Blog Contributors

The LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog is updated daily with blog posts contributed by academics, researchers and those interested in the impact debate in the UK and abroad. We invite comments, posts, articles, event notices, and research materials from all those interested. Scroll below to find out more about our contributors, or head to our main About page for more information on the project as a whole.

If you would like to contribute to the blog, please get in touch via impactofsocialsciences@lse.ac.uk

Donald Abelson
Donald Abelson is Professor, Department of Political Science, Director of the Canada-US Institute and Director, Centre for American Studies, at The University of Western Ontario. He is the author of several books including: Do Think Tanks Matter?  Assessing the Impact of Public Policy Institutes: Second Edition (2009) and A Capitol Idea: Think Tanks and U.S. Foreign Policy (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006).  His work has also appeared in over three dozen edited collections and academic journals, including: Global Society, Presidential Studies Quarterly, The Canadian Journal of Political Science and Canadian Public Administration. He is currently writing a book on the tensions between several American conservative think tanks and the more liberal universities with whom they share or have shared an affiliation.

Jon Adams
Dr Adams is currently based in LSE’s External Relations Division and was previously in LSE’s Department of Economic History. His specialist subject is Rat Cities and the Bee-hive Worlds: space and numbers in the modern city, an examination of how arguments about the effects of crowding on human behaviour have influenced city planners and architects during the 20th century.

Geoffrey Alderman
Geoffrey Alderman teaches History and Politics at the University of Buckingham. Professor Alderman is the author and co-author of some 12 books, including Modern British Jewry (2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1998). He is also an Associate Editor of the New Dictionary of National Biography, in charge of all post-1800 Jewish entries. He writes irregularly for the Guardian and regularly for the Jewish Chronicle.

Liz Allen
A social scientist by training, Liz Allen leads the Evaluation team at the Wellcome Trust. At Wellcome Liz is responsible for developing methodologies and implementing approaches to support the monitoring and evaluation of the impact of research and funding initiatives. Liz is also a member of the Board of Directors of the ORCID initiative (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) www.orcid.org – a not-for-profit initiative which intends to create an international and open system of unique and persistent researcher ids.

Paul André
Paul André is a postdoctorate student at Carnegie Mellon University who works in social computing and crowdsourcing. His research interests include complex and creative interests of the crowd and his thesis focused on social and affective computing: examining physical practices in the workplace and asking how we might use digital tools to augment or enrich those practices. Follow Paul on twitter @Paulesque.

Martin Zaltz Austwick
Martin Zaltz Austwick is a lecturer in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualization at UCL-CASA, having previous earned an MPhys in Physics and a DPhil in quantum computing and nanotechnology, working for four years in Medical Laser Physics before joining CASA in 2010. His blog is sociablephysics.com and he tweets at @sociablephysics.

Linda Baines
Linda Baines is Secretary and Treasurer of AURIL, and a member of AURIL Council. Linda is AURIL’s project manager, working on AURIL’s collaboration with organisations across the KT sector looking at what KE practitioners do, how and why they do it, and the knowledge and skills they need to keep up to date. Outside AURIL, Linda is Head of Corporate Development, Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), involved in strategic and business planning and policy development, and briefing BIS (Department for Business Innovation and Skills) on STFC issues. Linda has been involved in KE for some 15 years, and is also now researching the nature of the interactions between organisations and individuals involved in KE as part of her PhD study.

Paul Benneworth
Paul Benneworth is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies at the University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands.  Paul’s research concerns the relationships between higher education, research and society, and he is currently Project Leader for the HERAVALUE research consortium (Understanding the Value of Arts & Humanities Research), part of the ERANET funded programme “Humanities in the European Research Area”.  Paul is a Fellow of the Regional Studies Association.

Michael Bernstein
Michael Bernstein is a final-year graduate student at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. His research interests lie in combining computation with crowds to create systems that are powered by collective intelligence. His work in human-computer interaction embeds crowd work into interactive systems, creates new crowds by designing social computing systems, and mines crowd data for interactive applications. He can be reached on Twitter @msbernst.

Lord Michael Bichard
Lord Michael Bichard is chairman of the Design Council, London and chairman of Public Management and Money’s Editorial Board. After leaving the University of the Arts as Rector in August 2008, he was appointed Director of the first national Institute for Government. Prior to this he was Chief Executive of Brent and Gloucestershire Local Authorities and in 1990 became Chief Executive of the Government’s Benefits Agency. In 1995 he was appointed Permanent Secretary of the Employment Department and then the Department for Education and Employment, before leaving the Civil Service in 2001.

Tim Blackman
Professor Tim Blackman is Pro Vice Chancellor for Research & Scholarship at The Open University. Blackman joined the OU from Durham University where he was Dean of Queen’s Campus and Director of the Wolfson Research Institute. A Professor of Sociology and Social Policy, Tim also holds a BA in Geography and a PhD from Durham. In 2004 he was elected to the Academy of Social Sciences. Tim’s research had an early focus on housing and urban renewal, which is a continuing interest, while in recent years his work has included major studies of the effects of dementia on outdoor activities and of local interventions in health inequalities.

