Contributors

Ciarán Casey

Assistant Professor in Economics, University of Limerick

Assistant Professor in Economics, University of Limerick Ciarán Casey is an economic historian specialising in Irish economic policy. He is author of 'The Irish Department of Finance, 1959-1999 (IPA, 2022) and 'Policy Failures and the Irish Economic Crisis' (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018). He holds a DPhil from Oxford, where he was awarded a Clarendon Scholarship.

Charles Lehnen

Doctoral Candidate in Integrative and Evolutionary Biology, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Doctoral Candidate in Integrative and Evolutionary Biology, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences I am an ecologist driven to unravel the complexities of community dynamics and the cascading trophic effects that shape our natural world. My career has led me through a variety of roles, from leading a natural history study of Galapagos Diptera across five islands, assessing potential bat habitat in the man-made abandoned mineshafts of New Mexico, to conducting transects across the Nevada desert to track the population dynamics of Mojave Desert tortoises.

Chris Wilson3

Lecturer in Biology, University of Oxford

Lecturer in Biology, University of Oxford I am interested in a longstanding evolutionary puzzle: why does sex exist? In theory, a lineage of asexual females can reproduce twice as efficiently as a competing sexual population, whose resources are diverted into males that cannot produce eggs. Why does natural selection maintain sex so widely despite this and other costs, and why do most asexual lineages rapidly go extinct? To address these questions, I study a group of animals that have succeeded despite lacking males. Bdelloid rotifers are microscopic invertebrates that live in almost every pond, stream, puddle and patch of moss in the world. Hundreds of species have been described and thousands of individuals examined, but all of them so far have been female, and reproduction is known only via asexual eggs. My collaborators and I are investigating genetic and ecological aspects of the unusual reproductive behaviour of bdelloid rotifers. We are trying to understand how they deal with rapidly changing selection pressures, particularly infectious disease, by studying how species, populations and individuals interact with pathogens. We use a range of molecular and experimental approaches, including long-term field studies, population genetics, experimental evolution, comparative genomics, resistance bioassays, metagenomics and transcriptomics. I am also interested in fungal systematics, through my work with rotifer pathogens belonging to neglected fungal taxa.

Claire Jerry

Political History Curator, Smithsonian Institution

Political History Curator, Smithsonian Institution

Colin Nolden

Senior Research Fellow, Energy Institute, University of Sheffield

Senior Research Fellow, Energy Institute, University of Sheffield Colin researches at sustainable energy and climate governance at the intersection of demand, markets, and places to achieve a just transition to net zero. As a geographer by training, he is particularly interested in scalar and spatial dimensions. Throughout his academic career, Colin has worked for schools or departments of Geography, Politics, Business, Management, Law and Engineering.

Clare MacMahon

Associate Professor in Motor Learning and Skilled Performance, La Trobe University

Associate Professor in Motor Learning and Skilled Performance, La Trobe University Clare MacMahon completed an Undergraduate degree in Psychology from McGill University, a Masters in Human Kinetics from the University of Ottawa, and a PhD in Human Biodynamics from McMaster University. After completing a Postdoctoral Research position funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council at Florida State University in Cognitive Psychology, Clare moved to Australia to work within Sport and Exercise Science at Victoria University, Swinburne University, and currently at La Trobe University. She has worked in the research and application of skill acquisition and talent identification principles within Defense contexts, and professional sports such as Australian Rules football, Cricket, and Tennis.