Who we are

Matt Ryan is Associate Professor in Governance and Public Policy at the University of Southampton and has a PhD in Politics by the same University. His research interests lie across the boundaries of political theory and comparative politics, with a strong focus on innovative research methods. He is Policy Director at the Web Science Institute, co-director of the Centre for Democratic Futures and a Turing Fellow. Since January 2020 he is UKRI Future Leader Fellow leading the Rebooting Democracy project.

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Katy Tabero is a Senior Research Assistant at the University of Southampton and has a PhD in Economics from Durham University. With a specific interest in experimental economics, her research explores how groups make decisions (including democratic methods), whether and how decisions by groups differ to those of individuals, and methods or mechanisms for encouraging cooperation in groups. She is also interested in the impact of democratic decision-making as a process, such as the quality or types of decisions being reached, or the way in which people react to endogenously enacted rules.

Zohreh Khoban is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton and holds a PhD in Politics from Uppsala University. She does research at the intersection of democratic theory and democratic innovations, and draws on critical and feminist theories to reflect on and study representation, power and privilege in democratic processes and institutions.

Paolo Spada is a Lecturer in Comparative Politics within Politics at the University of Southampton. He has a PhD in Economics by the University of Bologna and a PhD in Political Science by Yale University. His research on Collective Intelligence explores how to combine the expertise of different people to achieve better decision making. His work investigates how and when these processes reshape political representation, promote accountability, and affect the planning and delivery of public policies. I am a member of the core development team of the Participedia Project, of the research unit of the Participatory Budgeting Project, a former member of the Digital Engagement Evaluation Team at the World Bank, a member of Democracy Matters, the consortium of academic and practitioners that promoted the adoption of Citizens' Assemblies in the UK, and I am one of the founders of the School of Collective Intelligence in Marocco.

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Tim Norman is Professor of Computer Science and Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. He read Electronic and Electrical Engineering at University of Wales, Swansea, then graduated in 1997 with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University College London in the area of AI planning and scheduling. After working as a postdoc at Queen Mary University of London, he moved to the University of Aberdeen in 1999 where he was promoted to Professor in 2009. He joined the Agents Interaction and Complexity Group at ECS Southampton in 2016.

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Cristina Argudin is a PhD student at the School of Biological Sciences. Her research focuses on evaluating the integrity of tropical forests under climate change and other anthropogenic pressures. She holds a MSc in Biodiversity Conservation from Macquarie University in Sydney and a BSc in Biology from the National University of Mexico in Mexico City.

Marco Meloni is a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton (UK), Faculty of Social Sciences, in the frame of the Horizon 2020 project PHOENIX - The rise of citizens voices for a Greener Europe. He has a PhD in Democracy in the XXI Century by the Centre for Social Studies (CES), associated to University of Coimbra (Portugal) and has a Master degree in International Relations by the University of Cagliari (Italy).

His research interest focuses on Democratic Innovations, digital participation and Intra-Party democracy. He worked as project manager and trainers in several EU projects, in the framework of the programmes Horizon 2020, Erasmus+, Leonardo, and in projects at the local level.

Selin is a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton's Agents, Interactions, and Complexity research group. She graduated from the Royal College of Art with a PhD in Intelligent Mobility, which was funded by the Hyundai-Kia Lab. She has worked on a wide range of projects, including soft robotics, virtual reality, and agent-based modelling.

Her research focuses on human-centered intelligent systems, specifically how human agency is observed, represented, and applied in digital services and intelligent systems.

Rafael Mestre is a New Frontiers Fellow at the University of Southampton and has a PhD in Nanoscience by the University of Barcelona. He has worked in a wide variety of topics, including bio-hybrid robotics, physics, bioengineering and nanoscience. Thus, he applies a broad set of interdisciplinary techniques to solve complex problems at the interface of different disciplines, with a strong emphasis on data science, programming, theoretical modelling and machine learning. His current research interests lie in data science and artificial intelligence for the social good, argumentation mining, democratic innovations and ethics.

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Masood Gheasi has a Master and a PhD degree in Law and Economics (Faculty of Law, University of Bologna, Italy). Furthermore, he has a second PhD in Economics (Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands). As a consequence, he has a broad range of research skills, a deeper understanding and knowledge of Law and Economics. His research interests have revolved around labor economics, as well as internal and international mobility of people. During the 9 years of his research career, he has published various articles in different international peer reviewed journals and chapters in books. Thus, his research is based on social and economic theories by utilizing rigorous econometric techniques.

