Academic Beards

Research
In humans, changes in day length, shift-work or trans-meridian travel lead to deficits in mood and cognitive functions. Previously, these deficits were thought to arise exclusively from sleep deprivation and/or disruptions in circadian rhythms. Work from Dr. Samer Hattar’s laboratory has recently shown that light can directly affect mood and learning, even in the context of normal sleep and functional circadian activity. The goal of our project is to determine the retinal and brain circuits that underlie the effects of an aberrant light schedule on mood and cognitive functions, by employing a combination of anatomical, functional, and behavioral approaches. We will evaluate the effects of social and sensory stimulations as possible therapies to prevent the mood and learning deficits induced in mice exposed to aberrant light schedules. Results obtained from this work will uncover the connectivity and functions of new retinal-brain circuits that are required for regulating mood and cognitive functions, independent of image formation. Understanding the interaction between light and complex behaviors could lead to more effective treatments for mood disorders, and more generally, better designs for lighting environments that could enhance learning abilities.

Dr. Thomas Kadyk has been a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Eikerling Research Group at Simon Fraser University since Spring 2012.

Dr Matt Thompson is a Research Associate on the EPSRC-funded Urban Retrofit project, in the Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures Research Centre, University of Salford.

Dr Thomas Roland
Research Fellow, Geography and Environment, University of Southampton

Thomas Roland was appointed as a Research Fellow in Geography and Environment in 2012. He works on the NERC-funded PATAGON project and is a member of Palaeoenvironmental Laboratory at the University of Southampton (PLUS).

Research Interests
Multi-proxy peat-based palaeoecology (inlcluding plant macrofossils and testate amoebae)
Stable isotopic analysis in peatlands
Tephrochronology
Radiocarbon dating

http://www.southampton.ac.uk/geography/about/staff/tpr1m11.page

https://twitter.com/AcademicBeards

Dr Pip Beard BVSc, PhD, MRCVS
Career Track Fellow
The Roslin Institute and The Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, University of Edinburgh
 
Summary of Research
Mechanisms employed by poxviruses to modulate host antiviral defence and the role of viral proteins in disease pathogenesis.

http://www.roslin.ed.ac.uk/pip-beard/

Dr Gabriel Yvon-Durocher
Lecturer in Natural Environment

Profile
Dr Yvon-Durocher explores the effects of environmental change on the structure of ecological communities (which are groups of actually or potentially interacting species living in the same place). He is mainly interested in understanding how structure and variables interact to determine changes at the ecosystem scale. He has developed a predictive 'tool box' to forecast how these ecological communities may be disrupted in a world increasingly dominated by humans.

He is also a member of the Biosciences department in the College of Life and Environmental Sciences.
http://www.exeter.ac.uk/esi/people/yvon-durocher/

Ryan Muldoon is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Philosophy, Politics and Economics department at the University of Pennsylvania.  Previously, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow of Science and Values at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario.  His primary research investigates how we can turn the challenge of increasing diversity into a resource to be tapped for our mutual benefit.  Specifically, he investigates how diversity can lead to more just societies, to an increase in the amount and quality of scientific production, and greater wealth. 

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~rmuldoon

For both those of you who missed this early video production and those who just want to revisit the sparkling bearded past. 

Antonio López-Gay, a research fellow at the Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, has begun a six-month visit to the Nucleo de Estudos de Populaçao in the Department of Demography at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas-UNICAMP, São Paulo (Brasil). 


During his stay in Brazil, he will give several seminars in the Postgraduate Programme in Demography, combining this teaching work with his research on The Cohabitation Boom in Brazil and Other Dimensions of the Demographic Transition. 

Formació acadèmica: 

• Doctor en Demografia per la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2007)
• Diploma d'estudis avançats (DEA) en Geografia Humana, UAB. (2004)
• Llicenciat en Geografia, UB (1999)
• Postgrau Mètodes per a l'Estudi de la Població, CED (2000)
• Investigador contractat Juan de la Cierva (des de l'1 de setembre de 2009)  

 
Camps investigació:
Second demographic transition, union formation, household changes, family relations, marriage markets of foreign population Urban demography, internal migration, residential mobility, reurbanization, selective migration, population substitution in urban central areas, gentrification, spatial segregation, demographic filter, inner cities, metropolitan regions, urban development, local demography, geo-demography, spatial statistics. International census data, data integration, data dissemination, IPUMS-International Population and development, world populations, population growth, population and environment, debates about the population growth, sexual and reproductive health. 

http://www.ced.uab.es/index.php?module=pagesetter&func=viewpub&tid=12&pid=39

Jesper Romers, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Oxford




http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~topnes/contacts/index.php#jr

Dr Tapio Rajala, Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Jyväskylä, is interested in geometric analysis and geometric measure theory in metric measure spaces. Here are some of the topics he has recently studied.

• Optimal mass transportation: Ricci-curvature bounds in metric spaces, existence of optimal maps.
• Lipschitz, Sobolev, BV-mappings: metric differentiation, area formulas, dimension distortion, extension domains.
• Local structure of sets and measures: densities, dimension, rectifiability, porosity.
• Fractal geometry: self-similar and self-affine sets, Moran type constructions.

He is currently funded by the Academy of Finland, project Geometric properties of sets and measures: densities, rectifiability and constructions. Before this he was a postdoc at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa working in the European Project Geometric Measure Theory in non Euclidean spaces. 

http://users.jyu.fi/~tamaraja/

Professor Bill Gray of the University of Chichester is the director of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy, which is based at the university, and a renowned expert in all three fields. Last year he acted as a consultant on the Hollywood film Snow White and the Huntsman. We think he'd look splendid if he swapped that red jersey for an elven cloak and peaked hat.

http://www.chi.ac.uk/staff/professor-bill-gray

Dr Tim Bunnell
Associate Professor
Department of Geography
National University of Singapore

Building upon doctoral work completed at the University of Nottingham in 1999, the initial focus of Dr Bunnell's research at NUS was on the politics of urban landscape change in and around Kuala Lumpur and, in particular, in a high-tech zone known as the Multimedia Super Corridor. While he retains an active interest in urban development issues in Malaysia, since 2004 he has also been carrying out research on the Malay community in Liverpool, U.K.

In mid-2009 Dr Bunnell began a joint appointment with the Asia Research Institute (ARI). His role in ARI's Asian Urbanisms research cluster, has revolved around efforts to position Asia as a 'frontier' of urban theory. He is principal investigator on a comparative ethnographic research project on urban aspirations in Asia.

http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/geotgb/index.htm