Mark Blyth
Mark Blyth is a faculty fellow at the Watson Institute, professor of international political economy in Brown University’s Political Science Department, and director of the University’s undergraduate programs in development studies and international relations. He is the author of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century, editor of The Routledge Handbook of International Political Economy: IPE as a Global Conversation which surveys different schools of IPE around the globe; and co-editor of a volume on constructivist theory and political economy titled Constructing the International Economy. He is working on a new book that questions the political and economic sustainability of liberal democracies, called The End of the Liberal World? Another book, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, investigating the return to prominence of the idea of a financial orthodoxy following the global financial crisis, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Björn Brembs
Dr Björn Brembs is a neurobiologist at Freie Universitat Berlin where his main research topics focus around the general organization of behavior with regards to reward, punishment and decision making, including questions on how brains accomplish adaptive behavioral choice. His current research topics include order in spontaneous behaviour, brains as output/input devices, hierarchial interactions in Drosophila predictive learning and Profound flight deficit in Deosophila lacking octopamine. You can find more about Björn on his homepage, or follow him on Twitter @brembs.

 Cheryl Brown
Cheryl Brown is a Chartered Marketer and former editor at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex and works with research institutes and knowledge brokers in international development to help them increase the uptake of their research. She is a part-time lecturer on professional marketing courses including the CAM Diploma in Digital Marketing. Cheryl has a particular interest in applying behaviour change theories (social marketing) to the process of development research and is creator of the Social Marketing Lady website, blog and Twitter account.

Casey Brienza
Casey Brienza is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Cambridge and member of Trinity College, Cambridge. She received her AB from Mount Holyoke College in 2003 and her MA from New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication in 2009. Her doctoral thesis, fully funded by an External Research Studentship from her College, is being written under the supervision of John Thompson on manga publishing and the transnational production of print culture. Casey also has refereed articles in print or forthcoming in journals such as The Journal of Popular Culture, Publishing Research Quarterly, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and The International Journal of the Book. She may be reached through her website.

Thom Brooks
Thom Brooks is Reader in Political and Legal Philosophy at Newcastle University. He is editor and founder of the Journal of Moral Philosophy. He is currently working on theories of justice. His books include Hegel’s Political Philosophy (2007), The Global Justice Reader (2008), New Waves in Ethics (2011), and Punishment (forthcoming). He also writes on his personal blog.

Aidan Byrne
Aidan Byrne is an SL in English and Media/Cultural Studies at Wolverhampton University. He specialises in masculinity in interwar Welsh and political fiction, and teaches on a wide range of modules. He blogs as Plashingvole.blogspot.com and tweets as @plashingvole. One day his blogging will get him sacked.

Elaine Byrne
Elaine teaches Comparative Political Reform and has also taught Irish Politics as an adjutant lecturer at the Department of Political Science in Trinity College Dublin. She is also author of ‘Political Corruption in Ireland 1922-2010′, which will be published in April 2012. Elaine blogs at www.elaine.ie and tweets @ElaineByrne.

Liz Carolan
Liz Carolan has been working at the Institute for Government since October 2010. Her research has focused on the international comparison of ministers and cabinets, the role of senior experts in the development of health policy, and the selection of candidates to be MPs. She recently received a postgraduate degree from the London School of Economics, having spent a number of years doing research and development work with civil society and academic organisations in Ireland, the Balkans and Australia.

Mark Carrigan
Mark Carrigan is a third year PhD student in Sociology at the University of Warwick. His PhD research is a longitudinal study of identity and culture involving ongoing in depth interviews with 18 undergraduate students over two years. He also conducts research on asexuality and sexual culture, with an edited book Asexuality Studies and a special issue of the international journal Psychology & Sexuality on these themes due for publication in 2012. He is an enthusiastic advocate of social media within academic life, currently editing the website Sociological Imagination and the Sociology@Warwick blog.

Antonio Casilli
Antonio A. Casilli is an associate professor of Digital Humanities at the Paris Institute of Technology (ParisTech) and a researcher in sociology at the Edgar Morin Centre, School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris). His main research foci are computer-mediated communication and health behaviours. He also deals with advanced ethno-computational methods and agent-based simulations for social science. He runs the research blog www.bodyspacesociety.eu and tweets as @bodyspacesoc.

Alan Cann
Alan Cann is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Leicester.  His interests are science education and exploiting emerging social technologies to enhance student and researcher development.  He is the author of two textbooks, has served on the editorial boards of several scientific and educational journals, and is serial blogger.  He has worked as a consultant for numerous educational and scientific institutions, and has published extensively in the area of educational research and social technologies.  See: http://bit.ly/AJCann

Stephen Curry
Stephen Curry is a structural biologist in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Imperial College London and writes a regular blog at Reciprocal Space. His research interests focus on the use of X-ray crystallography to elucidate the structures of proteins molecules, in efforts to shed new light on their functions. Most recently he has been studying and investigation of the substrate and inhibitor specificity of the 3C protease from foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV).

Huw Davies
Huw Davies is Co-Head of School and Professor of Health Care Policy & Management at The School of Management, the University of St Andrews, and he was formerly Director of Knowledge Mobilisation for the UK NIHR ‘Service Delivery and Organisation’ national R&D Programme (2008-10). His research interests are in service delivery, encompassing: evidence-informed policy and practice; performance measurement and management; accountability, governance and trust. Huw has published widely in each of these areas, including the highly acclaimed Using Evidence: How Research Can Inform Public Services (Policy Press, 2007).

Athene Donald
Athene Donald isProfessor of Experimental Physics at Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Athene has been at Cavendish since 1983, and became a professor in 1998. Her activity sits within the sector of Biological and Soft Systems, and focusses on using the ideas of soft matter physics to study a wide range of systems of both synthetic and biological origin.

Claire Donovan
Claire Donovan is Reader in the Health Economics Research Group, Brunel University. She is guest editor of the special issue of Research Evaluation 20(3) ‘State of the Art in Assessing Research Impact’, available in September 2011.

