Associate Professor of Paramedicine, Auckland University of Technology Bridget Dicker is the Head of Clinical Audit and Research for St John and concurrently serves as an Associate Professor at Auckland University of Technology. She has made a significant contribution to the field of out-of-hospital emergency care with a focus on resuscitation. She developed and manages the New Zealand out-of-hospital cardiac arrest registry, which was established for research into epidemiological, or clinical factors that may contribute to improved outcomes. She is also a registered Paramedic and continues to maintain her clinical practice alongside her academic role.
Associate Professor Emerita, Roskilde University My broad teaching and research area is the interface between culture and politics in east and southern Africa. I research the localisation of media and global popular culture in east and southern Africa, consumption and representation and the role they play for identities and social and livelihood practices for social groupings, particularly young women and men. I am interested in the political and cultural articulations of disadvantaged groups, how they often happen through mobilisation in ‘uncivil’ social movements – they may be ethnic or religious – and may, in spite of their unregulated character, contribute to processes of democratic transformation. In this connection I study diasporic groups who are often extremely dynamic but also exposed to abuse and persecution. I highlight the work of local intellectuals, writers and artists and their contributions to the political and social atmosphere in specific places and periods. I have a side interest in popular culture in India and am committed to the study of development from below. Finally I research the history of sexuality in Africa.
Assistant Professor of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies and Anthropology, University of Iowa My research examines the intersection of citizenship, kinship, and economy in the everyday lives of South African families. As the availability of wage labor declines globally, I research how women rework the obligations entailed by kinship and citizenship in order to combat their social and economic insecurity. Drawing on approaches from feminist anthropology, women’s history, and gendered theories of capital, my work considers how intimate relationships—such as those between couples or kin—reproduce or transform both economic inequalities and political belonging. I address these questions in South Africa, where gender, race, and work mark the shifting boundaries of political inclusion. I am in the process of writing up a book on my research on poor women’s efforts to garner resources for themselves and their children between 1960 and 2014. During this period, the availability of both marriage and waged work declined dramatically, rendering social reproduction and political recognition quite tenuous. Using archival and ethnographic research on family life and welfare provision, I tracked the livelihood strategies of poor mothers living in a multiracial inner-city neighborhood in the apartheid and democratic eras. My work reveals that women responded to men’s declining ability to earn a family wage and to formalize marriage relationships by cultivating new relations of obligation and dependency. I show how women built resource networks across families, friends, and communities that outlined alternative conditions of debt and duty not grounded in either a marital contract or relations of affinity. In the process, I argue, women not only responded to, but actively constructed the gendered and racial economy of the country and forged new relations between men and women, persons and communities, citizens and the state.
Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Barnard College I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Barnard College, Columbia University where I lead the Accessible and Accelerated Robotics Lab (A²R Lab). I am also a co-chair for the Tiny Machine Learning Open Education Initiative (TinyMLedu) and an associate co-chair for the IEEE RAS TC on Model Based Optimization for Robotics. My research is focused on developing and implementing open-source algorithms for dynamic motion planning and control of robots by exploiting both the mathematical structure of algorithms and the design of computational platforms. As such, my research is at the intersection of Robotics and Computer Architecture, Embedded Systems, Numerical Optimization, and Machine Learning. I also want to improve the accessibility of STEM education. I research ways to better understand and improve diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in STEM education globally, as well as design and teach new interdisciplinary, project-based, open-access courses that lower the barrier to entry of cutting edge topics like robotics and embedded machine learning. I enjoy spending my free time with my family and skiing in the winters.
Postdoctoral fellow in vertebrate palaeontology, Flinders University My research focuses on fossil fishes from the Silurian-Devonian in order to discover the origins of the modern vertebrate body plan. I completed my PhD at ANU/Museum Victoria in late 2010 and immediately commenced a full time postdoctoral research position at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Beijing, China. I was given full access to the world famous fossil collections of the institute and co-authored a series of high-impact papers on early gnathostome evolution and Triassic marine faunas, involving collaborating with researchers at the institute as well as Kean University, New Jersey (Xiaobo Yu) and Uppsala Universitet in Sweden (Per Ahlberg, Qu Qingming). Notable discoveries include the so called "fish with the oldest face" Entelognathus which was featured in Nature, the first evidence of dermal pelvic girdles ancient in bony fishes and the first clear evidence of pelvic fins in antiarchs, the most primitive gnathostomes to possess homologues of our own legs. This latter project was considered of sufficient import to be prominently featured by Sir David Attenborough in the 2013 BBC documentary "Rise of Animals: The Triumph of the Vertebrates" in which I was credited as an advisor having provided the original "character sketches" for the animated fish reconstructions while providing corrections to the early drafts. In March 2014, I commenced a full time postdoctoral research position at Flinders University, notable publication highlights for 2014 include the description of Megamastax, the earliest vertebrate apex predator (in Scientific Reports), fresh data on Devonian actinopterygians from Germany and Western Australia (in press in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology) and the earliest evidence for penetrative copulation in vertebrates. At present I am concluding several holdover projects from my time in Beijing and conducting preliminary research on undescribed Devonian fishes from Western Australia, New South Wales and the Northern Territory.
Investigador predoctoral en Medicina Molecular del GI-2092 en Optometría, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
