Speakers

Professor Rachael Rothman is the Grantham Centre Co-Director and supervises a number of Grantham Scholars. Rachael is also part of the Many Happy Returns multidisciplinary research project with a focus on reuse. More recently, Rachael has become the director of the new South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre. She is also the Academic Lead for Sustainability across the whole of the University of Sheffield, spearheading the strategy and plan to make the University more sustainable.
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Matthew Bishop is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Sheffield, and works broadly on the political economy of development in small islands, particularly the Caribbean. He is also one of the Co-Directors of the Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative (RESI), a global advisory network and policy thinktank based at ODI in London. He is also the co-host of the RESI podcast, "Small Islands, Big Picture".
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Dr. Joyce Kimutai is a Climate Scientist affiliated with Grantham Institute of Climate Change and Kenya Meteorological Services. Her research has increasingly focused on analysing the role of anthropogenic climate change in extreme weather/climate events and raising climate risk awareness among decision-makers. She also serves as the alternate IPCC Focal point for Kenya and negotiates for Kenya on agenda items under Science, Review and Systematic observations, Global Stocktake, and loss & damage at UNFCCC COP sessions. She participated as one of the Lead authors for the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land in the Sixth Assessment Cycle (AR6).
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Joanne’s research interests include societal responses to climatic changes during the early and mid-Holocene in the Near East and North Africa and the impacts of future climate change on heritage in Africa. She has directed archaeological field projects in Gaza, Cyprus and most recently Western Sahara culminating in a book published in 2018. Joanne has published extensively on heritage and climate change and has been Co-I on a number of climate change research projects, most recently with Professor Corinne Le Quéré on the Tyndall Centre’s GCRF funded bid Foundations for Climate Resilient and Sustainable Growing Settlements (U-RES) - link here. 

She is currently working with a team of international scholars modelling the impacts of sea-level rise and coastal erosion on coastal heritage. Joanne is a contributing author to the heritage section of the Africa Chapter of the Sixth Assessment Report for the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change and a lead author on the United Nations Environment Program, Global Environment Outlook 7.
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Jan Selby is Professor of the International Politics of Climate Change at the University of Leeds, though was until recently in the Politics department at Sheffield. His most recent book is Divided Environments: An International Political Ecology of Climate Change, Water and Security (Cambridge University Press, 2022, with Gabrielle Daoust and Clemens Hoffmann). He is lead author of a recent evidence review on climate change and migration for the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (link).
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Hadi is a lecturer in the department of Civil & Structural Engineering’s Resources, Infrastructure Systems & built-Environments (RISE) group at the University of Sheffield. Their work and research interests sit at the interface of data-driven urban analytics and planning. Hadi's overall body of research focuses on the challenges faced by urban systems in the context of planetary resource capacity and extreme climate change.
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Helen Woolley is a Landscape Architect and Head of Department. Her research has included understanding children and young people's use of town centres, the inclusion of disabled children in primary school playgrounds, controls put on skateboarders use of outdoor spaces and historic aspects of children's play. She has applied her theory of constructed and found space for children's outdoor play to the post-triple disaster context of north-east Japan and Za'atari refugee camp and she will draw on this research in her presentation. 

Helen's research, impact activities and advisory work have been with a wide range of partners including Government Departments, Local Government, CABE Space, Natural England, Groundwork, Sheffield Housing Services, the International Play Association and UNICEF. She is currently part of a research team exploring Changing Childhoods in Pacific Rim countries, funded by the New Zealand Marsden Fund.
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Liz Sharp is a professor of Water and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. She is an interpretive social scientist whose work focuses on the interaction between the public and governance through the urban water cycle including water supply, pollution management and flood management. She is concerned both with how the public is able to influence water governance, and how water authorities seek to influence people’s daily water practices. Although Liz’s own work focuses on the UK and urbanised western contexts, she has supported several PhD projects focused on water management in the cities of the global south.  
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Nigel Dunnett is Professor of Planting Design and Urban Horticulture in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield and Director of Nigel Dunnett Studio.  He is one of the world’s leading voices on planting design, and a pioneer of the new ecological approach to planting public spaces. His work revolves around the integration of ecology and horticulture to achieve low-input but high-impact landscapes that are dynamic, diverse, and tuned to nature, and is based on decades of detailed experimental work, and widespread application in practice, collaborating with a wide range of other professions, and his work has been widely applied in the UK and abroad. Nigel’s aim is to develop, apply, and promote concepts that ‘infiltrate transformational nature in cities, everywhere’.
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Having led on the development of the Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Strategy for England and more recently its Roadmap, Steven now heads up the team ensuring their implementation. With the growing impacts of climate change it’s vital that the commitments made are achieved, on time and even more importantly the benefits from them realised. 

