People

New faces on campus

Last month’s Wyvern featured some of the new academic staff at the University and their research interests, and more new faces are introduced this month.

In the Department of Health and Human Sciences, Professor Ruth Hancock has been appointed as non-clinical gerontologist. Her research interests include the social, economic and health policy implications of individual and population ageing. She is a Specialist adviser to the House of Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee, and a member of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Paying for Long-term care Policy, Practice and Development programme advisory group.

Stephen Davies has been appointed as a lecturer in Health Service Management. He previously worked in senior management at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge. Pharmacist Katherine Sains will spend half her time working at the University, and the other half working in the NHS.

In the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Dr Andrew Harrison has been appointed Lecturer in Bioinformatics - the application of mathematical and computing techniques to solve biological problems. Dr Harrison has skills in analysing the complex data sets that arise from structural biology, developed while working at University College London, and as a senior research fellow in Bioinformatics for the London Pain Consortium.

Professor Ewa Morawska has joined the Department of Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include immigration and ethnicity (policies, settlement, adaptation) in a comparative-historical perspective; East European societies; Philosophy of the social sciences and qualitative research methods.

Her recent publications include Reflections on Migration Research: Promises of Interdisciplinarity (co-edited with Michael Bommes), Toward Assimilation and Citizenship in Liberal Nation-States (co-edited with Christian Joppke), and the award-winning Insecure Prosperity: Jews in Small-town Industrial America, 1880-1940.

Prior to coming to the Department of Sociology, Dr Max Bergman was Head of Research Projects and Methodology at the Swiss Social Science Data Archive. He has previously held university appointments at the Universities of Cambridge, Florence (European University Institute), Geneva, Lausanne, St. Gall, and Zurich. His current research interests include social inequality, and applied research methods in relation to statistical modelling, and quality assessment of qualitative research.

Two new professors have been appointed in the Institute for Social and Economic Research. Professor Steve Pudney’s research interests include the analysis of data relating directly to the economic behaviour of individuals, with applications to tax-benefit policy, poverty, labour economics and the economics of crime and illicit drugs.

Professor Holly Sutherland’s research interests include gender effects in microsimulation analysis, making microsimulation models as widely accessible and understood as possible, and the development of comparable methods across countries.

The Department of Government has appointed Tom Quinn, a specialist in UK political parties.

Dr Antonio Liotta will enhance the networks research in the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering when he joins as Senior Lecturer in February.

Currently working in the Networks Research Group at the University of Surrey, Dr Liotta will bring new expertise in grid computing to the department.

His recent publications have included the use of mobile agents for distributed network monitoring, and the study of middleware solutions for advanced services in 3G mobile phones, and he serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Network and Systems Management.

Also in the printed December edition of Wyvern:

• Retirements
• New faces  in the Multi-Faith Chaplaincy