Professor Patrick Dunleavy
Patrick Dunleavy is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he has worked since 1979. He was educated at Corpus Christi College and Nuffield College, Oxford, where he gained his D.Phil. He has authored and edited numerous books on political science theory, British politics and urban politics, as well as more than 50 articles in professional journals. His current research includes a seven country study of how central governments relate to the IT industry for the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council.

Alastair Dunning
Alastair Dunning is Programme Manager of Digitisation at JISC, looking after JISC’s e-content programme which deals with the creation and delivery of digital resources, such as the British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings or the East London Theatre Archive for use in research, teaching and learning.

Martin Fenner
Martin Fenner works as a medical doctor and cancer researcher at the Hannover Medical School Cancer Center in Germany. He writes about how the internet is changing scholarly communication. He is one of the organizers of the Science Online London conference and is member of the ORCID board of directors. He believes that open standards that enable collaboration between people and software tools will make the internet a friendlier and more productive place for science and scientists. Martin can be found on Twitter as @mfenner.

Steven Fielding
Steven is a Professor of Political History and Director of the Centre for British Politics at the University of Nottingham. Steven’s research interests include the ‘crisis’ of trust in politics, the fictional representation of politics and the British Labour Party. He has written for the Guardian, the BBC and In July 2010 he wrote and presented a documentary on Radio 4, ‘Dramatising New Labour’.

Matt Flinders
Matt Flinders is a Professor in the Department of Government at Sheffield University. He also sits on the Executive Committee of the Political Studies Association. Professor Flinders is also a writer and broadcaster and has made numerous contributions to national newspapers, including The Times and The Guardian, and in 2011 he wrote and presented a three-part series for BBC Radio 4 entitled ‘In Defence of Politics’.

Robert Frodeman
Robert is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Interdisciplinarity and is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Texas. He specializes in environmental philosophy, science policy, and questions concerning interdisciplinarity. He served as a consultant for the US Geological Survey for eight years, was the 2001-2002 Hennebach Professor of the Humanities at the Colorado School of Mines, and was an ESRC Fellow at Lancaster University in England in the spring of 2005.

Melonie Fullick
Melonie Fullick is a Ph.D. student at York University, Canada, working on research in post-secondary education, policy and governance. She previously earned a BA in Communication Studies (2006) and an MA in Linguistics (2007). She has many interests including communication, knowledge, history, politics, science and technology, public relations, and teaching. She enjoys “building bridges” between theory and practice, research and policy.

Conor Gearty
Conor Gearty moved to LSE in 2002, to a post in the law department but also to become the first Rausing Director of LSE’s new Centre for the Study of Human Rights. His academic research focuses primarily on civil liberties, terrorism and human rights. He has been a visiting professor at a number of universities abroad and has also been an external examiner at many universities in the UK and Ireland. Conor ran, The Rights’ Future, a collaborative online project and blogs here. His is also on twitter @conorgearty.

Chris Gilson
Chris Gilson joined the LSE PPG in December 2007 as Editor/Researcher and has worked on the long-standing hot review contract with the National Audit Office, review work for the European Court of Auditors, and is now the Managing Editor of the EUROPP blog. Before this, he worked for three years at the Department of Health, firstly as a Correspondence Officer and then as a Freedom of Information Officer. He has a undergraduate and a Masters degree in Geography, and a postgraduate diploma in Strategic Management, all from the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand.

Adam Golberg
Adam Golberg works in research development at Nottingham University Business School, with a particular emphasis on supporting colleagues in obtaining external funding for research. Before the University of Nottingham, he worked at Keele University – first managing the Centre for Professional Ethics, and then the Institute for Public Policy and Management. Prior to that, Adam was a research student at Keele, completing an MPhil by research on the political philosophy of John Rawls.

Chris Goulden
Chris Goulden is the Policy and Research Manager at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and manages much of the group’s work on poverty including that on minimum income standards and monitoring poverty and social exclusion. He has previously worked at the Home Office on drugs and crime research and has also been involved with the Cabinet Office’s development of alcohol policy.

Timothy Gowers
Timothy Gowers is a Royal Society Research Professor in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge University. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. In 1998, he was awarded the Fields Medal for his research. Gowers broke new ground recently with his “Polymath project,” challenging mathematicians to collectively solve a math problem online.

Mark Hahnel
Mark has just completed his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London, having previously studied genetics in both Newcastle and Leeds. He is passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionise the research community. For more information about FigShare, visit FigShare.com. You can follow him at @figshare.

Martin Hall
Professor Martin Hall is a historical archaeologist and strategic leader. He took up his present role of Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford in August 2009. Professor Hall joined Salford from the University of Cape Town where he was Deputy Vice-Chancellor for six years. He has a career that has spanned both political change and transformation in South Africa and new directions in archaeology over the past four decades. He has written extensively on South African history, culture and higher education policy. Professor Hall’s current areas of focus include open access and innovation, inequality and its consequences and post-conflict mitigation and mediation. He writes weekly on these and other issues on his blog.

Avery Hancock
Avery Hancock joined the LSE PPG in January 2010 and is an Assistant Editor of the British Politics and Policy at LSE blog. She is a first-year Phd student in Political Theory at UCL and holds an MSc in Global Politics from the LSE. Before joining PPG Avery worked at the International Rescue Committee UKI and as a parliamentary research assistant in the House of Commons.

Chris Hanretty
Chris Hanretty joined the University of East Anglia in 2010 from the European University Institute. Chris’s doctoral thesis, “The Political Independence of Public Service Broadcasters”, won the inaugural François Mény Prize for the Best Comparative Study of European Institutions and has now been published by Routledge. His work has been published in Electoral Studies and the British Journal of Political Science. He previously studied Politics, Philosophy & Economics at St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, and has worked for the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) and the OSCE. He blogs here.

