Middlesex University

This is Professor Brendan Walker, a performance artist, a showman, and the world's only thrill engineer.

Also, a professor of creative industries at Middlesex University in the UK.

Thrill is that really lovely warm feeling you get of excitement when something absolutely brilliant happens all of a sudden.

Brendan thinks there might be a link between experiences which gives us a thrill and ones which trigger our fight or flight response.

Danny Shields for all the music.

Our partner, Middlesex University.

And our student placements who keep everything running behind the scenes.

Today we have Ruby, Rana, Christopher and Shivani.

And from there, I just kind of delved into nutrition, became obsessed with it and did a number of different courses and then went on to study it postgrad.

So I did a master's in nutrition at Worcester Uni and then a performance nutrition master's at Middlesex University.

and had the plan to go and work with uh sports teams so football teams rugby teams uh in the nutrition world uh but then uh took a bit of a u-turn uh uh and off the back of a breakup i i was like screw it i just want to have fun for a bit so i went and did a ski season and got into cooking through that um I had to do a very basic cookery course to get onto it and then I just decided that it was the best thing in the world and I think like six seasons later I figured it was then about time to grow up um but but by that point I've um I'd really got into chefing.

I'd decided that that was kind of like the career path I wanted to go down.

Yep.

So 17 started at Middlesex University, dropped out, I'm afraid to say, dropped out after a year because it wasn't quite the right course for me.

What were you doing? So it was a drama and technical theater arts and English literary studies.

So quite a mouthful.

part.

Get out there and explore different possibilities.

Okay, so you've decided to quit your course at Middlesex University.

And then where did you head off to then?

But what does it actually... involve getting the best out of your brain.

And so when I studied a master's in neuroscience of leadership through Middlesex University in the UK and became so fascinated about understanding the brain, I really ended up writing this to be able to share my understanding, what I was putting in practice, what I was seeing in leadership and how we could use neuroscience really for the first time when I wrote this in being able to improve our own leadership and leadership of others.

So it really summarizes a framework of practical neuroscience in being able to lead self, lead teams and develop others.

Love it.

Uh, I then went back to get a finance degree at Mount Royal University in Canada before switching to a university in Hong Kong called Lingnan, and then went to study Mandarin in Beijing at the Beijing Language and Culture University.

And at that time, I had some additional business opportunities coming up in the United Arab Emirates, so I decided to move to Dubai in 2009, and I finished my degree here at, uh, Middlesex University, and I've been here ever since.

And so after my education, I moved into corporate finance, working on transactions across oil and gas, mining, maritime, manufacturing, and technology, with transaction sizes ranging from $5 million venture capital raises to $600 million private equity transactions and debt structuring.

I've also spent quite, quite a few years in the tech industry building ERP solutions, data management solutions, and e-commerce solutions for oil and gas and mining companies.

Before joining CFO Associates, he served as international tax manager at Z Strategic Group PR and as tax advisor at BDO Puerto Rico, USVI.

Ojo holds a BBA in accounting from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, a US international tax certificate from the AICPA, and a postgraduate diploma in transfer pricing from Middlesex University.

Jorge Obin Cuadros is partner at Procopio, who advises multinational corporation, defense contractors, investment funds, high net worth individuals, and family offices particular from Latin America, Puerto Rico, and Europe, on U.S. and international tax and trade matters, with a focus on inbound structuring, cross-border planning, tariff exposure, and tax and trade litigation.

Prior to joining Procopio, he serves in the U.S. Internal Revenue Service Office of Associate Chief Counsel International, where he helped draft the GILTI regulations on a section 951 Cap A, and later as an IRS detailee to the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, contributing to international tax legislation in Puerto Rico and territory matters, and the energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

This was, of course, the pre-digital world, where the usual way to share images with students was to show them photographic slides projected onto a screen.

Flick told me how the art historian Lisa Tickner generously gave her permission to borrow slides from Middlesex University Library.

I'd be teaching in Eastbourne or Brighton or all over different bits of London.

Yeah.

Getting national institutions to buy artists' work might sound like a way for them to secure a place in the museums and therefore in art history.

But Sonia found that all too often, work in collections by Black artists, and Black women in particular, gets forgotten, stored in the basement, never exhibited.

Here she is talking about the Black Artists and Modernism research project that she led at the University of the Arts, London, in partnership with Middlesex University.

It was addressing the questions: