The following researchers are part of MESSAGE:
Assoc. Prof. Geertje Schuitema (iCRAG & UCD School of Business) is an Environmental Psychologist with an interest in the public acceptance of new technologies and environmental policies in areas such as energy, transportation, raw materials, water and food.
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Dr. Mark Coughlan (iCRAG & UCD School of Earth Sciences) is a Marine Geoscientist studying changes in the seabed over varying timescales and the sustainable use of the seabed to address climate change and energy transition issues.
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Dr. Tomas Buitendijk (iCRAG & UCD School of Business) is a Blue and Environmental Humanities researcher working with coastal communities to understand the cultural value of the landscape and the impact of climate change and the energy transition.
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Dr. Fergus McAuliffe (iCRAG) is the Communication and Engagement Manager at iCRAG, and manages the Centre’s award-winning public engagement programme. He has over a decade’s experience in science communication, education and public engagement, science television and science radio, with a particular focus on collaboration with the arts, creative and community sectors.
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Professor Tasman Crowe is Vice President for Sustainability at University College Dublin. Prior to this appointment, he was director of the UCD Earth Institute and co-founder and co-director of a new interdisciplinary BSc in Sustainability. He is chair of Ireland’s National Biodiversity Forum and chaired an advisory group to government on the expansion of Ireland’s network of Marine Protected Areas.
His research characterises impacts of multiple stressors on marine ecosystems, both in ecological terms and in terms of the services they provide to society, including their cultural value. He has worked at the interface between science and the humanities in projects such as Land2Sea, the Cultural Value of Coastlines and MARBEFES.
Dr. Ashley Cahillane (UCD Earth Institute and UCD School of English, Drama and Film) is an Environmental Humanities researcher who specialises in contemporary climate change fiction, world literature, and cultural representations of water. She is currently working with Professor John Brannigan on the MARBEFES project, analysing cultural and well-being implications of marine biodiversity crises for coastal communities.
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Dr Dorota Kołbuk (UCD Earth Institute and UCD School of Biology and Environmental Science) is an Environmental Scientist specializing in marine biodiversity and paleobiology. Currently, she is involved in the MARBEFES project, where she applies ecological and interdisciplinary tools to determine the ecological value of the Irish Sea biodiversity and habitats. She is also interested in the environmental and societal impacts of energy transition.
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I am currently John Pollard Newman Fellow in Climate Change and the Arts. My research expertise sits at the intersections of literary analysis, the environmental humanities, and museum studies. Since 2018, I have researched the stories we tell through the display cultures of our natural history museums, including as Principal Investigator on Still Lives: Organic and Digital Animals in the Natural History Museum (IRC, Trinity College Dublin), and as research associate on Narrativising Dinosaurs: Science and Popular Culture, 1850-Present (AHRC, University of Birmingham) and Beyond Dodos and Dinosaurs: Displaying Extinction and Recovery in Museums (NFR, Universitet i Stavanger).
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Serena Sgarzi is a postdoctoral teaching fellow at the School of Biology and Environmental Science at UCD. She obtained her doctorate in January 2022 at the University of Vic, Catalonia (Spain), focusing on environmental and biotic factors influencing the size structure of aquatic communities in Mediterranean ponds. She participated in the PONDERFUL project during her first postdoc, a H2020 ”Research and Innovation Programme” project funded by the European Union. She studied Biological Sciences at Alma Mater Studiorum of Bologna (Italy) and obtained a master’s degree in marine biology from the same university.
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Dr Shauna Creane (UCD School of Civil Engineering) is a Marine Geoscientist who studies the interaction between meteorological, oceanographic and sediment transport processes over different time spans to answer complex research questions that aims to support the sustainable use of marine and coastal resources during the energy transition.
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I am a multidisciplinary engineer (BSc Mechanical Engineering, MSc Energy Engineering, PhD Biosystems Engineering) with expertise in techno-economic and life cycle assessment of emerging technologies. My research focuses on assessing the viability and sustainability of biorefinery and renewable energy systems; previous research projects have included modelling ocean energy systems (wave energy converters), seaweed production systems, seagrass meadow and wrack management, and lactic acid production from industrial waste. I am currently researching the feasibility of green hydrogen production in Ireland, with a focus on future curtailed power from the developing offshore wind sector.
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Victoria Durrer is Assistant Professor in Cultural Policy at University College Dublin and co-founder and director of the interdisciplinary network, Cultural Policy Observatory Ireland. Holding degrees in Sociology (PhD) and Art History (BA, MA), her work is interdisciplinary. Her research considers the conditions and value of creative practice as social, cultural, and professional endeavours, with focus on their spatial, temporal, and relational dynamics. She holds expertise in engaged and policy-informing research, with projects often involving collaborative research designs, data collection and analysis with research participants and policymakers, and she champions mixed methods approaches that bring creative practice-as-research into dialogue with more traditional social scientific methods. Her funded projects focus on sustainable prosperity and ecologies of practice, most recently in rural border regions and for / with young people.
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I am a Lecturer/ Assistant Professor in World Literature in the School of English, Drama and Film; and a co-lead of the Climate Research Strand at UCD's Earth Institute. My main research and teaching interests are the study of the environmental humanities in world and postcolonial literature, especially around energy, waste, and climate change. My second book project focuses on energy wastes in world literature; and I am currently involved in a creative and community-based funded project on Irish Energy Narratives in the Transition (IE-NARR), focusing on coastal and offshore sites of energy transition.
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Josie is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the ENACT project exploring community narratives of energy transition to offshore wind in Whitegate, County Cork and Kilrush County Clare. Her expertise are in the domains in energy humanities, feminism, and animal studies. Her first monograph is under contract with Palgrave Animal and Literature series and is titled The Nonhuman Narratives of Energy: Multispecies Relations in Extraction Zones. She has published in areas exploring science fiction and energy transition, affect theory and automobile infrastructure, and feminism and environmental politics. She is also a member of the research collective Beyond Gender.
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Dr. Ruth H. Leeney (School of Biology and Environmental Science) is a Teaching Fellow and researcher. Her research has focused on the ecology and conservation of cetaceans, and collecting baseline ecological data on sharks and investigating their socio-cultural importance to small-scale fishing communities, to inform better management and conservation. She is an experienced science communicator with a focus on developing short films, educational books and classroom materials.
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