News & Events

A very warm welcome to five new new Institute members this month. Julie Ballweg (Agriculture and Food Science) joined UCD last summer and has a background in environmental and forest economics. Her interests include include forest bioeconomy, agroforestry, quantifying ecosystem service values, land use change under emissions trading schemes, and international trade of forest products. Sam Kelley (Earth Sciences) has recently joined UCD from positions in the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA, and the University of Waterloo, Canada, and his interests centre on how cosmogenic isotopes extracted from rocks can be used to assess a number of geologic processes, such as landscape stability, erosion rates, and sediment provenance over multiple timescales. Mick Lennon (Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy) works at the interface of spatial planning and environmental policy, and focuses on four interrelated areas: governing nature; the politics and policy of change; planning sustainable environments; and planning theory and practice. Anita McKeown (Mechanical and Materials Engineering) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, scholar and educator with research interests in Sustainability, Creative Placemaking and Open Source Culture and Technology. Paula Russell (Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy) works on community and governance with a particular focus on the interface between civil society and the policy process most notably between the public and the institutions of the planning system. Paula is also organising the City Futures IV conference this week in the O'Brien Centre for Science.

Welcome to Julie, Sam, Mick, Anita and Paula! You can find out more about our members and their research interests in our directory.