Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research, UCL My expertise is in research methodologies in education, including randomised controlled trials and meta-analysis. I contribute to evidence reviews and impact evaluations of educational programmes and initiatives. Much of my work is focussed on socio-economic inequalities in education and I provide policy advice to the Social Mobility Commission. I also regularly work directly with schools, local authorities, and multi-academy trusts to improve the use of evidence in practice. This work includes supporting teacher research and developing school policy. I speak at research conferences and teacher training events.
PhD candidate, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore - Catholic University of Milan Samuele C.A. Abrami is a PhD candidate at the UCSC in Milan, where he is also subject expert in the courses of Geopolitics and History and Institutions of Asia. He is research assistant at the International Center for Contemporary Turkish Studies and Ce.St.In.Geo. Samuele is now visiting researcher at Sabancı University in Istanbul, where he is working on his project about the link between internal and external dimensions in Turkish Foreign Policy as well as on Türkiye’s relations with the EU, Balkans and Wider Mediterranean. Since 2023, he is part of the Türkiye- Europe Future Forum, of the German-Italian Spinelli Forum, and a CM-Lerici recipient at the Stockholm Institute for Turkish Studies.
Professor of Psychology, University of Ghana Charity S. Akotia is a professor in the Department of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, University of Ghana, Legon. Her specialty is social/community psychology and she teaches both at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology and Russian from the University of Ghana, a Master of Arts degree in community psychology from Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario, Canada, and a PhD from the University of Ghana. Her main research interest is in suicidal behaviour in a cultural context and how to prevent suicide. She has collaborated with colleagues from Norway and Uganda to work in this area of psychology for several years. In recent times, she has also developed an interest in the multifaceted needs of the ageing and how they navigate on a daily basis to improve their lived experiences. She has also done some work on the psychology of eating behaviour. This area of research is new in Ghana and is a very interesting area where an attempt is made to understand how people eat and what eating means to them. Prof. Akotia also researches personhood in an African context. This project is funded by the Mellon Foundation and focuses on understanding how people conceptualise personhood and the factors that determine personhood. She is a member of the Ghana Psychology Association (GPA) and has been licensed by the Ghana Psychology Council. Internationally, she is a member of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) and the Critical Suicidology Group. She is the current national representative of the IASP and a co-chair of the Council of National Representatives of the IASP. Research area(s) (including ongoing research). Suicide and suicide prevention Gender and gender role attitudes Ageing, care and spirituality Psychology of eating behaviour Personhood in an African context
Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York) Samuel (Sam) Jens is a recent PhD graduate from the Department of Political Science at Stony Brook. He is a Research Associate at the Center for News, Technology & Innovation.
Professor of Public Policy, UCL Sandy Oliver is Professor of Public Policy at University College London. For thirty-five years, her interests have focused on the interaction between people making decisions together in their professional and personal lives. Alongside this, she has been developing methods to collate knowledge from whole bodies of research – systematic reviews – not just single studies to inform those decisions. This work has combined the strengths of two social movements: evidence-informed everything and inclusive approaches to research and decision making. It has taken her on a journey spanning community activism, public sector outreach, socio-economic development, research methodology, indigenous knowledge, and blended ways of learning. Sandy consistently looks for the big picture, by synthesising knowledge from various academic traditions and from people who see issues from different perspectives.
ARC Future Fellow, School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Queensland Sebastian is from Adelaide and received his BSc(Hons) and PhD. from the University of Adelaide, where he worked on the Aryl Hydrocarbon receptor in the lab of Murray Whitelaw. He then did postdoctoral research on haematopoitic stem cell differentiation in Kelly McNagny’s lab at the Biomedical Research Centre at the University of British Columbia before joining Patrick Sexton to work on G protein-coupled receptors at Monash University . Sebastian is now an ARC Future Fellow developing his own research program in the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Queensland. He remains an adjunct member of MIPS DDB as well as CCeMMP. Sebastian has honours and PhD positions for motivated students who have a strong desire to assume ownership of a project and work independently.