Anne Haour
Anne Haour is a Reader in the Arts & Archaeology of Africa at the University of East Anglia, where she teaches at Masters and PhD level and undertakes research. An archaeologist, her field is the archaeology of the medieval Sahel, and she has published both on this subject and, more widely, using a comparative angle to argue for the value of a comparative approach seeking out similarities between pre-industrial societies.  She is leading a five-year European Research Council-funded project in the north of the Republic of Bénin, West Africa, about which she edits a blog, crossroadsofempires.wordpress.com

Mike Harris
Michael Harris is a Senior Associate at the new economics foundation. Prior to joining nef, Michael led NESTA’s work on public and social innovation, innovation policy, the creative industries and science education, and he remains a NESTA Senior Associate. Michael has also worked in central and local government, education, and he lectured in political philosophy and public policy. He has a first class degree and a PhD in politics from the University of Sheffield.

James Hartley
James Hartley is Research Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Keele, UK. He is widely known for his work on student learning, text design and academic writing. Address for correspondence: James Hartley, School of Psychology, Keele University, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, UK. Email j.hartley@psy.keele.ac.uk

Alfred Hermida
Alfred Hermida is an award-winning online news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and his research interests include digital journalism and social media. He is a co-author of Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. Hermida spent 16 years at BBC News and was a founding news editor of the BBC News website.

J. Britt Holbrook
J. Britt Holbrook is Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at the University of North Texas (UNT), where he has served as Research Assistant Professor within the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies since 2005. He has also held teaching positions in philosophy at Emory University and at Georgia State University. Holbrook’s current research focuses on interdisciplinarity, peer review, scholarly communication, and the relationship between science, technology, and society. He is especially interested in the incorporation of societal impacts considerations into the peer review process of publicly supported funding agencies. Follow him on twitter @jbrittholbrook.

Julian Huppert
Julian is the Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge. He grew up in Cambridge and completed his PhD in Biological Chemistry and worked as a research scientist before moving into politics.

James Johns
James Johns is Director of Strategy for Government with HP, the largest supplier of IT products and services to the UK public sector.  In this role he works with politicians and officials to develop a shared understanding of emerging policy and how HP products and services can best support its implementation.  His brief includes oversight of HP’s government marketing programmes and managing relationships with academic institutions who are engaged by in support of this activity.

Steve Johnson
Steve Johnson has spent most of his career working at the interface between research and policy, in the university and consultancy sectors. He was Research Director of Consulting Inplace Ltd, where he undertook research for government departments and agencies, local and regional agencies and not-for-profit organisations. He has published on small business and entrepreneurship, local economic development and labour market policies. Steve is currently at Hull University Business School where he lectures on entrepreneurship and management consulting. He has recently completed a study for ESRC of the role of social research in the development of the Sure Start initiative.

John Kay
John Kay is one of Britain’s leading economists and visiting Professor at the LSE. His interests focus on the relationships between economics and business.  His career has spanned academic work and think tanks, business schools, company directorships, consultancies and investment companies. For more details of John’s biography, see the his website.

Eric Kaufmann
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth (Profile Books, 2010). In addition, he has authored The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (Harvard, 2004), The Orange Order (Oxford 2007, 2009), Unionism and Orangeism in Northern Ireland since 1945 – with H. Patterson (Manchester 2007) and edited Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities (Routledge 2004) and -with J. Goldstone and M. Toft,  Political Demography (Paradigm 2011). An editor of the journal Nations & Nationalism, his work focuses on dominant ethnicity, nationalism theory, the sociology of religion and political demography. He may be found on the web at www.sneps.net.

Gill Kirrup
Gill Kirrup is Senior Lecturer in Educational Technology at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University. Her particular research interests are gender and llifelong learning (elearning and distance education), students’ use of learning technolgies in their domestic and work environments and the use by home-based staff of technologies for teaching (ie Open University Associate Lecturers).

Ben Kochan
Ben Kochan is a freelance editor and planning and regeneration consultant. He was a specialist on the House of Commons Select Committee on the ODPM, and editor of Urban Environment Today Magazine. He co-edited with Kathleen Scanlon Towards a sustainable private rented sector: the lessons from other countries (LSE London 2011) and London: coping with austerity (LSE London 2010).

Julia Lane
Julia is the Program Director of the Science of Science & Innovation Policy program at the National Science Foundation. Her previous jobs included Senior Vice President and Director, Economics Department at NORC/University of Chicago, Director of the Employment Dynamics Program at the Urban Institute, Senior Research Fellow at the U.S. Census Bureau and Assistant, Associate and Full Professor of Economics at American University. Julia is also the founder and developer of the STAR METRICS program which has been highlighted nationally and internationally, including by Science and Nature.

Martyn Lawrence
Martyn Lawrence is Senior Publisher at Emerald Group Publishing, and manages a portfolio of International Business, Regional Management and Marketing journals.  He has a PhD in History from the University of York and has published several articles in books and peer-reviewed journals.  In addition to his role as Publisher, Martyn is Emerald’s Thomson Reuters (ISI) co-ordinator, and sits on taskforces that monitor journal rankings, trends in global higher education and the wider impact of scholarly research.

Elizabeth Eva Leach
Elizabeth is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and is both a music theorist and musicologist, with wide-ranging interests in everything from the minutiae of musical structures and manuscripts to the broadest cultural, historical, and philosophical contexts for music. Her principal focus has been on music and poetry of the fourteenth century. Elizabeth has her own blog, and you can follow her @eeleach.

