Speaker Bios - "HSS in 21st Century Ireland / Delivering the Knowledge Society "
Norman Glass
Norman is Chief Executive of NatCen (National Centre for Social Research) in the UK. Until March 2001 he was a Deputy Director in the UK Treasury where he had a primary role in developing the Sure Start programme. He previously worked as Chief Economist in the Department of Social Security and the Department of Environment, and was Chairman of the Economic Policy Committee of the European Union from 1999 to 2001. Norman is President of the Pre-School Learning Alliance, Chair of High Scope UK and a Board member of the Countryside Agency.
Caroline Fennell
Professor Caroline Fennell is Dean of the Faculty and Head of Department of Law at UCC. She holds a BCL from UCC, an LL.M. from Osgoode Hall, Canada and a Ph.D. from the University of Wales. She is a Professor of Law and is a qualified Barrister. She was Dean of the Law Faculty from 1996-1999 and is an external examiner in the Law of Evidence for Kings Inns and a Consultant on the Law of Evidence for the Law Society of Ireland. She has been a Mary Ball Washington Visiting Professor at the University of West Florida and a visiting fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. Her publications include Law of Evidence in Ireland, 2nd ed. (LexisNexis, 2003); Labour Law in Ireland with I. Lynch (Gill and Macmillan, 1993); Crime and Crisis in Ireland; Justice by Illusion (Cork University Press, 1993).
William Schabas
Professor William A. Schabas is director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he also holds the chair in human rights law. Professor Schabas holds BA. and MA degrees from the University of Toronto and LLB, LLM. and LLD degrees from the University of Montreal. William Schabas is an Officer of the Order of Canada.
He has published more than 170 articles in academic journals, principally in the field of international human rights law. They have been cited in judgments of many of the world's leading constitutional and international courts, including the United States Supreme Court, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the Supreme Court of Canada and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Professor Schabas is editor-in-chief of Criminal Law Forum , the quarterly journal of the International Society for the Reform of Criminal Law.
Professor Schabas has often participated in international human rights missions on behalf of non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International (International Secretariat), the International Federation of Human Rights, and the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development to Rwanda, Burundi, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Cambodia and Guyana. He is legal counsel to Amnesty International Ireland. He is a member of the board of several international human rights organizations and institutions, including the International Institute for Criminal Investigation, of which he is chair. He has recently been appointed by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the Board of Trustees of the Voluntary Fund for Technical Co-operation in Human Rights.
Kenneth Benoit
Kenneth Benoit (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1998) is Associate Professor of Political Science at Trinity College, Dublin. His research interests center on comparative party competition, including party policy, electoral systems, strategic voting, and pre-election coalitions. His current work involves the use of expert surveys to measure the policy positions of political parties, and refining a computerized, statistical technique for extracting information from political texts. He has served as a consultant on policy issues to political parties, governments in the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Hungary.
Craig T. Ramey, PhD
Craig T. Ramey, PhD, is the Director of the Center for Health and Education. He specializes in the study of factors affecting young children's development of intelligence, social competence and academic achievement. Over the past 30 years, he and Sharon Ramey have conducted research involving 14,000 children and families in 40 states. Dr. Ramey is the author of more than 225 publications, including five books, and he frequently consults with federal and state governments as well as private agencies, foundations and the news media.
Dr. Colm Harmon
Colm Harmon is Professor of Economics at University College Dublin (UCD) and Director of the Geary Institute. He is a Research Affiliate with the Labour Economics Programme of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London. He received his BA and MA in Economics from UCD, and his PhD from the University of Keele in 1997. He was a lecturer at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth, and has held visiting appointments at the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University, University College London and the University of Warwick. He has, together with colleagues, published papers in the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Economica, Economic and Social Review, European Economic Review, Health Economics and Labour Economics and has made a number of policy related contributions locally. He has also been involved in a number of research projects for government departments in Ireland and the UK as well as the EU Commission.
Dr. Conor O'Carroll
As head of the Research Office at the Irish Universities Association (IUA), Dr. O'Carroll is responsible for the coordination of research policy across all seven Irish universities. He is also responsible for the Marie Curie Programme and Network of Mobility Centres in Ireland. He is a physicist by training and during his research career he has been truly mobile having done his doctorate in Italy and worked for both industry and academia in Ireland, Scotland and Germany. He has extensive experience of policy formulation having worked in the European Commission's DG Research and with the Irish science policy advisory agency Forfás. He has also deep experience of the operations of funding agencies through his time on the Marie Curie Programme and key involvement in the establishment of Ireland's newest funding agency, Science Foundation Ireland.
Professor Keith Sidwell
Keith Sidwell was educated at Cambridge and has held University posts at Lancaster, Maynooth and UCC, where he is currently Professor of Latin and Greek, Head of the Department of Classics and Diirector of the Centre for Neo-Latin Studies. In 2004-5, he was Vice-Dean for Research of the Faculty of Arts, UCC and in 2005-6 an IRCHSS Senior Research Fellow. His academic interests cover Greek Drama (especially Old Comedy, on which he has just completed a monograph), Lucian and his reception (see Lucian: Chattering Courtesans and Other Sardonic Sketches, Penguin 2004), and the early modern Latin of Ireland (his Centre is currently preparing the Cambridge Handbook of Irish Neo-Latin and his edition of Dermitius O'Meara's didactic epic Ormonius, with David Edwards of UCC History Dept., with appear shortly from Brepols Publishers).
