Plants, Pixels & Possibilities: Science for a Better Future

Community gardens offer much more than fresh produce or urban greening. Community gardens are emerging as powerful, accessible spaces for supporting wellbeing, with many therapeutic impacts. Research shows that these shared environments can reduce stress, enhance positive mood, and provide a rare sense of physical and mental escape. Everyday gardening task like digging, weeding, or simply tending to plants can even evoke a state of flow, with flow described as a deeply absorbing and restorative experience linked to improved mental health.

Increasingly recognised as transformative public health assets, community gardens are holistic, low-cost amenities, that act as catalysts for both personal and collective wellbeing.

What if plant molecules could turn light into heat to fight infections and cancer? In this talk, we’ll explore how natural plant molecules can be transformed into materials that absorb light and convert it into heat, powering antimicrobial textiles and new approaches to cancer therapy. By harnessing the power of nature, this simple idea could open new ways to protect and heal our bodies.

My research involves utilising Offaly's historical association with the night sky to develop tourism that promotes environmental conservation, empowers local communities and creates educational experiences for visitors for a more sustainable post peat-harvesting future.

This research benefits human health, nocturnal habitats and biodiversity, local heritage and identity, and rural development.

By blending psychology, sociology, and technology design, I have spent the last four years co-creating eXtended Reality (XR) use cases with a diverse range of engineers.

Together, we understand how teams 'react to' and 'train with' real world manufacturing scenarios. Identifying what it really takes for XR to move from a ‘cool demo’ to an ‘everyday tool’.