Mark Leach
Mark joined University Alliance, a group of 23 major, business-engaged universities committed to delivering world-class research and a quality student experience around the UK, in 2011 and takes responsibility for leading several policy areas including funding and quality of research. He also works across a broad range of issues important to Alliance institutions.

Tim Leunig
Tim Leunig is a reader in Economic History at the LSE, and specialises in 18th and 19th century economic history. He has written on history of railways, the cotton industry, the housing market, and historical quality of life measures. His most recent work is The glamour of speed: an analysis of postwar investment in Britain’s railways in Hood, Christopher and Margetts, Helen, (eds.) Paradoxes of modernization: unintended consequences of public policy reform. Oxford University Press. He is also the Chief Economist at CentreForum.

Simon Linacre
Simon Linacre has worked with Emerald for nine years, managing its Accounting, Finance and Economics journals as a Senior Publisher. Recently he moved to Business Development to work on projects involving community development, open access publishing and new products. Simon has a degree in Philosophy from St Andrews University, a postgraduate diploma in Journalism and an MA in International Business.

Matt Lingard
Matt Lingard is the E-Learning Manager for the School of Engineering & Mathematical Sciences and the School of Informatics at City University Londonwhere he manages the support & development of our use of technologies for teaching and learning. Matt is particularly interested in the use of social media in higher education and has worked in learning technology roles since 2001 at LSE , London Metropolitan University & London Business School. He is also an elected Trustee of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT)  and the Vice Chair of their Publications Committee.

Debbie Lock
Debbie Lock joined Kingston University in February 2008 as the Executive Director of Enterprise with a remit to design and implement a large scale change management programme over a 2-3 year period. In 2008 Deborah undertook the first national UK survey on HEI knowledge-technology transfer salary and incentive schemes in partnership with UNICO. Until August 2011, she was a member of the Association for University Research & Industry Links (AURIL) Council and currently serves as a Councillor on the CBI London Regional Council. Deborah is working on a PhD, the focus of which is professional identities in knowledge transfer. You can read Debbie’s blog online here.

Patrick Lockley
Patrick Lockley works in the field of E-learning and Open Educational Resources. Whilst at Nottingham, Patrick helped to develop the Xpert and Xpert Attributor. Now at the University of Oxford, Patrick is working on Politics In Spires, a joint blogging project between the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, which aims to promote and disseminate research, engage in scholarly debate on current affairs, addressing topical issues in a timely fashion.

Eleanor Lovell
Eleanor Lovell is the Managing Editor of the Knowledge Centre at the University of Warwick. The Knowledge Centre launched in July 2010 and is a major new initiative from the University which aims to ensure Warwick is a primary source of knowledge and learning, providing access to world class research, learning materials and leading academic experts. You can follow Ellie on Twitter @ellielovell, as well as the Knowledge Centre @warwicknowledge.

Kurt Luther
Kurt Luther is a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on designing and studying social computing systems that support creative collaboration. He has previously investigated leadership in online, collaborative movie and game production, and led the development of Pipeline, free software for crowdsourcing creative projects.

Natalia Madjarevic
Natalia Madjarevic is Academic Support Librarian at LSE and is responsible for LSE Research Online and LSE Theses Online. She joined LSE Library in summer 2011 and prior to that she worked at The Guardian and at Queen Mary University of London Library. Her professional interests include Open Access and digital developments in libraries.

Peter Matthews
Peter Matthews is a Lecturer in Urban Management at the School of the Built Environment, Heriot-Watt University, based at their Edinburgh campus. He completed his doctoral research on Scottish urban regeneration policy at the University of Glasgow in 2009 and joined Heriot-Watt in January 2011. As an early career academic he has been using Twitter (@urbaneprofessor) and a blog to make networks with other academics and provide a public thinking space. His research interests are on policy analysis and implementation studies, particularly from the perspective of public administration, spatial inequalities and advanced interpretive and qualitative methodologies. His work on discourses of policy and planning has appeared in Planning Practice and Research and Housing Theory and Society.

David McKenzie
David McKenzie is a Senior Economist in the Finance and Private Sector Development Unit of the Development Research Group. He received his B.Com.(Hons)/B.A. from the University of Auckland, New Zealand in and his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University. Prior to joining the World Bank, he spent four years as an assistant professor of Economics at Stanford University. His main research is on migration, microenterprises, and methodology for use with developing country data. He has worked or is currently working on impact evaluations in Sri Lanka, Ghana, Mexico, India, Tonga, Vanuatu, the Philippines, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and Brazil on policies related to enterprise growth, migration, and job creation.

Enrique Mendizabal
Enrique Mendizabal is a researcher and advisor on think tanks and research policy networks. He works primarily with think tanks in Latin America, Africa and Asia. His work includes research on policy influence, research communications, networks, and monitoring and evaluation of influence. He writes in and edits www.onthinktanks.org.

Inger Mewburn
Dr Inger Mewburn works as a Research Fellow in the School of Graduate Research at RMIT University and edits The Thesis Whisperer blog. Inger holds a Bachelor of Architecture (Hons) (1997), Certificate IV in workplace training and assessment (2001), a Post Graduate Certificate in Spatial Information Architecture (2003), and a Masters of Architecture by research from RMIT (2005), and a PhD in the Architecture, Building and Planning faculty at the University of Melbourne.

Andreea Moise
Andreea Moise has recently completed a master’s degree in social research methods and social policy at the London School of Economics. She is currently working as a policy research intern at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. She is also collaborating on the Impact of Social Sciences Project.

