The following researchers are part of MESSAGE:
Assoc. Prof. Geertje Schuitema (iCRAG & UCD School of Business) is an Environmental Psychologist with an interest in the public acceptance of new technologies and environmental policies in areas such as energy, transportation, raw materials, water and food.
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Dr. Mark Coughlan (iCRAG & UCD School of Earth Sciences) is a Marine Geoscientist studying changes in the seabed over varying timescales and the sustainable use of the seabed to address climate change and energy transition issues.
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Dr. Tomas Buitendijk (iCRAG & UCD School of Business) is a Blue and Environmental Humanities researcher working with coastal communities to understand the cultural value of the landscape and the impact of climate change and the energy transition.
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Emma is the Research Assistant for MESSAGE, The Marine & Energy Social Sciences & Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Group. She holds an MPhil in Environmental History from Trinity College Dublin (2024) and an MFA in Contemporary Creation from Sorbonne-Paris University (2022). Her interests lie at the intersection between the humanities and the marine sciences. This includes marine interdisciplinary research, marine material culture, ocean extractivism and environmental humanities. Emma is also a Research Assistant for the UCD Marine and Seabed Research Group MarSea, led by Dr. Mark Coughlan, as well as a Research Assistant for the 4Oceans Synergy Project, led by Professor Poul Holm and based in Trinity College Dublin.
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Professor Tasman Crowe is Vice President for Sustainability at University College Dublin. Prior to this appointment, he was director of the UCD Earth Institute and co-founder and co-director of a new interdisciplinary BSc in Sustainability. He is chair of Ireland’s National Biodiversity Forum and chaired an advisory group to government on the expansion of Ireland’s network of Marine Protected Areas.
His research characterises impacts of multiple stressors on marine ecosystems, both in ecological terms and in terms of the services they provide to society, including their cultural value. He has worked at the interface between science and the humanities in projects such as Land2Sea, the Cultural Value of Coastlines and MARBEFES.
Dr. Ashley Cahillane (UCD Earth Institute and UCD School of English, Drama and Film) is an Environmental Humanities researcher who specialises in contemporary climate change fiction, world literature, and cultural representations of water. She is currently working with Professor John Brannigan on the MARBEFES project, analysing cultural and well-being implications of marine biodiversity crises for coastal communities.
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Dr Dorota Kołbuk (UCD Earth Institute and UCD School of Biology and Environmental Science) is an Environmental Scientist specializing in marine biodiversity and paleobiology. Currently, she is involved in the MARBEFES project, where she applies ecological and interdisciplinary tools to determine the ecological value of the Irish Sea biodiversity and habitats. She is also interested in the environmental and societal impacts of energy transition.
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I am currently John Pollard Newman Fellow in Climate Change and the Arts. My research expertise sits at the intersections of literary analysis, the environmental humanities, and museum studies. Since 2018, I have researched the stories we tell through the display cultures of our natural history museums, including as Principal Investigator on Still Lives: Organic and Digital Animals in the Natural History Museum (IRC, Trinity College Dublin), and as research associate on Narrativising Dinosaurs: Science and Popular Culture, 1850-Present (AHRC, University of Birmingham) and Beyond Dodos and Dinosaurs: Displaying Extinction and Recovery in Museums (NFR, Universitet i Stavanger).
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Dr Shauna Creane (UCD School of Civil Engineering) is a Marine Geoscientist who studies the interaction between meteorological, oceanographic and sediment transport processes over different time spans to answer complex research questions that aims to support the sustainable use of marine and coastal resources during the energy transition.
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I am a multidisciplinary engineer (BSc Mechanical Engineering, MSc Energy Engineering, PhD Biosystems Engineering) with expertise in techno-economic and life cycle assessment of emerging technologies. My research focuses on assessing the viability and sustainability of biorefinery and renewable energy systems; previous research projects have included modelling ocean energy systems (wave energy converters), seaweed production systems, seagrass meadow and wrack management, and lactic acid production from industrial waste. I am currently researching the feasibility of green hydrogen production in Ireland, with a focus on future curtailed power from the developing offshore wind sector.
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Victoria Durrer is Assistant Professor in Cultural Policy at University College Dublin and co-founder and director of the interdisciplinary network, Cultural Policy Observatory Ireland. Holding degrees in Sociology (PhD) and Art History (BA, MA), her work is interdisciplinary. Her research considers the conditions and value of creative practice as social, cultural, and professional endeavours, with focus on their spatial, temporal, and relational dynamics. She holds expertise in engaged and policy-informing research, with projects often involving collaborative research designs, data collection and analysis with research participants and policymakers, and she champions mixed methods approaches that bring creative practice-as-research into dialogue with more traditional social scientific methods. Her funded projects focus on sustainable prosperity and ecologies of practice, most recently in rural border regions and for / with young people.
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I am a Lecturer/ Assistant Professor in World Literature in the School of English, Drama and Film; and a co-lead of the Climate Research Strand at UCD's Earth Institute. My main research and teaching interests are the study of the environmental humanities in world and postcolonial literature, especially around energy, waste, and climate change. My second book project focuses on energy wastes in world literature; and I am currently involved in a creative and community-based funded project on Irish Energy Narratives in the Transition (IE-NARR), focusing on coastal and offshore sites of energy transition.
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Josie is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the ENACT project exploring community narratives of energy transition to offshore wind in Whitegate, County Cork and Kilrush County Clare. Her expertise are in the domains in energy humanities, feminism, and animal studies. Her first monograph is under contract with Palgrave Animal and Literature series and is titled The Nonhuman Narratives of Energy: Multispecies Relations in Extraction Zones. She has published in areas exploring science fiction and energy transition, affect theory and automobile infrastructure, and feminism and environmental politics. She is also a member of the research collective Beyond Gender.
