Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies, The Open University Jessica Hughes is Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies at The Open University. Her research focuses on the cultural and religious history of the southern Italian region of Campania, especially the area around Vesuvius and the Campi Flegrei. She is interested in how the traces of Greco-Roman antiquity co-exist and intertwine with other elements of local history and geology, particularly the material culture and practices of vernacular Catholicism. In 2024 she has a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship - during this year, she is writing a book about the Catholic Shrine of Our Lady of the Rosary in the modern town of Pompeii, and its evolving relationship with the neighbouring archaeological excavations.
Ph.D. Candidate in Chemical Engineering, University of Toronto I'm a researcher with prior experience in polymer membrane design and electrochemistry. I'm currently working for Prof. Jay Werber in collaboration with Prof. Charles De Lannoy on a project funded by Carbon to Sea to design efficient bipolar membranes for electrochemical Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement.
Professor of Strategic Media Management, Bournemouth University Prof. John Oliver is an experienced academic who has published in international media and business journals. He has a successful track record of delivering world class instrumental impact from his research. Most recently his research on the impact of crisis events on the levels of innovation and corporate financial performance influenced the UK Govts new ‘Build Back Better: our plan for growth’ and the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee's new 'Innovation Strategy’ which aims to incorporate long-term strategies that centre on business investment that drives innovation in the UK economy. His research has made a demonstrable impact on UK Communications policy and regulatory decisions relating to Sky Plc and influenced the public policy debate on internet regulation. His research into ‘strategic organisational transformation’ created financial benefits for several world class management consultancies which resulted in direct economic impacts in terms of new jobs and multi-million pound investments made by FTSE 100 firms. The reach and significance of his Scenario Planning research has also extended outside the UK with a number of Middle East Government agencies changing their strategy practices, operational structures and capacity building capabilities in strategic communications. He is an advisory board member for the Horizon Scanning & Foresight Committee (UK Parliament), and member of the Centre of Excellence and Profession in the Enterprise Portfolio Management Office (UK Parliament). He is a former President of the European Media Management Association, Academic Fellow at the Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology, and former Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford. Prof. Oliver has also held senior leadership roles as: Deputy Dean (Business School), Head of Research; Head of International Development (Faculty of Media & Communications); Professoriate representative to the Academic Standards Committee. As an executive trainer he has delivered executive education to clients like the BBC, ITV, Virgin Media, Sky, UKTV, Channel 4, FremantleMedia and Bell Pottinger.
Associate professor, University of Canberra Jeroen J.A. van Boxtel started with a master's degrees in Biology (Utrecht University) and Cognitive Sciences (Université Pierre et Marie Curie & Collège de France, France), after which he completed his PhD at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, at the cross-disciplinary Helmholtz Institute in 2008. After obtaining his PhD, he moved to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he worked for two years on the relationship between attention and consciousness with Prof. Christof Koch. In 2010, he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, to work on questions related to human action perception and attention, and the link to Autism Spectrum Disorders. In 2013, Jeroen van Boxtel was recruited to Monash University where he also headed the Cognitive Neuroimaging group at Monash Biomedical Imaging. He currently works in the Discipline of Psychology at the University of Canberra, and focuses on the negative effects of attention, the link between attention and conscious perception, the influence of attention on biological motion perception, and the influence of noise on visual processing.
Full Professor of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland I research the geographies of discards as well as those of maintenance and repair. Today's discards are synthetic, heterogeneous, and entail high degrees of indeterminacy around their mitigation or remediation. Maintenance and repair, although essential to the smooth functioning of socioeconomic life, have until quite recently, been relegated to the margins of social science research. Questions that inform my research include where and how are contemporary discards made? Where do they travel and where do their effects accumulate? Who gets what discards, where, how, and under what conditions? I am also interested in how maintenance and repair, broadly conceived, might offer both literal and figurative lessons for figuring out how to live well together in permanently polluted and always breaking worlds.
