PhD candidate in Religious Studies, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) Nathasha Fernando is a PhD candidate at the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada. Her research focuses on the religio-political discourse surrounding the Easter Sunday Attacks of Sri Lanka and among its diaspora in Canada. She is supervised by Professors Chiara Letizia and Stephanie Tremblay. Her interests include : religiously motivated terrorism, religious extremism and religious radicalization in the Indian subcontinent.
College Lecturer at Worcester College, and Postdoctoral Researcher at School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford Dr. Huanyuan Zhang-Zheng is a Postdoctoral researcher with a profound interest in African forest ecology, carbon cycle modelling, and plant functional traits. Affiliated with both the University of Oxford and UC Berkeley, he is responsible for building the Global Ecosystem Monitoring (GEM) Forests carbon cycle database. Huanyuan is a member of the Ecosystems Lab and NGEE-Tropics lab. Huanyuan's primary research endeavours encompass the compilation of the GEM forests carbon cycle database, data-model comparisons of forests' gross primary productivity, and meta-analyses of forest productivity across a multitude of tropical sites. He is also the sole author of CRAN R package, ARTofR Dr. Zhang-Zheng earned a BSc in Environmental Science from Sun Yat-sen University in China, and the University of Birmingham. He also holds an MRes in Ecosystem and Environmental Change (Distinction) from Imperial College London. In 2023, he was awarded DPhil in Geography and the Environment from the University of Oxford with a thesis entitled Gross primary production of West African tropical forests. He has been the recipient of the Environmental Change Institute small grants from the University of Oxford, the Tang scholarships awarded by the China Oxford Scholarship Fund, and the Henfrey scholarship on Chinese studies from St Catherine’s College, Oxford. Additionally, his research was funded by Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden Open Funding, and African-Oxford Catalyst Grant, awarded by African-Oxford Initiative. Born on a tropical island (Nan'ao Island, China) and passionate about tropical ecosystems, he has travelled to and conducted research in Mexico, Colombia, Ghana, Malaysia and Yunan, China. He is also a PADI qualified Free Diver and Dive Master.
Assistant Professor of Communications, University of Florida My research expertise lies predominantly in the realms of risk/science communication and public health. I investigate intricacies of public perceptions surrounding health and environmental risks, especially within the contexts of infectious disease prevention, sustainability and resilience, and their associated sociological and psychological constructs. My work has shed light on how individuals perceive, internalize and act upon health advisories, environmental warnings and science-driven narratives. My recent work explores artificial intelligence and its potential to influence public health interventions and communication strategies. I have served on the editorial boards of academic journals including Science Communication and Environmental Communication. My work has appeared in prestigious journals such as Journal of Communication, Social Science & Medicine, and Global Environmental Change.
Associate professor in Library and Information Science, Linnaeus University Hanna Carlsson is an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Her research interests encompass the democratic role and agency of cultural institutions, with a particular focus on public libraries and library and cultural policy. She also has expertise in critical studies related to media and information literacy, as well as digital education's role in democracy. She coordinates the Master's program in Library and Information Science at Linnaeus University and teaches media and information literacy, as well as cultural and library policy, at the Bachelor's level.
Assistant Professor, School of Kinesiology, Western University Hayley Baker’s scholarly interests include leadership, gender, and sport. Her research has focused on addressing the underrepresentation of women coaches at Canadian universities by exploring normalized institutional practices and processes. More recently, she has examined the implementation of gender-based violence policies in universities and the institutional responses to gender-based violence within Canadian university sport.
Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Alberta Howard Nye is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta. He works primarily in the areas of practical ethics, normative ethics, and metaethics, and has related interests in political philosophy, the philosophy of mind, and decision theory. One line of Howard’s current research concerns the ethics of collective action, including why individuals should contribute to projects that may do a great deal of good if enough others also contribute, and what contributions to potentially beneficial projects are most important to make. Much of his current research in this line investigates the desirability and feasibility of a just transition to a predominantly plant-based food system in Canada. Another line of Howard's research investigates challenges to the common assumption that life is less of a morally important benefit to sentient beings who lack the intellectual abilities of typical human adults. A third line of Howard's research investigates what it takes for an entity to have representations and goals in a sense that admits of genuine, underivative error and unfulfillment, with applications to the sentience and mental lives of various non-human animals, intellectually less able humans, and possible future artificial intelligence systems.