Amy Mollett
Amy is an Assistant Editor of the British Politics and Policy at LSE blog, and Managing Editor of the Impact of Social Sciences Blog. She holds an MSc in Gender and Social Policy from the London School of Economics and a BA in English Language and Gender Studies from the University of Sussex. Before joining the PPG, Amy worked on a European Commission funded project on domestic violence policy across Europe with the Islington Training Network.

Lucy Montgomery
Dr Lucy Montgomery is a Visiting Fellow at the Big Innovation Centre, run by the Work Foundation. She is a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council funded Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. Her current work explores the role of intellectual property in processes of innovation and change in creative industries business models.

Agata Mrva-Montoya
Agata has worked at Sydney University Press since 2008, in a role combining editing, project management and social media. She is interested in the impact of new technologies on scholarly publishing, editing and books in general. In pre-publishing life, she completed a PhD in archaeology. She is also a member of Human Animal Research Network at the University of Sydney and can be found on twitter @agatamontoya.

Herryman Moono
Herryman Moono is the IGC’s In-Country Economist for Zambia. He holds an MSc Economics from University of Sheffield, an MSc Global Health from University of Oxford where he read as a Rhodes Scholar and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Zambia. Prior to his postgraduate studies, Herryman worked as a Teaching Assistant in Microeconomics at the University of Zambia, interned in the Regulatory Policy and Liquidations Division of the Central Bank of Zambia and in 2007 worked as an Assistant to the Principal Local Government Auditor for the Ministry of Local Government and Housing in Lusaka.

Danielle Moran
Danielle joined the LSE PPG in February 2011. She holds an MSc in Comparative Politics (Conflict Studies) from the LSE and a BA in English and Spanish from University College Dublin. Danielle has a background in journalism and has worked as a news reporter for the Irish Times and the Financial Times. You can follow Danielle on twitter@daniellemoran

Lynne Murphy
Lynne Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of English, University of Sussex. Her research concerns what we know when we know words and particularly the role of semantic relations, particularly antonymy, in language representation, use and acquisition, as in Antonyms in English (Jones, Murphy, Paradis & Willners 2012). Raised and educated in the US, Murphy lived in South Africa in the 90s and has been in England since 2000. Her observations on the different uses of English in these places (and the linguistics behind them) are chronicled in Separated by a Common Language.

Cameron Neylon
Cameron Neylon is a biophysicist and well known advocate of opening up the process of research. He is a co-author of the Panton Principles for open data in science, founding Editor in Chief of Open Research Computation, as well as being an academic editor for PLoS ONE. He speaks regularly on issues of Open Science including Open Access publication, Open Data, and Open Source as well as the wider technical and social issues of applying the opportunities the internet brings to the practice of science. He was named as a SPARC Innovator in July 2010 and is a proud recipient of the Blue Obelisk for contributions to open data. He writes regularly at his blog, Science in the Open.

Tyler Neylon
Tyler Neylon is Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Zillabyte, a data analysis start-up in Mountain View, California. He earned his PhD in applied math from New York University in 2006. Neylon started his career as a computer programmer and worked as a software engineer at Google for two years before launching Zillabyte. Tyler is also the creater of the Cost of Knowledge website where academics can sign up to declare their boycott of publisher, Elsevier.

Dave O’Brien
Dave O’Brien’s work concentrates on public policy and administration, using the example of cultural policy.  His PhD explored European Capital of Culture 2008 in Liverpool and Newcastle and Gateshead, using the framework of institutionalism to understand those areas’ decision-making and governance. He has published several articles on this topic and has written reports on the management and process of hosting European Capital of Culture for Impacts08, the research programme evaluating Liverpool 2008.  Most recently he has completed a six month secondment to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) working on Measuring Cultural Value.

Henry Overman
Henry Overman is Professor in Economic Geography in the department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and since April 2008, director of the Spatial Economics Research Centre. His research has been published in leading economics and geography journals. He has provided policy advice to, amongst others, the European Commission, Department for International Development, Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Department for Communities and Local Government and the Department for Transport.

Berk Özler
Berk Özler is a Senior Economist at the World Bank’s Development Research Group. He received his Ph.D in Economics from Cornell University in 2001. Berk is interested in policy issues that are salient in the developing world, including the effective design of cash transfer programs and HIV prevention among adolescent girls and young women to name a couple. He is currently a co-PI for several randomized controlled experiments in Malawi and Tanzania.

Mark Pack
Mark is currently Head of Digital at MHP Communications, one of the top ten communications consultancies by revenue in the UK. MHP is part of the Engine Group. He has also served as Head of Innovations at the Liberal Democrats where I ran the party’s 2001 and 2005 internet general election campaigns. Mark is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, the most widely-read Liberal Democrat blog in the UK, and is a member of the Open Rights Group’s Advisory Council.

John Parkinson
John Parkinson is Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Warwick. He specialises in the application of political theory to public policy, especially deliberative democratic theory. His latest book, Democracy and Public Space: the physical sites of democratic performance is published by Oxford University Press  later this year, and he is working with Jane Mansbridge (Harvard) on Deliberative Systems: deliberation at the large scale for Cambridge University Press. His personal website is www.johnrparkinson.net, and he tweets @drjohnparkinson.

Heather Piwowar
Heather is a postdoc research associate, funded by the NSF-funded DataONE cyberinfrastructure project. She works with the Dryad team at NESCent, studying data sharing and reuse behaviour. She is based remotely in beautiful Vancouver Canada, with a home base in the Biodiversity building in the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia. Heather’s research focuses on studying the patterns, prevalence and impact of data sharing and reuse behaviour of “small science” post-publication datasets. Her doctoral research focused on biomedical data, particularly gene expression microarray datasets.  My postdoc work, in contrast, will concentrate on data in evolution and ecology.

