Dr. Giulia Poerio is a clinical psychologist and lecturer at the University of Essex. Her research focuses on emotion and wellbeing, particularly the relationship between cognition and emotion. She works at the intersection of psychological disciplines, including cognitive psychology, affective science, neuroscience, clinical, and social psychology.

Dr. Natalie Bowling is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Greenwich. She uses a social neuroscience approach to explore how we represent the experiences of others (such as in empathy for pain) and how these representations impact conceptions of the self. She has worked with mirror-sensory synaesthetes – people who experience conscious vicarious sensations of touch and pain and has investigated individual differences in the perception of touch and the bodily self in social contexts.

Dr. Michael Banissy is a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths University. He is also a Royal Society Short Industry Fellow working with OPI Ñ ON (www.getopinon.com). He has contributed to research areas including social perception, social cognition, creativity, synaesthesia, and brain stimulation, and been awarded the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal (2016) and the Bertelson Award (2017) for outstanding contributions to psychological research.

Dr.Freddie Mason received his doctorate from the Royal College of Art in 2019, where he researched the history and futures of viscosity and viscous materiality. The fruits of this work formed a book, The Viscous: Slime, Stickiness, Fondling, Mixtures (New York: Punctum Books 2020). He regularly gives talks, teaches, writes and makes films on matters related and unrelated to his material specialisms. He is currently working on a new book about the history of texture in food and art.