Contributors

Jeff Bessen

Ph.D. Candidate in Chemical Biology, Harvard University I am a graduate student in the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Dept at Harvard University. I specialize in protein evolution and genome editing.

Joseph Lewnard

PhD candidate, Yale University Infectious disease modeling; neglected tropical diseases; epidemiology

Jamie T. Mullins

Assistant Professor of Resource Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst I am interested in the quantitative investigation of policy-relevant factors that contribute to outcomes in human health and well-being. My research to date has been primarily concerned with the two-way interaction between environmental conditions and human activities. In addition to a continued attention to environmental topics, I am particularly interested in expanding the scope of my work to questions in health, education, agriculture, and development.

Jennifer Mercieca

Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the Aggie Agora, Texas A&M University Jennifer Mercieca is an historian of American political discourse, especially discourses about citizenship, democracy, and the presidency. Her scholarship combines American history with rhetorical and political theory in an effort to understand democratic practices. She argues that current views of citizenship rely upon the tragic and ironic views, which do not enable citizens to act to control their government. Her presidency research argues that we have heroic expectations for the presidency that are both unrealistic and unconstitutional and that these expectations burden the presidency. She is the author of Founding Fictions and the co-Editor of The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations: Establishing the Obama Presidency. Her essays have appeared in scholarly journals like Rhetoric & Public Affairs, The Quarterly Journal of Speech, and Presidential Studies Quarterly. Dr. Mercieca teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Political Communication, Presidential Rhetoric, Activism, Citizenship & the Public Sphere, Social Movements, Rhetorical Theory, and the History of American Public Discourse. Dr. Mercieca frequently appears as an expert commentator and as a consultant for news stories.

Joelle Gergis

ARC DECRA Climate Research Fellow, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne Dr Joëlle Gergis is a climate research scientist and writer working with Professor David Karoly at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research focuses on reconstructing Southern Hemisphere climate variability over the past 200–1,000 years using annually-resolved tree rings, corals, ice cores and historical records. From 2009–2012 she led the Australian Research Council Linkage funded South-Eastern Australian Recent Climate History (SEARCH) project; a landmark initiative, spanning the sciences and the humanities to reconstruct the region’s climate variability from first European settlement in 1788. Since 2009 Joëlle has led the international Past Global Changes (PAGES) working group on Australasian climate variability of the past 2,000 years (Aus2K). This involved coordinating the development of the region’s 1,000 year temperature reconstruction for input into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report. Joëlle received her PhD in high-resolution palaeoclimatology from the University of New South Wales in 2006. Since 2003 she has authored over 60 articles on climate variability and change publications. Her work has been covered on national and international television (SBS World News, ABC, TVNZ), radio (ABC Radio National, AM, Bush Telegraph, Science Show, RRR) and print media (The Guardian, The Australian, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Geographic). In 2007 she was one of three national finalists for the 2007 Eureka Prize for Young Leaders in Environmental Issues and Climate Change, and was one of nineteen Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists’ Science Leaders Scholarship recipients selected nationwide. Professor Tim Flannery, the 2007 Australian of the Year, was one of her mentors during the program aimed at training outstanding young scientists to help bridge the communication gap between science and public policy. In 2012 Joëlle was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) fellowship, and her team won the 2014 Eureka Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scientific Research – informally known as the ‘Oscars of Australian Science’. Most recently Joëlle was awarded the 2015 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research in the Faculty of Science at the University of Melbourne.

Jane Wills

Professor of Human Geography, Queen Mary University of London I'm a Human Geographer, based at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. I completed a degree in Geography at Cambridge University (St Catharine's College, 1983-1986) and a PhD at the Open University (supervised by Professors John Allen and Doreen Massey, 1992-1995). I have had academic jobs at the University of Cambridge (1991-1992); University of Southampton (1993-1998); and arrived at Queen Mary in 1998. Since completing my PhD in 1995 I've looked at the geography of labour organising; the development of union-community alliances in pursuit of shared goals such as the living wage; the impact of the living wage in London; the potential for employee ownership to democratise the workplace and economy; the challenges faced in fostering international solidarity between workers in transnational companies; the emergence of a migrant division of labour in London's low waged labour market; the history and practice of community organising; and the emergence of localism as a key tool for public policy and political practice