Who we are

Scientists for EU (SfEU) was initiated by Dr Mike Galsworthy & Dr Rob Davidson on May 8, 2015. This was the day after the UK General Election when the Conservative win ensured that there would be a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU.

SfEU began on Facebook and grew by thousands over the weekend. So we also opened a Twitter account, webpage, and began networking with the other pro-EU campaigns. We then began to establish an Advisory Board to help guide the campaign.

Who we are:

SfEU is led by Dr Mike Galsworthy (Programme Director) & Dr Rob Davidson (CTO).

 

Dr Mike Galsworthy is an independent consultant in research and innovation policy and a visiting researcher at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). Previous to that he worked at UCL & the Royal College of Anaesthetists. Mike’s undergraduate degree is from Cambridge (Natural Sciences, 1st class) and PhD from Kings’ College London (behaviour genetics). His recent work includes a series of case studies on “international innovation” by UK universities for Universities UK and an analysis to assess the effectiveness of the EU’s health research programme under FP7 (science programme for the years 2007-2013). His commentary on UK-EU research relations has been cited in Government and House of Lords documents. Mike has analysed and written commentary (academic and lay) on EU research programmes since 2009, has given invited talks on science policy and has been vocal on why the UK should stay in the EU for science since 2013.

 

---

 

Dr Rob Davidson works as a Data Scientist for the academic online journal Gigascience. Previously he worked as post-doctoral bioinformatician at the University of Birmingham. He holds a BSc in Computer Science (1st Class Honours) and MRes in Bioinformatics from the University of Exeter. His PhD is in Clinical NMR Metabolomics from the Institute of Cancer Research. Rob is an executive member of Open Data Hong Kong, leading their science working group and jointly leading the Open Knowledge Asia-Pacific Science network. Rob also has experience of running a targeted social media campaign (called Congo Now!) for a large coalition of charities, successfully increasing their social media following 10 fold, building a mailing list of ~1000 supporters and organising a 7000 strong petition of the Foreign Office on the subject of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

 

Research Team:

---

Dr Diana Beech is a Senior Researcher at the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, London. She also helps run the Euraxess ‘Voice of the Researchers’ network which gives researchers a say in science policy-making at the EU-level. Diana holds a PhD from Cambridge, has researched European science values and open access impacts, and acts as an adviser for the career development and recruitment of researchers in Europe.

---

Prof. Jon Fairburn is Professor of Sustainable Development at Staffordshire University. He has extensive experience of EU projects having worked on INTERREG, GRUNDTVIG, Transversals and Framework Programme 7. He is currently leading an EU project on Sustainable management in the tourism sector. He has evaluated innovation support schemes under FP7 and also produced research for several UK government departments and the World Health Organisation.

 

---

John Lapage is in the final stages of a Ph.D. in Biology at the University of Warwick, and has previously held studentships at the University of Cambridge and the University of Southampton. He is an inaugural member of ‘Interact’, an international network campaigning on issues affecting Early Career Researchers, as well as writing and presenting at science communication events in his home town of Southampton.

 

 

---

Daniel Mayhew is a development tech in a medical device company on the edge of Cambridge. He is a chemistry graduate of Nottingham Trent University and an active campaigner for science.

 

 

 

---

Dr Claire Skentelbery runs two European scientific networks, the Council of European BioRegions (CEBR) and the European Biotechnology Network (EBN). She has a degree in agriculture from the University of Aberdeen and PhD in plant biochemistry from the University of Lancaster. She has worked in the support, communication and networking of science across Europe for 15 years and is annoyingly relentless about research having no unnecessary barriers to progression as science offers challenge enough

 

---

Dr Andrew Steele is a computational biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. He is also a science presenter and writer, and dabbles in science policy as vice-chair of grassroots campaign group Science is Vital, and demystifies science funding statistics at Scienceogram. Check out his website or follow @statto on Twitter.

 

 

---

Dr Andrea Taroni is Chief Editor of Nature Physics. He obtained an undergraduate degree in chemistry and PhD in statistical physics from University College London. This was followed by work at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France and work at Uppsala University in Sweden, investigating the dynamics of low-dimensional magnetic and spintronic systems, before joining the team at Nature.

 

 

---

Dr Alison Woollard is an Associate Professor in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Oxford (and Fellow of Hertford College) where she works on the developmental genetics of the nematode worm C. elegans. She also has a strong interest in science policy and public engagement and was the 2013 Royal Institution Christmas Lecturer.