Ben Handel is an economist at the Unversity of Claifornia at Berkeley whose research focuses on health care markets. His research has studied consumer decision-making and market design of health insurance markets, and illustrates the interplay between consumer decision-making and market regulation. Ben has also researched provider financial incentives and take up of preventive care in health care markets. Ben received his Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern in 2010 and an A.B. in Economics from Princeton in 2004. In addition to his teaching at Berkeley, he has advised numerous businesses and policymakers on a range of issues related to health economics.
A J Brown is professor of public policy and law, and program leader, public integrity and anti-corruption, in the Centre for Governance & Public Policy, Griffith University. He is also a former senior investigator for the Commonwealth Ombudsman, Associate to Justice Tony Fitzgerald AC QC, ministerial advisor in the first Beattie Government, and current member of the board of Transparency International Australia: http://www.transparency.org.au
Professor Thas Nirmalathas is the Director of the Melbourne Networked Society Institute. He is also the Co-Founder and the Academic Director of Melbourne Accelerator Programs (MAP) which supports entrepreneurial activities of the University Community through business acceleration models. Prof Nirmalathas obtained his BEng and PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Melbourne in 1993 and 1998 respectively. Between 2000 and 2004, he was the Director of Photonics Research Laboratory (Melbourne Node of Australian Photonics CRC) and also the Program Leader of Telecommunications Technologies Program. From 2004 to 2006, he was the Program Leader for the Network Technologies Research Program in NICTA. He was also the acting Lab Director of VRL in 2007. Between 2006 and 2008, He was the Research Group Manager of the Networked Systems Group of Victoria Research Laboratory (VRL) at the National ICT Australia (NICTA), a premier Australian research centre of excellence in ICT. Between 2010 and 2012, he was the Head, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne He has written more than 400 technical articles and currently hold 2 active international patents and 1 provisional patent application in the process. His research interests include microwave photonics, optical-wireless network integration, broadband networks, and scalability of telecom and Internet services. He has serviced as chair of steering committees of Asia Pacific Microwave Photonics and IEEE Topical Meeting on Microwave Photonics Conference series in 2008/2009. He is also a member of the Steering Committee for the International Conference on Optical Internet (COIN). He was also Guest Editor for Special Issue on Opto-Electronics and Communications of the IEICE Transactions in Communications. He was the General Co-Chair of 2008 IEEE Topical Meeting on Microwave Photonics/ Asia Pacific Microwave Photonics 2008. He is currently an Associate Editor of IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of Optical Society of America and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia.
Jack Thompson is Lecturer at the Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College Dublin. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and his MA from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Dr Thompson’s research focuses on foreign policy and political culture in the United States. He is particularly interested in political (especially presidential) leadership, partisanship, transatlantic relations, and debates regarding American relative decline. Dr Thompson is currently working on two projects. One explores presidential leadership in US foreign policy. The second explores the emergence of modern conservative political culture.
Marek's research focuses on various aspects of competition law and policy in international and transnational contexts, including the limits of extraterritorial jurisdiction and state involvement in anticompetitive practices. In broader terms, his interests lie in international economic law. Before joining Queen's Marek was a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies at Loyola University Chicago. He holds a PhD from University College Dublin (completed on a prestigious Ad Astra Scholarship), an LLM (with specializations in EU Economic and World Trade Law) from the Saarland University’s European Institute, and MA degrees from the Warsaw School of Economics. Marek is a Member of the International Advisory Board of the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies at the Loyola University Chicago (US); an Associate Member of the Centre for Antitrust and Regulatory Studies at the Warsaw University (Poland); and a Fellow of the European Law Institute (Austria). He is also a member of a number of academic societies-- among them the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS), Academic Society for Competition Law, and Competition Law Scholars Forum. Marek has been also nominated by the Polish Competition Authority to serve as a Non-Governmental Advisor to the International Competition Network He has taught Contract Law, EU Law (both Constitutional and Substantive/Economic), International and Comparative Competition Law, EU Competition Law, and International Trade Law.
Since I retired from teaching at the University of Queensland I have continued collaborating with academic colleagues on forest restoration. I have undertaken a series of consultancies with the World Bank in China (involving forest restoration in degraded land) and with the Australian aid program in Vietnam (involving adaptions to climate change in the Mekong Delta). In recent years I have also given lectures to post graduate students (University of Melbourne, Yale University, Swedish Agricultural University) and participated in reforestation training programs (China, Thailand, Malaysia).
