using the same cameras they use for “BBC News” and “The One Show” instead of small webcams. Suddenly participants were nicely lit, they had a lovely backdrop, and the sound quality was great. It looked like a beautiful broadcast and it up’d the game against every other university competing for a virtual audience. From that, I started working with the events team to offer more high profile events, such as the VC hosting University Court from the TV and a COVID research event with Prof. John Bridgeman. In April 2021 we delivered the Unify Festival which is a whole week of live events. With the Unify festival, there was an opportunity to reset everything, for example, delivering virtual events on campus involved considering social distancing which meant extending the set, re-rigging the lighting, and I built a new fly-away kit in the room next door to the studio so that the broadcast could be operated (almost) as a one-man-band. One person controlling the cameras and floor-managing the studio along with myself in another room managing sound, video, and Zoom feeds.

What exciting projects are you working on right now?

Another project I’ve been working on has been to create a live virtual Open Day experience with the recruitment team. We have a second small TV studio with a Bradford skyline backdrop used for small events, and I built a new dedicated TV studio gallery especially for this. Previously we used to wheel a trolley of kit into the studio next door, but it’s become so useful it needed it’s own permanent setup. It’s been great a I’ve installed a 4 channel Broadcast quality Skype box, so we can bring participants in directly from Skype or Teams without having to rely on switching/spotlighting callers over the same Zoom meeting we’re broadcasting over. For the open days, we have been doing our own live talk show, positioning 4 “roving reporters” in different locations around campus, where they were able to talk about the facilities in areas such as the Unique Sports Centre and Theatre In the Mill and going on to interview students about their experiences. The work on this has been ongoing, as I’ve been tweaking the setup, and making improvements throughout the semester for different events.

A highlight of your time in role so far?

Back in 2010, the TV studios were down at the Media Museum, and we were looking at moving the studios onto the campus. It was suggested that we look at having an outside broadcasting truck rather than a gallery, mainly as a way to cut down on space use. I wasn’t 100% sure about the idea to begin with as we would need something of a substantial size in order to accommodate teaching staff, students and a technician. I looked around online and found a lorry for sale which had been used for slow-motion replays – a video playback truck for Sky Sports. Between myself and our lead television lecturer Chris Hazel, we spent a lot of time pulling out old video cables and things to converted it into an OB truck. When we were then asked by the BBC if we could hold a regional Question Time, hosted by Harry Gration from Look North for the 2015 General election, it really made the project worthwhile. I was very proud of that, as I don’t think many university students around the UK get to deliver prime time BBC One content! Since then, we’ve done Children in Need from Bradford, Halifax, Chesterfield, Scarborough as well as a second general election Question Time and a Brexit referendum special from Bradford. I feel especially proud of the Brexit broadcast because it was chosen to go out nationally on the BBC HD channel.

I’ve really missed my “jollies out with Pudsey” for Children in Need in the past two years, which were cancelled due to Covid. Whilst they’re a lot of hard work and stressful with all the complicated technical requirements and pressure to deliver live TV, it’s very rewarding to stand back and feel like a spare part when we go live, knowing that after all the prep on campus, and two days of rigging on site that it’s all working and there’s nothing more I need to do (until the derig).

A funny/embarrassing story from your time on campus

We were doing a general election broadcast in Halifax in 2017. We squeezed the OB truck as close to the venue as we could. The BBC had hired in a camera crane to do some nice sweeping shots, and these two lads were trying to lift this great big heavy camera base past the OB truck to get it into the building. I realised they were going to struggle getting it past the steps of the truck and so dashed over to lift up the steps, and got my fingers trapped. In the rush I had picked up the steps in the wrong position and it was extremely painful but at the time they were already behind me, so I stood there in agony as they carried the camera past me! There wasn’t that much blood, but I did end up with a bandage around it for the next few days.

A surprising/interesting fact about yourself

Not much to say, if I’m not doing video related stuff, I’m generally chasing around a flock of chickens at the bottom of the garden. We decided to get chickens a couple of years ago, and the eggs were very handy during the lockdown! One of the chickens, Ginger, is a complete liability. Shortly after we got her, she got an eye infection, so we ended up with an expensive vet’s bill and a one-eyed chicken. Another time, she got stuck behind the chicken coop as she was dashing to get away from the heavy rain, plus she’s forever falling out of the coop. She’s a complete calamity.

What inspires you?

This is a difficult question. It made me think about a story about one of our Palestinian graduates. Given the situation over there, none of his family could attend the graduation ceremony, so his brother set up a projector in the village hall and the whole village turned up to watch his graduation. It’s a lovely story. When delivering live events, it’s sometimes disappointing to see a low turn-out online given the effort that goes into making it possible. But as a result of this story, I always think back to the impact it can have on viewers, as you never know who the viewers are, how many could be watching just one stream, or why they are online rather than attending in-person.

If you could give a piece of advice to your younger self, what would that be?

Probably buy less stuff and seize more opportunities.

If you could time travel 100 years, would you go into the past or the future?

It’s another difficult one, I often think I’d love to go into the past with modern technology and video-record what it looks like, for example, see Bradford 100 years ago in high definition. However, I would choose the future, I’d be interested to see what the planet is like.

What are you fearful of in the future and what are you hopeful for?

What keeps me awake at night is that I have no confidence that governments around the world will put enough effort into solving the climate crisis. Relating to your previous question, I’d be interested to see what we are left with, in the future. What kind of planet will future generations have to live on?

What question are you never asked that you wish you were?

“Would you like me to take the tea bag out before I add the milk?”. It’s a bugbear. We’re supposed to be a nation of tea drinkers and tea lovers!