Stuart Middleton is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Southampton and a Turing Fellow. He has over the last 19 years made internationally recognized contributions to research into the natural language processing and information extraction. Many of his grants are cross-disciplinary in nature, featuring consortia with a mixture of academic and commercial partners experienced in a range of domains and disciplines. His research interest lies in the natural language processing area of information extraction and human-in-the-loop NLP, including techniques such as active learning, few/zero-shot learning, graph-based models, sentence embeddings, domain adaption and argument mining.

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Richard Gomer is a Lecturer in Computer Science in the Web and Internet Science research group at the University of Southampton. He has a PhD in Web Science, also from Southampton. His research interests lie in Human-Computer Interaction, particularly how human agency is mediated, extended or constrained by engineered systems. He has research interests in consent and data protection, health and wellbeing, and connected transport. Richard is also an elected member of Eastleigh Borough Council, so has a practical interest in democratic participation, too!

Charlotte Campbell-Nieves is a final year PhD student in Economic Geography at the University of Southampton. Her PhD research examines flows of capital, knowledge and innovation in micro-businesses, with the aim of providing policy recommendations for how micro/small businesses can be better supported both inside and outside times of crisis. Charlotte has been involved in various national and international policy development projects, from improving support for creative industries workers in Kenya to ‘Levelling Up’ the South Coast of England. Most recently, she has worked with the think tank Demos to co-author their ‘Good Credit Index’ for 2022. She holds a BA in Geography and MSc in Social Research Methods from the University of Southampton.

Lydia has a PhD in Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London and Post Doc Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at SOAS, University of London. Her doctoral thesis works to further flesh out the links and gaps amongst de/postcolonialism, feminism, environmentalism, and social movement studies. Her research aims to increase learning amongst environmentalists in relation to inclusive action and philosophies of environmentalism. Lydia's research is funded through the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Lydia has worked in collaboration with colleagues across several contexts on various projects relating to teaching and sustainable practice, including at the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, the British Library, Utrecht University, and Goldsmiths, University of London. Lydia is also currently the Secretary on the Political Studies Association’s Early Career Network Committee.

Adam Meylan-Stevenson is a PhD student working on Political Theory and Public Policy at the University of Southampton. His work is focused on applying John Stuart Mill's harm principle to public health policy. Adam's research is interdisciplinary and utilises empirically engaged normative political theory and analytical philosophy to inform a greater understanding of public health policy. He has a BA in Philosophy from the University of Southampton, an MSc in Global Ethics and Justice from the University of Birmingham, and an ESRC-funded MSc in Social Research Methods from the University of Southampton.

You can find more about Adam’s work on LinkedIn and his University profile.

Jack is a Maritime Archaeologist primarily interested in the study of ships and shipwrecks. His research interests primarily concern ways we can better understand the shipwreck sites we are dealing with. Particularly theoretical concepts and methodological tools that allow us to better understand people in the past. Jack joined the Rebooting team through Public Policy Southampton’s Associate Scheme and he is contributing with stakeholder analysis and research support for Southampton’s Climate Assembly.

Jiatong Zhu is a PhD student at the Agents Interaction and Complexity Group, Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Before this, she obtained an MSc degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Southampton. Her research interests are focused on Natural Language Processing, especially using Natural Language Processing techniques to solve Argument Classification.

George is a ESRC-funded Politics PhD student at Southampton. He is currently researching topics around economic inequality and political trust. He is collaborating with the team in Open Science research and Participedia. You can find more about George here: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/5ywhrh/mr-george-bolton

Hannah has a PhD from the University of Southampton in Politics and International Relations specialising in gender, sexual and reproductive health, education and human rights in vulnerable populations.

Her PhD used mixed methods to analyse actors' responses to the sexual and reproductive health and human rights of adolescent migrants in humanitarian settings, specifically looking at the case study of Venezuelan migrants in Colombia. She has also worked as a research assistant on redressing gendered health inequalities in migrant women. Hannah continues to be an active member of the Centre for Global Health and Policy (GHaP) and the Society of Gender Professionals. She has extensive experience interviewing vulnerable groups and key informants, conducting focus groups, participatory workshops, survey analysis, human rights impact assessment and policy analysis.

Arjun is a second year PhD researcher in the department of Sociology, Social Policy, and Criminology. He is also the student representative from his department. You can find more about Arjun here.

James is a Project Manager at University of Southampton and a part-time Masters student in Systems Thinking in Practice. James is also a Committee Member of the RAISE Network, delivering their annual higher education Buddy Scheme. James has a passion for student engagement, continual development and lifelong learning, and during his career has supported funded student-staff partnership research projects at The Open University, exploring decolonisation and inclusion initiatives in UK universities, and University of Hertfordshire, delivering mental health awareness training in higher education.