Assistant Professor, Labour Studies, Simon Fraser University
Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez (she, her, ella) is a Latinx Assistant Professor in Labour Studies and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at SFU. As a community engaged scholar and Public Sociologist, Dr. Encalada Grez has mobilized her migrant-labour research through various media including documentaries and given talks in venues such as Parliament Hill, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and at the United Nations in New York.
Currently Dr. Encalada is working on mobilizing research findings from community-engaged research she led on the systemic discrimination of Internationally Trained Physicians in British Columbia. She is also conducting research on the invisible labour undertaken by community workers and organizers who support migrant farmworkers, particularly during the height of he pandemic.
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Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies, Carleton University
Dr. Evelyn Namakula Mayanja is an Assistant Professor at Carleton University in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies. She teaches courses on Political repression and Human Rights. Her research focuses on natural resource extraction, peace, security and development in Africa. She received the SSHRC New Frontiers in Research Fund and the Insight Development Grant (2021-2025).
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PhD candidate, Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University
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Sustainability Researcher, Queen's University, Ontario
I am Sustainability Researcher with other 15 years of work experience. Over the years, I have worked with several international development agencies including the Government of Tanzania and international development organizations including The World-Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), German Development Agency (GIZ), and Pathfinder International and others where I was engaged in programs management, monitoring and evaluation, research, policy advisory for the development of forestry, agriculture and renewable energy sectors in Tanzania.
In research, I have a passion for and interest in agriculture-food related research with a focus on small-scale farming systems in Africa. My broad areas of interest are to explore how policies can propel agriculture innovations (technologies) and their adoption, acceptance, and use among under-resourced farmers of Sub-Saharan Africa. As a researcher, I employ qualitative techniques to explore and understand socially and economically sound solutions addressing day to day livelihood and environmental challenges of rural communities.
I am also a Founder of MAVUNO LAB, one of the first post-harvest innovation centers based in Morogoro, Tanzania, with a mission to develop low cost and affordable technologies, products, and services to mitigate post-harvest food losses in Tanzania. We work with young graduate engineers to design and come up with affordable solution to prevent and reduce food loss and waste in Tanzania.
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PhD candidate, Interdisciplinary Studies, University of British Columbia
Ewan Wright is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where he researches issues related to the sustainability of the outer space environment through both the Astrophysics and Political Science Departments. He is also a Junior Fellow of the Outer Space Institute, an interdisciplinary group of experts working on emerging space sustainability issues.
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Lecturer in Work and Employment, Newcastle University
Dr Ewan Mackenzie is a Lecturer in Work and Employment at Newcastle University. He is interested in the socio-political aspects of work and applies sociological and critical approaches to the realities of work, employment and society. He is interested in the convergence between how work is governed and everyday work and labour, and the possibilities and necessity for alternative ways in which to understand and organise work. He has published on creative and cultural work, the politics of austerity in public and healthcare sectors, and community organising. These publications have appeared in international peer reviewed journals including Human Relations, Organization Studies, Social Science and Medicine: Qualitative Research in Health, and Spatial Justice.
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Project scientist for the Transients and Pulsars with MeerKAT (TRAPUM) collaboration, Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy
My primary research interests are pulsars, radio telescopes and high-performance computing. At the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, I lead a team of scientists, software engineers and systems architects who specialise in the development of high-performance instrumentation for radio telescopes around the world. Our instruments aim to provide universal processing systems, capable of handling the myriad use cases for radio telescopes, from pulsar observations to spectroscopy and very long baseline interferometry. We work with cutting-edge, commodity off-the-shelf GPU and FPGA accelerators to push the limits of what our telescopes can do.
I also serve as the project scientist for the both the Transients and Pulsars with MeerKAT (TRAPUM) collaboration and the MPIfR-MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey (MMGPS). The TRAPUM collaboration uses the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa to hunt for radio pulsars in places of special interest throughout the Galaxy and beyond. Through observations of supernova remnants, gamma-ray sources, globular clusters and nearby galaxies we have discovered more than 100 new pulsars, including exotic systems that probe fundamental physics. The MMGPS is a unique pulsar and imaging survey that uses MeerKAT to observe the Galactic plane at multiple frequencies. Its goals are to discover new pulsar systems and probe the galactic magnetic field. To enable the TRAPUM and MMGPS projects, as well as the ERC-funded MeerTRAP project, which searches for fast transients with MeerKAT, my team and I at the MPIfR built and operate two powerful computing clusters located on the MeerKAT site. One of these clusters provides MeerKAT with the ability to perform high-time resolution observations in may hundreds of different directions at the same time. The other provides the means to analyse the data, to search for extreme relativistic pulsar binary systems.
My team and I work on several other instrumentation projects. These include the ERC-funded, Crete-based ARGOS telescope, the joint Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG) - Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) funded cryogenically-cooled phase array feed programme and the pan-European ERC-funded radio technology programme RADIOBLOCKS. We also operate the SARAO and MPG-funded, SKA-MPG telescope, the first dish of the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope.
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PhD in Geography and Sustainable Development, University of St Andrews
Most recently, I have completed a postdoctoral research fellowship with the School of Geography and Sustainable Development with the University of St Andrews (Nov 22 - Aug 23), conducting field work in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, to understand how peatland restoration is perceived by rural crofting communities beset with pressures and opportunities from policy and private finance. The outputs from this project include a short Correspondence piece for Nature (https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03539-9), and a website, a public-facing output targeted at the researched community, comprising a booklet, FAQ, Glossary, executive summary in Gáidhlig and English, to assist with decision-making on peatland restoration (https://peatland-restoration-guide.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk). I hope to write a Conversation piece highlighting our research and outputs regarding these.
Presently I am pursuing a PhD with the school of Geography and SD at the University of St Andrews, which focuses on the commune-form as the newly emergent, pre-figurative Event for ecological futures, analysed spatially and temporally using case studies in North America and Europe.
I'm also editor-in-chief for the interdisciplinary journal INTER-, published by the Graduate School in St Andrews, with our first issue forthcoming May 2024.
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Dr Eyal Mayroz is a Senior Lecturer on human rights and international peace and security in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney. Formerly a counterterrorism specialist (Captain, retired), he is the author of Reluctant Interveners: America’s Failed Responses to Genocide from Bosnia to Darfur, which was named one of Choice magazine’s outstanding academic titles of 2020.
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Associate Professor of Biology and Cell Biology, University of Virginia
Through evolutionary history the human genome was optimized to promote survival in environments where food is mostly scarce. These survivor-genomes clash with an environment where calorie-rich foods are readily available. Based on the premise that the genes networks that allow animals to endure starvation are under strong selective pressure and consequently conserved, we use a combination of cutting-edge functional genomics, biochemical, cell biology, genetic, and physiological approaches to identify and characterize the conserved gene networks that allow the animal model Caenorhabditis elegans to adapt to changes in food availability. Ultimately, our research would contribute to better understanding of how dysfunctional gene networks affect or cause obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, and accelerate aging.
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