Patrick Powers
Patrick Powers is an interactive media manager at Webster University. In this role, he is responsible for developing and executing the university’s social media communications strategy across multiple platforms. Patrick regularly speaks on issues of social media in higher education and writes about the topic on his personal blog at www.patrickpowers.net.

Martin Price
Martin Price is the Project Manager for MYPLACE ( www.fp7-myplace.eu ), a large scale EC-funded project coordinated from the Department of Sociology at Warwick University. When he isn’t busy with ensuring the smooth  day-to-day running of the project, and planning ahead for the full four year duration, Martin is fascinated by the communication required to make MYPLACE a real success. In particular, the inter-related challenges of engaging with audiences beyond the career academics and forging stronger links between research evidence and social policy. For this reason, he now makes his first forays into the Blogosphere and even the Twittersphere ( @ProjectMYPLACE ). He looks forward to letting the world know how he gets on!

Jason Priem
Jason is a 3rd-year doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying how the Web is revolutionizing scholarly communication. Jason has been a leader in the altmetrics movement, investigating new measures of scholarly impact on the social Web, and also helps to lead the open-source total-impact project. He tweets at @jasonpriem.

Dave Puplett
Dave Puplett is Eservices Manager at the Library of The London School of Economics. He is a qualified and chartered Librarian who has worked at LSE, King’s College London and cpd25 in a variety of Library roles. His professional interests include the shift to electronic library collections and changes in scholarly communications including repositories and open access.

Danny Quah
Danny Quah is a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His work focuses on the global economy, economic growth and income distribution and technology. He writes about the shifting global economy and the rise of the east and hopes to “make large things visible to the naked eye”. You can read Danny’s personal blog here.

Sarah-Louise Quinnell
Dr. Sarah-Louise Quinnell gained her PhD from the Geography Department at King’s College London in 2010. She has research interests in digital research methods and communication as well as international environmental politics. Sarah is the founder of the site networked researcher. You can visit her personal blog here and she tweets @sarahthesheepu.

Anthony Ridge-Newman
Anthony Ridge-Newman’s current research is funded by the Economic and Social Research Research Council (ESRC). His career has included work in communications and research, with six years experience in business. He holds a first class degree in the natural sciences, a masters in research methods and has studied at doctorate level in the humanities.

Jill Rutter
Jill Rutter joined the Institute for Government as a Whitehall secondee in September 2009 and was co-author of the Institute’s report on arm’s length bodies, Read Before Burning (July 2010). She has also been part of the better policy making project. Before joining the Institute for Government, Jill was Director of Strategy and Sustainable Development at Defra.

Dan Scott
Dan  is the founder and director of Social Sciences Directory Limited, an open access publisher, which was established this year and aims to launch its first issue in July 2012. He graduated from Kings College London with a BA Hons in War Studies and from Leeds Met University with a Masters in International Business. Dan has worked in publishing for nearly two decades in a variety of commercial and managerial roles. For over six years, he has worked closely with academics and librarians in the UK, US, Europe and Australia

Judy Sebba
Judy Sebba is Professor of Education and Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange in the School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sussex. Her e mail is j.c.sebba@sussex.ac.uk Her book with Mark Rickinson and Anne Edwards on improving research through user engagement is published by Routledge. Judy was a member of the review panel for the revision of the TTA INSET funding and a member of the Cabinet Office panel which reviewed the use of pilots across government.

Jane Secker
Jane is the Copyright and Digital Literacy Advisor at LSE’s Centre for Learning Technology. She has written and published widely on topics such as copyright, elearning and information literacy. You can visit her personal blog and she tweets as @jsecker. Jane was recently on secondment to Wolfson College Cambridge as an Arcadia Fellow, developing a new curriculum for information literacy.

Chris Sherwood
Chris Sherwood is Director of Innovation and Development at Scope. He leads on the incubation of new services models that meet the needs and aspirations of disabled people and their families. He joined the organisation in October 2011 from the Shaw Trust where he was Head of Service Design. Prior to this he was based at NESTA where he headed up their work on ageing, people powered health and commissioning.  Chris has spent eight years in the voluntary sector and prior to this worked in local government. Chris is a trustee of the Alliance for Inclusive Education and Timebanking UK. He is also a member of the Guardian’s Public Sector Leaders Advisory Board. 

John Sides
John Sides is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, George Washington University. His research focuses on political behaviour, public opinion, campaigns and elections, and he is a co-founder of political science blog, The Monkey Cage.

Simon Smith
Simon Smith is a sociologist working at the Leeds Institute of Health Sciences. He is also attached to Leeds University’s Institute of Communications Studies. Simon works on knowledge processes, science communication and online cultural production and holds a PhD from Bradford University in 1998 for a thesis on spaces of independent cultural production in communist Czechoslovakia. Since then he has exemplified the post-doctoral patchwork career path, with spells at three universities conducting research on a variety of topics including interest representation in post-communist societies, community studies, regional identities and regional planning, digital inclusion and eHealth.

Neil Stewart
Neil Stewart is Digital Repository Manager at City University London, where he manages City Research Online. Prior to that he was an Assistant Librarian at LSE Library, where he managed LSE Research Online. He is interested in open access, scholarly communication via the web, and electronic resources for research. He blogs at City Open Access, and is also on Twitter.