Prior to working on the FCERM Strategy Steven led teams in the Environment Agency focussing on FCERM engagement with partners and government. The experiences from these roles is vital in his current work given the large number of organisations actively helping to achieve the Strategy vision.
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Professionally qualified in Architecture and Urbanism in Uruguay, Professor Garcia Ferrari’s research focuses on current processes of urban development and regeneration in Latin America and Europe. Soledad has extensive expertise in sustainable planning in growing Latin American cities, with a focus on community-empowerment, participatory and co-creation processes in the production and management of the built environment, with particular interest in increasing resilience and adaptation to climate change in the most vulnerable urban and peri-urban areas. 

She is currently leading research focused on community-led climate change-related risk management in Mexico and Colombia (https://www.globalurbancollaborative.org). Professor Soledad Garcia Ferrari is the International Dean for the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. Soledad is also Dean for Latin America for the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Latin American Studies.
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Professor Peter Jackson is the Co-Director of the University of Sheffield Institute for Sustainable Food and Professor of Geography. Peter's research focuses on commodity culture and the geography of consumption with a particular interest in food. Previous projects include an ESRC-funded project on consumption and identity in North London (published as Shopping, Place and Identity, Routledge, 1998), an ESRC-funded study of retail competition and consumer choice or a study of food commodity chains, funded via the AHRC-ESRC Cultures of Consumption programme.

Beginning in 2009, Peter led a four-year research programme on "Consumer anxieties about food" (CONANX), funded by the European Research Council (ERC). He also coordinated an ERA-Net project on Food, Convenience and Sustainability (FOCAS) with colleagues in Denmark, Germany and Sweden, as part of a European programme on sustainable food, published as Reframing Convenience Food (Palgrave, 2018).
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Louise is a Chartered Health Psychologist whose research focuses on the effects of nutrition (diet/food components) on cognitive function and decline, health and wellbeing. She was academic lead of the N8 Agrifood programme at University of Leeds and has developed a strong interest in how to encourage and sustain dietary behaviour change at individual, organisational and societal levels, linking to global issues of food production/supply, inequality and health in vulnerable populations e.g. children, ageing and food insecure people. 

Louise leads the Diet and Health priority area of the Global Food and Environment Institute at the University of Leeds. She chairs the BBSRC Strategic Advisory Panel for Biosciences for an Integrated Understanding of Health, served on the BBSRC Diet and Health Research Industry Club (DRINC) Steering Group and chaired the BBSRC Working Group on Neuroscience and Mental Health. Louise is past President of ILSI Europe and is current Co-Chair of ILSI Global. She is Associate Editor of Nutritional Neuroscience. She is leading a work package on increasing dietary fibre intake in low income consumers in the UKRI funded H3 project and is co-Chair of the health and wellbeing pillar of the Leeds Food Strategy for Leeds City Council.
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Jill Edmondson is an environmental scientist in the Plants, Photosynthesis and Soils Cluster in the School of Biosciences at the University of Sheffield.  Her interdisciplinary research aims to address the challenge of improving the sustainability and resilience of ecosystems, with a focus on urban and agricultural systems. She has a particular interest in the interaction between soils, plants and the ecosystem services they provide to a growing global population. 
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Toby is a PhD researcher with a background in genetics and sustainable agriculture. Their current work revolves around the intriguing world of hydroponics, a soilless cultivation technique that uses nutrient-rich water solutions to nourish plants. Their research explores the practical applications of low-input hydroponics for cultivating leafy green vegetables and assessing the potential integration into the UK food system, focusing on sustainability and resource efficiency.

Toby is passionate about sharing their knowledge and would like to move towards supporting smallholder farmers in less developed countries, as well as promoting urban agriculture initiatives. Their goal is to empower communities with hydroponic solutions to enhance food security and sustainability.
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Bethany is an interdisciplinary PhD researcher, studying the co-benefits of urban horticulture. Her research focuses on the health and wellbeing benefits of urban horticulture, and ways to increase participation in small-scale domestic food growing. As part of this work, Bethany co-designed and runs the Urban Harvest project, a Sheffield-based scheme aiming to promote the uptake of backyard food growing.
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Emily Harrison is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Biosciences, University of Sheffield, and is interested in the interactions between food security and climate change, both from an adaptation and mitigation perspective. Funded by the Grantham Foundation ‘Double Hundred Challenge’, Emily is currently developing new crops that can capture and store more carbon, to be used as a climate mitigation tool. Through this programme, she is also working with the University’s commercialisation team to develop the technology further. Prior to this, Emily’s PhD investigated ways to enhance the climate resilience of crops using gene-editing, and was partnered with agricultural biotech company Limagrain.  
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