Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, University College Cork Jessica Wax-Edwards is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action Postdoctoral Fellow at the University College Cork. Previously an Honorary Research Fellow at Royal Holloway University of London, her research interests include memory, violence and politics in twentieth century and contemporary Mexican visual culture. She has published articles on Latin American fiction and documentary cinema, graphic art and photography and her first monograph Documenting Violence in Calderón’s Mexico: Visual Culture, Resistance and Memorialisation was published 2023. Jessica was also a selected participant in the 8-month AHRC-funded mentorship scheme Doing Women’s (Global) (Horror) Film History (DWGHFH); her resulting short film Storylines___ was published 2024.
Lecturer in English, School of English, Irish and Communication, University of Limerick Jack Fennell is a writer and researcher who teaches at the University of Limerick, Ireland. He is the editor of two fiction anthologies, A Brilliant Void (2018) and It Rose Up (2021), collecting lesser-known Irish science fiction and fantasy stories respectively. He has written two academic studies, Irish Science Fiction (2014) and Rough Beasts: Monstrosity in Irish Literature, 1800-2010 (2019), as well as twelve book chapters covering topics ranging from comic-book vampires to the work of Flann O'Brien, Dermot Healy, and the representation of transgender characters in the Star Trek franchise. His own fiction has appeared in Silver Apples Magazine, Archive of the Odd, and various anthologies. He also contributed translations to The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013), and was the winner of the 2022 European Science Fiction Society award for Best Translator.
Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Tennessee Jian Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He leads Mobile Sensing and Intelligence Security (MoSIS) Lab @ UTK. Before joining UTK, he received his Ph.D. degree from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. His research interests span Robust and Trustworthy AI and ML, Human-Computer Interaction, Computational Sensing, Mobile Security, and Smart Healthcare. His research work has been published at top-tier mobile-computing/AI/security/HCI venues (e.g., S&P/Oakland, ACM CCS, ACM MobiCom, ICML, CVPR, AAAI, IJCAI, ECCV, ACM MobiSys, ACM SenSys, ACM UbiComp, and IEEE ICASSP) and has received regular media attention from outlets, such as BBC News, Yahoo News, MIT Technology Review, NBC New York, IEEE Spectrum, WCBS TV, and Voice of America TV, etc. He was recognized as one of the Stanford’s World’s Top 2% Most Cited Scientists. Additionally, he holds seven U.S. patents, two of which have been licensed to industrial companies.
Postdoctoral Fellow in Plant Genetics, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory I received my BA in Biology from Macalester College in St Paul, MN after which I pursued a PhD in Plant Biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. There I worked under Dr. Michael Scanlon using single-cell transcriptomic approaches to better understand the genetics of maize shoot development. After completing my graduate work in 2022, I became a postdoc in Dr. Zachary Lippman's lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, NY. My work focuses on the genetic basis of convergently evolved plant phenotypes and adaptations to better understand evolution and predictably improve plant traits for agriculture. In Spring 2025 I will open my lab in the Botany Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I will continue related work.
Associate Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington Joan A. Casey received her doctoral degree from the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2014. Dr. Casey is an environmental epidemiologist who focuses on environmental health, environmental justice, and sustainability. Her research uses large secondary health datasets, such as electronic health records, to study the relationship between emerging environmental exposures and population health across the lifecourse. She also considers vulnerable populations, joint social and environmental exposures, and health disparities, particularly in an era of climate change. Dr. Casey investigates a range of exposures including wildfires, power outages, ambient temperature, the built environment, fossil fuel infrastructure, and concentrated animal feeding operations. From 2014-2016, Dr. Casey was a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar, and from 2019-2022, she was the co-chair of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology North American chapter. She also serves as an editorial board review member for Environmental Health Perspectives. Dr. Casey also holds a BS in Biological and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University and an MA in Applied Physiology from Teachers College at Columbia University.
Post Doctorate Fellow, Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Newcastle Dr Jordan Stanford is an Accredited Practising Dietitian and an early career researcher in the School of Health Sciences at The University of Newcastle, Australia. She obtained her Bachelor of Nutrition and Dietetics (Honours Class I) in 2016, and her PhD in Nutrition and Dietetics in 2022, both from the University of Wollongong. Dr Stanford's research investigates diet-based therapies and the gastrointestinal microbiome to achieve favourable gut microbiome and metabolomic changes and enhance clinical outcomes for individuals with chronic kidney disease. Since completing her studies, Dr Stanford has broadened her research scope to emphasise precision and personalised nutrition, which involves examining the interplay between diet and using multi-omic technologies, such as the dietary metabolome.