Sean Ryder
Sean Ryder received his PhD from University College Dublin. He teaches film studies, American poetry, critical and cultural theory, and Irish writing at NUI Galway. His research interests include 19thC Irish culture and politics (with a particular interest in the works of Thomas Moore, James Clarence Mangan, and cultural nationalism), and the theory and practice of textual editing. He is currently project leader for TEXTE (Transfer of Expertise in Technologies of Editing), a research and training programme in textual editing with new technologies funded by EU 6th Framework Programme, and is also project leader for the Thomas Moore Hypermedia Archive, a hypermedia archive and critical edition of the works of Thomas Moore, funded by Irish Research Council for Humanities and the Social Sciences. He a former director of the multi-disciplinary MA in Culture & Colonialism. He has published on various aspects of 19thC Irish nationalism and culture, and on Irish cinema.
James Wickham
James Wickham studied sociology at the London School of Economics and the University of Frankfurt; he took his PhD from the University of Sussex. He has been awarded a Jean Monnet Professorship in European Labour Market Studies at Trinity College Dublin where he is a Fellow and directs the Employment Research Centre in the School of Social Sciences and Philosophy. He has written Gridlock: Dublin's transport crisis and the future of the city (2006) and has published in journals such as Social History, Work Employment and Society, Gender Work & Organisation, Journal of Education and Work, European Journal of Education and European Societies. He is currently researching the connections between employment and transportation.
David Robey
David Robey is part time Director of the ICT in Arts and Humanities Research Programme for the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK. He is also Professor of Italian in Reading University's School of Modern Languages. Formerly Professor of Italian at Manchester University, he is also Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He has published on 15th-century Italian humanism (educational and poetic theory), language and style in Dante and Renaissance narrative poetry, the computer analysis of literature, and modern critical theory. He is author of a computer-based study on Sound and Structure in Dante's 'Divine Comedy' (Oxford University Press, 2000), and is currently extending this work to include the major narrative poems of the Italian Renaissance. He was also joint editor of the The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature, now translated as the Enciclopedia Oxford/Zanichelli della Letteratura Italiana.
Danny McCoy
Danny McCoy is Director of Economic Policy at IBEC. He is responsible for IBEC policy on a broad range of issues including fiscal, monetary and macroeconomic policy, trade and international relations, services, legal and regulatory affairs, pensions, competition and North-South business development. The division is also responsible for supporting the Economics and Taxation Committee, the Trade Council and IBEC's Policy Advisory Group, which comprises the chairs of key policy committees and co-ordinates the Confederation's overall strategy on policy delivery.
Deirdre Madden
Deirdre Madden is a graduate of UCC and was called to the Bar in 1989. She has been a lecturer in the UCC Law Department since 1992. Her research interests and publications are primarily in the area of Medical Law. Her textbook, Medicine, Ethics and the Law, was published by Butterworths in 2002. Dr. Madden was a member of the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction 2000-2005 (www.dohc.ie/publications/cahr.html ); the Research Ethics Committee of the Irish College of General Practitioners 2000-2004; and has acted as an Expert Evaluator for the European Commission since 2000. She also wrote a monthly medico-legal column for the Irish Medical News from 1997-2004. In 2004 Dr. Madden was appointed by the Minister for Health and Children Micheal Martin TD to the Medical Council for a 5 year term to represent the public interest. In 2005 she was appointed by the Government to write a final report on post mortem practice and procedure (www.dohc.ie/publications/madden.html ). She currently chairs a Working Group on implementation of the recommendations in her Report in the areas of perinatal and adult post mortem practice (www.dohc.ie/working_groups/pmpp/ ). She was also appointed by the President of UCC as Chair of the University Research Ethics Board in 2006.
Seán Ó Riain
Seán Ó Riain is Professor of Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. His research explores a variety of issues relating to the politics of globalisation, the informational economy and social change. The Politics of High Tech Growth (Cambridge UP, 2004), investigates the role of the developmental state in developing a 'global region' in Ireland. Current research includes: (1) A study of the emergence of a global system of work and employment through the transnational ties between Silicon Valley and Ireland; (2) A life history study of social change in twentieth century Ireland (funded by IRCHSS); (3) A study of the politics of the global informational economy. He was Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis from 1999-2003 and has worked with policy agencies such as Forfás and the National Centre for Partnership and Performance. He is Chairperson of the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, NUI Maynooth.
Richard E. Tremblay
Richard Tremblay is Professor of Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Psychology at the University of Montréal, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Child Development. He is also Director of the Research Unit on Children's Psycho-Social Maladjustment, a multidisciplinary research centre funded by Laval University, McGill University, and the University of Montréal. In addition, he is the Director of Health Canada's Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development. Dr. Tremblay was a member of CIAR's Human Development Program, which concluded in 2003, and is now a Fellow in the Experience-based Brain & Biological Development Program.
Dr. Tremblay received his B.A. from the University of Ottawa, his Master's degree from the University of Montréal, and his Ph.D. from the University of London, England. After working for a number of years in clinical settings, he accepted his first position at the University of Montréal in 1971. Dr. Tremblay was Chair of the 2002 World Conference of the International Society for Research on Aggression. He is a member of the U.S. National Consortium on Violence Research, an International Professor at the University of Central Lancastershire in England, and a Special Professor of Interdisciplinary Research at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Dr. Tremblay has been honoured with numerous awards and distinctions including: the 2002 Jacques-Rousseau Interdisciplinary Research Award, the 2003 Royal Society of Canada Innis-Guérin Medal (Social Sciences), the 2004 Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize in the Social Sciences and Humanities, the 2004 Academy of Experimental Criminology Joan McCord Prize, and the 2005 American Society of Criminology Sellin-Glueck Award.
