Assistant Clinical Professor, Case Western Reserve University Gregory L. Hall, MD, is a primary care physician practicing in Cleveland, Ohio for over 20 years. A native Clevelander, he attended Williams College and majored in psychology while taking pre-med coursework. After graduation from Williams College with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and working summers as a research assistant at the Cleveland Clinic, he attended the Medical College of Ohio, and completed residency in Internal Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. Dr. Hall serves on the teaching faculty at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine and Northeast Ohio Medical University and has an appointment of Assistant Clinical Professor. He has co-chaired the City of Cleveland’s Public Health Advisory Committee, and co-chaired the leadership board of Steps to a Healthier Cleveland which oversaw health awareness and improvement activities throughout the area. In 2002, Dr. Hall received a governor’s appointment to the Ohio Commission on Minority Health, on which he now serves as Chairman. In January of 2008, he was appointed to Ohio Medicaid Medical Care Advisory Committee and served on its executive committee. In 2010, he was appointed to the Cuyahoga County Board of Health which oversees Ohio’s largest county’s broad range of quality driven public health programs and services.
Senior Lecturer in Economics, Strategy, Marketing and Economics, University of Huddersfield Gareth Downing joined the University as a lecturer in Economics in 2013. Before joining the University of Huddersfield, Gareth worked briefly with the Scottish Government within the newly formed fiscal responsibility team looking into issues related to possible future independence. Before deciding to take a career in economics Gareth spent several years working in the field of mental health on an acute psychiatric ward which he found extremely interesting and rewarding. Gareth’s main research interests are in the ares of Governance and Growth. In particular, the focus of his PhD is on the relationship between Decentralisation, Corruption and Economic Development. Gareth is also interersted in monetary economics and the Post Keynesian perspective.
Reader in Psychology, University of Glasgow My research interests are broad, and are strongly influenced by my education in Cognitive Psychology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psychological Research and subsequent neurobiological research at the Medical School of Washington University in St.Louis. My current research is best described as a mix of Cognitive (they of thinking, attention, perception, action, memory, etc), Differential (studying differences between individuals), and Educational Psychology (the psychology of learning processes). I am particularly interested in gender differences in thought and behaviour, the psychology of learning, as well as in meta-cognitive processes, such attention and executive control. One of my aims is to understand and reduce performance gaps between boys and girls in school. For example, in international surveys, British boys fall behind in reading skills, and British girls in mathematics (this is the case in most countries). More research is necessary to be able to reduce these fairly persistent gaps, which limit children's career opportunities. This research is a good example of combining Differential and Cognitive Psychology. In the past, I have gained much experience with a wide variety of extremely different laboratory measurement techniques (see my publications below). Currently, I use behavioral measures from my own lab as well as "secondary data", in particular those from the Programme for International Student Assessment (the largest international test of school children with millions of data points). The main academic aim of this research is to understand variation in human attitudes and cognition. The practical aim is to improve learning and education. Most of my past and present research has been funded with grants from the ESRC, NIH, German Science Foundation (DFG), Max-Planck-Society, James S. McDonnell Foundation, British Academy, and Nuffield Foundation, and I would like to thank the funding organisations and collaborators for their support.
University Associate, School of Economics and Finance, University of Tasmania Graeme Wells teaches and publishes in a variety of areas in macroeconomics and economic policy. He has also held teaching and research positions at ANU and universities in Wellington, Oslo, Santa Barbara and Guelph. In addition to his academic work, Dr Wells has been a consultant to a variety of policy-making agencies such as the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, The New Zealand Treasury, The Australian Treasury and EPAC. For a number of years was Co Editor of the journal 'Agenda', which provides a forum for debate on current policy issues in Australia and New Zealand.
Professor of History, University of St Andrews Guy Rowlands’ research interests lie principally in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century military, naval, financial and French history. His first book, The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV. Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661 to 1701 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), used political, social, cultural and military approaches to examine how Louis XIV and his ministers were able to increase the size of the French army five-fold over a period of 30 years, and it stressed the importance of integrating the multiple private interests of noble families into calculations of how to organise the state. This book was co-winner of the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize in 2003. His recent work has been on early eighteenth-century financial history. His second book, entitled The Financial Decline of a Great Power. War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV's France (Oxford University Press, 2012), places military paymasters and suppliers at the centre of an explanation of how and why the French state’s financial situation deteriorated dramatically during the War of the Spanish Succession. Louis XIV bequeathed a legacy of debt generated in this war to his successors that made an ultimate breakdown of government much more likely. The book focusses, as no book on early modern state finances has done before, on the full range of state financial activity – taxation, borrowing, monetary policy, the appropriations system and expenditure – to explain how things went so badly wrong. His third book, Dangerous and Dishonest Men: the International Bankers of Louis XIV’s France (Palgrave, 2014), follows up the previous study by looking at the extraordinary but damaging role played by foreign exchange and international bankers in France’s eighteenth-century troubles. At the start of the eighteenth century Louis XIV needed to remit huge sums of money abroad to support his armies during the War of the Spanish Succession. This book explains how international bankers moved French money across Europe, and how the foreign exchange system was so overloaded by the demands of war that a massive banking crash resulted. Prof. Rowlands is currently in negotiation with a major press for the production of a work of grand synthesis on “War and the State in the Early Modern European World”. He is planning a bid to funding councils for a major project on the emerging western European states, military power and the civilian contractors who serviced and supplied their armed forces in the period 1660-1730. In recent decades the defence establishments of the NATO powers have employed civilian contractors for logistical tasks on a very large scale once again, but there seems to be a real lack of appreciation that so many of these arrangements have been tried before, and particularly so once the state started to emerge in a recognisably modern form after the mid-seventeenth century. As part of this he is already working on another book on arms, artillery and absolute monarchy in Louis XIV’s France. In the longer term he is working towards a comprehensive, international history of logistics from the mid-17th century to the present day. Prof. Rowlands also has extensive interests in European international and transnational relations between the 1660s and the outbreak of the French Revolution (1789), and he maintains an interest in Jacobitism on the continent between 1688 and 1720.
Lecturer in Immunology, Edinburgh Napier University My research focuses on cellular-therapy for the treatment of autoimmune disease. We have shown in models of rheumatoid arthritis that naturally occurring suppressive white blood cells modified using gene-transfer can home to disease sites and actively suppress disease. We are now working on translating this work to the clinic for both rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. My work utilises many of the approaches developed in the field of cancer cell therapy, an area of research I was involved in during my PhD. I was awarded my PhD from UCL in 2009, followed by fellowship from Arthritis Research UK at the Centre for Rheumatology Research. I am currently a Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University.
