Biography: Marcel Bursztyn

Marcel Bursztyn holds a B.A. in Economics (1973) and an M.Sc. in Urban and Regional Planning (1976), from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He also holds a Diploma in Planning Studies from the University of Edinburgh (1977), a doctorate in Social and Economic Development, from Université de Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne (1982) and a doctorate in Economics, from Université de Picardie, France (1988).

Since 1992 he has been working at the University of Brasília, where he is now a professor in the Center for Sustainable Development. He was a post-doctoral visiting fellow in Public Policies at Université de Paris XIII and at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1989-1991). He is also a member of the French Ethics Committee for the Agrarian Research, editor of the Journal Sustainability in Debate, and member of the editorial board of 12 journals. He was a Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government – Sustainability Science Program (2007-2008), a Visiting Professor (“Chaire des Amériques”) at Université de Rennes 2, France (2009), and at Université de Paris 3 – Sorbonne la Nouvelle (“Chaire Simon Bolivar”) (2012).

Main fields of interest: regional development, sustainable development, environmental policy, interdisciplinarity, perceptions of climate change, and ethical issues in research.

Biography: Nicky Grigg

Nicky Grigg is a research scientist at CSIRO Land and Water. She completed Environmental Engineering and Applied Mathematics undergraduate degrees at the University of Western Australia, and a PhD in Resource Management and Environmental Science at the Australian National University. In her postdoctoral fellowship at CSIRO she worked on the implications of nonlinear dynamics on mathematical modelling of ecological systems. In her subsequent work at CSIRO she has worked on a diverse range of projects, from a local scale (e.g. analysis of stormwater harvesting in Canberra) to a national scale (e.g. what builds social-ecological resilience in Australia?) Currently she is part of a team of complex systems scientists working on interdisciplinary approaches to understanding impacts of and responses to global change.

Biography: Julie Thompson Klein

Julie Thompson Klein is Faculty Fellow for Interdisciplinary Development in the Division of Research and Professor of Humanities in the English Department at Wayne State University (USA). She has also had appointments as Visiting Foreign Professor at Shimane University in Japan, Fulbright Lecturer at Tribhuvan University in Nepal and Academic Specialist for the U.S. Information Agency in Kathmandu,  Foundation Visitor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and Visiting Professor and Mellon Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Michigan. Klein is past president of the Association for Integrative Studies (AIS) and former editor of the AIS journal Issues in Integrative Studies.

Her books include Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (l990), Interdisciplinary Studies Today (co-edited, 1994), Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (1996), Transdisciplinarity: Joint Problem Solving among Science, Technology, and Society (co-edited, 2001), Interdisciplinary Education in K-12 and College (edited, 2002), the monograph Mapping Interdisciplinary Studies (1999), Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity: The Changing American Academy (2005), and Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures (2010). She was also Associate Editor of the Oxford Handbook on Interdisciplinarity (2010), and has authored numerous articles and book chapters.

Klein has received the Kenneth Boulding Award for outstanding scholarship on interdisciplinarity, the Yamamoorthy and Yeh Distinguished Transdisciplinary Achievement Award, and the Joseph Katz Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Practice and Discourse of General and Liberal Education.

At present, she is co-editor of the University of Michigan Press series Digital Humanities @ digitalculturebooks and is writing a new book on Interdisciplining Digital Humanities.
 

Biography: Gloria Laycock, BSc, PhD, FRSA, OBE

Gloria Laycock graduated in psychology from University College London in 1968 and completed her PhD at UCL in 1975. She worked in the Home Office for over thirty years of which almost twenty years were spent on research and development in the policing and crime prevention fields. She has extensive research experience in the UK and has acted as a consultant on policing and crime prevention in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, South Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

In 1999 she was awarded an International Visiting Fellowship by the United States Department of Justice based in Washington DC. She returned to the UK in April 2001 from a four-month consultancy at the Australian Institute of Criminology in Canberra to become Director of the UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science. In 2010 she took special leave from UCL to establish the Community Policing and Police Science Institute in Abu Dhabi, UAE. She has now returned to UCL as Professor of Crime Science.

She was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2008 for services to crime policy.

Biography: Cha-aim Pachanee

Dr. Pachanee is a researcher at International Health Policy Program (IHPP), Ministry of Public Health in Thailand. Prior to this she worked at Bureau of International Health for five years before pursuing a study for PhD in Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University. She received her undergraduate degree in Public Health (Environmental Health) from Queensland University of Technology and Master of International Health from Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Before joining the Ministry of Public Health, she was a research assistant at Thailand Environment Institute.

Dr. Pachanee is particularly interested in the areas of international trade in health services, human resources for health, health systems and health policies, global health, and environmental health. She has been involving in research in these areas and presenting her works in a number of forums as well as publishing a number of articles.
 

Biography: George P. Richardson

George P. Richardson is O’Leary Professor of Public Administration and Policy in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany, and affiliated Professor of Informatics in the College of Computing and Information. He is the author of Introduction to System Dynamics Modeling with DYNAMO (1981) and Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory (1991, 1999), both of which were honoured with the System Dynamics Society’s Jay W.Forrester Award, and the edited two-volume collection Modeling for Management: Simulation in Support of Systems Thinking (1996). He founded the System Dynamics Review and later served for seven years as its Executive Editor.

Professor Richardson has been honored with awards from the University and the State University of New York for Excellence in Teaching (2003) and Excellence in Academic Service (2010). In 2011, the System Dynamics Society recognized him with its award for Outstanding Service for his contributions to the Society and the field.

Biography: Michael Smithson

Michael Smithson is a Professor in the Research School of Psychology at The Australian National University in Canberra, and received his PhD from the University of Oregon. He is the author of Confidence Intervals (2003), Statistics With Confidence (2000), Ignorance and Uncertainty (1989), and Fuzzy Set Analysis for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (1987), co-author of Fuzzy Set Theory: Applications in the Social Sciences (2006), and co-editor of Uncertainty and Risk: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (2008) and Resolving Social Dilemmas: Dynamic, Structural, and Intergroup Aspects (1999). His other publications include more than 140 refereed journal articles and book chapters.

His primary research interests are in judgement and decision making under uncertainty, statistical methods for the social sciences, and applications of fuzzy set theory to the social sciences.