Happy Talk
Date: Thursday, 16 November 2022
Venue: Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), London
Time: Doors open at 6pm for a 7pm start
Price: £35 per ticket
This year, we have named our evening “Happy Talk“-the title of a song from the Rogers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific” with the lyrics: “Happy Talkin’ talkin’ happy talk, Talk about things you like to do, You’ve got to have a dream, If you don’t have a dream, How you gonna have a dream come true” Our four wonderful speakers will inspire you with their talks and the fulfilment of their dreams. It’s going to be another great evening. Join us and be entertained and amazed!
Alex Lewis – Aged 33 Alex thought he had ‘man flu’ but collapsed and was rushed to hospital, he was given just hours to live and less than 1% chance of survival. He had contracted Strep which led to Septicaemia, Toxic shock syndrome and necrotising fasciitis. The result was quadruple amputation and facial disfigurement requiring 140hrs of plastic surgery and 14hrs of facial tattooing. Rejecting self-pity, the story of his adjustment to a new life was the subject of a Channel 4 documentary “The Extraordinary case of Alex Lewis”. Since then Alex has found his lifechanging illness has made him think differently about being a father, a partner, a human being. Recently he set up the Alex Lewis Trust to raise funds to help amputees and to participate in prosthesis design and wearable assistive technology research with Imperial College, Southampton University and others. Alex has kayaked around the southern tip of Greenland, completed a 320 mile expedition along South Africa’s Orange River. In 2019 he became the first quadruple amputee to hand cycle 15,000ft up Ethiopia’s highest mountain in a solar assisted four wheeled vehicle. The documentary of this expedition “Alex Lewis Mountain “ won best Documentary at the London Independent Film Festival 2023. Recently, with the support of TET, Alex made a remarkable journey to Ukraine to offer support with affordable prosthesis for soldiers and civilians wounded in the war there.
Captain Preet Chandi – Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond our control, Preet Chandi will be unable to attend the lecture evening as originally planned. Our apologies for this, however we are confident that our remaining speakers will seamlessly fill her space with their wonderful stories.
Gina Moseley – Gina is a 2021 Rolex Awards for Enterprise Laureate, National Geographic Explorer, main protagonist in the giant screen film “Ancient Caves”,and three-times recipient of the Transglobe Expedition Trust ‘Mad But Marvellous’ grant. At the age of 12, Gina became hooked on the underworld during a family holiday to Somerset. Today, as a Professor of Paleoclimatology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, Gina has followed that passion and now uses caves to investigate Earth’s changing climate over the last half a million years. In 2008, she learned about a huge cave entrance in North Greenland that had been photographed in the Cold War but never explored. She made it her mission to find out what was inside. Gina has led four pioneering caving expeditions to Greenland, including the recent Northern Caves 2023 expedition, which, with TET support, set out to explore the elusive ‘Cold War cave’ and the most northern-known caves in the world.
Helen Czerski – is an Associate Professor at University College London, a broadcaster and writer. Her research topic is the physics of breaking waves and bubbles in the open ocean, and how these bubbles influence the transfer of gases between the atmosphere and the ocean.She has spent months working on research ships in the Antarctic, the Pacific, the North Atlantic and the Arctic, and is an experienced field scientist. Since 2011 Helen has presented many science documentaries for the BBC on the physics of everyday life, atmospheric and ocean science and, as a writer, speaker and performer strives to share a broader perspective on what the ocean itself is, and how this watery engine matters for our planet. She received the 2018 Lord Kelvin Medal from the Institute of Physics for her work on communicating physics to a wider audience. She is an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, has anHonorary Fellowship of the British Science Association and was one of the 2020 Royal Institution Christmas Lecturers. Her latest book, Blue Machine, was Radio 4’s Book of the Week andarguesthat the biggest story on Earth is our global ocean -not the fish, whales or pollution, but the water itself and the way it influences all life on Earth.