Joel Suss
Joel Suss joined the LSE PPG in January 2012 and is a student in the MPA programme. Hailing from Montréal, Canada, where he earned a BA in Political Science from Concordia University, Joel has worked in the most recent Canadian federal elections campaign for the New Democratic Party (NDP), now the official opposition to the government. He is primarily focused on public and social policy, welfare inequality dynamics and institutional reform.

Helen Sword
Helen Sword is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Academic Development at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. She has published widely on modernist literature, higher education pedagogy, academic writing and digital poetry.  Her new book, Stylish Academic Writing, is published by Harvard University Press.

Jen Tarr
Jen Tarr is a lecturer in research methodology in the LSE’s Methodology Institute, where she teaches qualitative methods.  She is particularly interested in new developments in visual and sensory methods, and the ethics and politics of social research. As a health sociologist, she has research interests in pain and injury and embodied somatic practices, and has published in journals such as Qualitative Research, Sociology of Health & Illness, and Ethnography. She has a PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Jane Tinkler
Jane has been PPG Manager since September 2005. She is also actively involved in research projects undertaken by PPG. Previous to this, she was Managing Editor of the journals, Political Studies and Political Studies Review for six years. She also was a Research Fellow in the School of Public Policy, University College London. Her first degree was in psychology and business at Leeds University and she later took an MSc at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published in UK public policy

Don Taylor
Don is an associate professor of Public Policy at Duke University. He holds three degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, including PhD in Health Policy and Management from the School of Public Health. He has published numerous peer review articles and co-authored two books. His papers have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, BMJ, Health Affairs, The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, and Social Science and Medicine. He blogs at The Incidental Economist.

Mike Taylor
Mike Taylor is a dinosaur palaeontologist, computer programmer and open access advocate, affiliated with the University of Bristol. He has named two new dinosaurs, Xenoposeidon (“alien earthquake god”) and Brontomerus (“thunder thighs”) and written other papers so boring that his wife fell asleep while he was explaining one of them to her.

Melissa Terras
Melissa Terras is Co-Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Reader in Electronic Communication in UCL’s Department of Information Studies. With a background in Classical Art History, English Literature, and Computing Science, her doctorate (University of Oxford) examined how to use advanced information engineering technologies to interpret and read Roman texts. Publications include Image to Interpretation: Intelligent Systems to Aid Historians in the Reading of the Vindolanda Texts (2006, Oxford University Press) and “Digital Images for the Information Professional” (2008, Ashgate). She is the general editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly journal, the secretary of the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing, and on the board of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations. Her research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the arts and humanities that would otherwise be impossible. You can generally find her on twitter @melissaterras.

Matthew Todd
Matthew Todd was born in Manchester, England. He obtained his PhD in organic chemistry from Cambridge University in 1999, was a Wellcome Trust postdoc at The University of California, Berkeley, a college fellow back at Cambridge University, a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London and since 2005 has been at the School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney where he is currently Senior Lecturer. He has a growing interest in Open Science, and how it may be used to accelerate research, with particularly emphasis on open source drug discovery. He is Chair of The Synaptic Leap, a nonprofit dedicated to open biomedical research and is on the Editorial Boards of PLoS One, Chemistry Central Journal and ChemistryOpen.

Jo VanEvery
Jo VanEveryhas a PhD in Sociology from University of Essex and worked as an academic in the UK before returning to Canada, and eventually starting her own business as an academic career coach. She has previously worked for the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. She hosts a website on how to be a better academic and can be followed on twitter @jovanevery.

Phil Ward
Phil Ward is the Research Funding Manager at the University of Kent. A gamekeeper turned poacher, he previously worked on the other side of the funding fence at the AHRC. He’s still not sure, but on balance thinks it’s better to get than to give. He enjoys exploring the choppy, tempestuous seas of research funding and writes about his exploits on the Research Fundermentals blog. He tries not to wake in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking about impact.

Martin Weller
Martin Weller is Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University. He chaired the OU’s first major online course, with over 15,000 students annually, and was also the VLE project director. His interests are in the impact of new technologies, open education and learning environments. He has recently authored the book The Digital Scholar, which is published by Bloomsbury and available as open access. He blogs at edtechie.net

Peter Wells
Peter Wells is a Reader at Cardiff Business School. Since joining Cardiff Business School in 1990 his work has been in terms of research and writing on components and materials supply in the automotive industry, vehicle manufacturing, the distribution, retail and marketing of cars, government intervention and regulation, and the history of car design. Much of his work has a policy bias, initially with respect to inward investment and economic development, more recently in terms of regulation, environment, and sustainable mobility.

Andy Williamson
Dr Andy Williamson is an experienced digital strategist focussing on engagement, collaboration and communication. A well known writer and commentator, he was previously Director of Digital Democracy at the Hansard Society and has edited a book on good practice applied research within communities. His website can be found here.

John Wihbey
John is a Policy Journalist and Editor for Journalist’s Resource, a project of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorestein Center and the Carnegie-Knight initiative. He has worked for Star-Ledger and the NPR-syndicated show “On Point,” from WBUR. His research interests include politics, the environment, and technology.

Joan Wilson
Joan joined the PPG in January 2011 as a Research Assistant. She holds a PhD in the Economics of Education from the Institute of Education, University of London. Her thesis focused on an empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of major state sector education policy initiatives in England, looking specifically at (i) pupil mobility patterns and school oversubscription in primary schools following the introduction of the school choice system and (ii) changes to the academic quality and composition of pupil admissions into ‘failing’ secondary schools that acquired renewed status under the Academies programmePrior to joining the PPG, Joan worked for seven years as a researcher in the Education and Skills team of the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at the London School of Economics.