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Dr. Ruth H. Leeney (School of Biology and Environmental Science) is a Teaching Fellow and researcher. Her research has focused on the ecology and conservation of cetaceans, and collecting baseline ecological data on sharks and investigating their socio-cultural importance to small-scale fishing communities, to inform better management and conservation. She is an experienced science communicator with a focus on developing short films, educational books and classroom materials.
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Dr. Oluwayemisi Olomo (iCRAG & UCD School of Business) is a social scientist, and her area of specialisation is Marketing. Within the marketing domain, her research interests lie in understanding human behaviour, especially what drives people’s choices, attitudes and decisions at an individual and societal level.
Her current research explores how people as societal stakeholders make decisions concerning the need to source critical raw materials to achieve the EU Green Deal targets. Her study is part of the VECTOR project which aims to explore the complex social, environmental and technical challenges surrounding the domestic sourcing of CRMs in Europe.
Boróka Bó is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and a Fellow at the Geary Institute for Public Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland. Formerly, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Essex, a Summer Fellow at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a National Institutes of Health Fellow at Duke University, an Edward Hildebrand Research Fellow and a Data Science Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Boróka Bó holds a double PhD in Sociology and Demography from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work situates the temporal perspectives, experiences, and decision-making processes of communities navigating environmental hazards in space and time.
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Pranay is a postdoctoral researcher at School of Economics, UCD. Currently, he is working on an all-island, multidisciplinary project on defining pathways for next generation energy systems (NexSys) housed in UCD Energy Institute. His research interests include a mix of topics on human dimensions of sustainable energy transition policies at the intersection of natural and social sciences disciplines. His project work includes analysis of heterogeneities in residential behaviours in adoption of technologies and acceptance of demand side energy policies in Ireland.
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Virginia is a PhD candidate at the UCD School of Geography. She has a background in Marine Biology from Florida International University and an MSc in Applied Coastal and Marine Management from University College Cork. Her research focuses on improving how cumulative effects are assessed in Strategic Environmental Assessments of Marine Spatial Plans. She uses GIS and spatial analysis to identify high-activity areas in the marine space where cumulative effects may be putting pressure on sensitive ecosystems. Since 2024, she has been one of the Young Ambassadors of the European Marine Board’s Early Career Ocean Professional network, a role that grew her interest in the science-policy interface. She hopes the output of her work can support more informed and meaningful decision-making around how we use and manage the ocean sustainably.
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I am a Postdoc in the School of Biology and Environmental Science at UCD, working under the Atlantic Whale Deal, which aims to reduce ship strike risk to whales. I am a specialist in shark and tuna physiology, behaviour and conservation. I’ve applied this expertise to inform the Celtic Sea sensitivity report regarding anthropogenic pressures, such as wind farm construction, and I have worked to provide underwater noise threshold advice for Irish waters with MaREI.
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Dr Rachel McArdle is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher working at University College Dublin (UCD) on the CONUNDRUM project, since January 2024. CONUNDRUM (Co-Creating sustainable and shared community mobility) is funded by Science Foundation Ireland under the Sustainable Communities challenge. Before joining UCD Rachel worked at the University of Galway and Maynooth University. She is a member of the European Union wide SHARED GREEN DEAL project. Her research interests include: sustainability, communities, climate justice, energy poverty and housing. Three common themes foreground Rachel’s research: community development, sustainability and social justice. In the past she has worked with different stakeholder groups and is committed to place-based research.
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Pegah is a PhD Researcher and Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) Postgraduate Scholar, supervised by Dr. Jennifer Keenahan and Dr. Mark Coughlan. Her research focuses on de-risking scour and anchor installations for floating offshore wind farms, with the goal of enhancing foundation stability and extending the operational lifespan of floating wind structures.
Prior to her PhD, Pegah earned an MSc in Offshore Renewable Energy from Bangor University and an MSc in Environmental Management, following a BSc in Environmental Engineering in Iran. She also worked as a Research Assistant on the Marine Energy Engineering Centre of Excellence (MEECE) and Smart Efficient Energy Centre (SEEC) projects at Bangor University in 2022 and 2023.
João Serpa holds a degree in Journalism from the Federal University of Sergipe (2011), which included a one-year international exchange at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Lyon (Science-Po), France. He holds a specialization in International Relations, with a focus on the international environmental regime. His academic background is rooted in Political Science, with an emphasis on International, Bilateral, and Multilateral Relations. He earned a Master’s degree from the Graduate Program in Development and the Environment at the Federal University of Sergipe, where he conducted interdisciplinary research bridging International Relations, Law, and Environmental Sciences within the context of sustainability in the Amazon. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the School of Philosophy at the Federal University of Sergipe. His doctoral research is interdisciplinary, integrating Philosophy, International Law, and Diplomacy, with a particular focus on ocean sustainability.
Chloé is a PhD candidate at University College Dublin’s Centre for Humanitarian Action, exploring how communities adapt, move or stay in the face of climate risk along coastlines. Her work navigates the nuanced and complicated realities of relocation and housing buyout policies as sea levels rise, coasts erode and flooding intensifies. She’s also a Programme Coordinator for the Beyond Climate Collaborative where she is designing training courses on planned relocation and climate mobility within Europe. With a Masters in Environmental Policy from Sciences Po Paris and a background in youth climate advocacy, Chloé is passionate about translating research into education and policy that supports just, grounded strategies for climate adaptation.