Dr. Iain MacRury is Director of London East. He has worked on a number of LERI projects publishing articles and reports following from the London City Airport Impact Study, the Newham Night Time Economy project and from LERI's work focusing on Olympic Legacy. He is co-editor of the forthcoming Olympic Cities book (Ashgate 2008) and has a continuing interest in further developing LERI’s international, consultancy and Olympics research.
Contact: I.M.Macrury@uel.ac.uk
Professor Gavin Poynter is Chair of the LERI management board. He has carried out research into industrial restructuring and economic regeneration; knowledge, culture and the rise of the new economy; management and work organisation in the service sector and historical patterns of innovation and technological change. He has recently published a LERI Working Paper, 'From Beijing to Bow Bells', which examines the relationship between urban regeneration and the experience of cities that host the Olympic and Paralympic Games. He has contributed to consultancy projects for DAC, the Field Studies Council, ExCel London and the London Assembly. Recently, with Dr Iain Macrury, he has produced a journal article for the International History of Sport on ‘Striking Gold: Commodities, Gifts and the Economics of London 2012’ and edited a book on ‘Olympic Cities’ - both of these will be published in autumn 2008.
Contact: G.Poynter@uel.ac.uk
Rachel Aldred is a senior lecturer in sociology who joined UEL in September 2007 after an ESRC-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the London School of Economics. She is particularly interested in researching connections between space, mobility, and well-being, and in critical sociological policy analysis. She has secured UEL funding to conduct a project on European regulation of road transport CO2 emissions (with Daniela Tepe and Sam Ashman), for which she is seeking follow-on funding, and she has been working on "Cycling Cultures", looking at narratives around cycling. She is working on a special issue of Critical Social Policy journal on environmental issues, social policy, and social welfare, and planning a research project entitled '"This lovely corridor of blight?" Living with the A13'.
Contact: R.e.aldred@uel.ac.uk
Leila Baker has worked as a researcher in the fields of homelessness and exclusion for over ten years. Now working on a freelance basis, Leila was previously Research Manager for Shelter. Most recently, she has carried out research into housing advice, homelessness prevention, and young runaways. She has also been involved in the evaluation of a range of housing, support and youth projects; and the production of good practice guides and practitioner ‘toolkits’. She works for a variety of commissioning agencies including charities and community projects, local authorities and housing associations.
Contact: l.baker@uel.ac.uk
Penny Bernstock is a Senior Lecturer in the field of Sociology. She has recently published a report on housing in the Thames Gateway for Shelter. She was Principal Researcher for the Davies Arnold Cooper Housing Study, a detailed report on housing in the Thames Gateway. Penny is developing LERI's work on the Olympics and the Thames Gateway with particular reference to housing policy. She also sits on the LERI Management Team
Contact: p.bernstock@uel.ac.uk
Karina Berzins is a Visiting Fellow at London East Research Institute and lecturer in media and cultural studies, teaching on a wide range of courses, at the University of East London , and London and Metropolitan University . She has acted as a consultant for a number of tourist firms in Venice , Italy , which centred around e-strategies for tourism marketing and destination branding. She has also consulted on the arts and cultural strategy for the national pilot Milton Keynes regeneration area, the Cambridgeshire sub-region, and the Thames Gateway.Her recent work includes research for the Havering Casino bid, and assistance with a National stock take by the Arts Council of Creative Workspaces.
Contact: k.berzins@uel.ac.uk
Professor Andrew Blake is Associate Head of the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London and a member of the management team. From 1997-2005 he was Head of the School of Cultural Studies at the University of Winchester. He is a consultant on cultural policy with a performing background as a saxophonist and composer. Professor Blake’s writings include The Music Business (1992) and The Land without Music: Music, Culture and Society in Twentieth Century Britain (1997; the edited collection Living through Pop (1999); and a contribution to The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Music (2004). He is also the author of books on sport, consumer culture, and fiction, including The Body Language: the Meaning of Modern Sport (1995), and The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter (2002), which has been translated into five languages.
Allan Brimicombe
Allan Brimicombe is Professor of Geo-Information Studies at UEL. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and has extensive experience of consultancy work. He spent six years in China as project manager for the department of International development. More recent consultancy work includes work on the proposed Disneyland Development in Hong Kong , a study of repeat victims for the Metropolitan Police, an analysis of the statistical life time of assets for Anglia Water and the use of GIS for urban and regional planning and ecological mapping.
Contact: allan3@uel.ac.uk
Toby Butler is a Visiting Fellow at London East and a consultant. He led the recent Ports of Call project designing multimedia heritage trails around the Royal Docks. Toby has directed and worked on several oral history projects with communities in Kansas, USA, Wales and India. Starting out as historian and tour guide at Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London he moved into journalism and has edited several magazines including Third Sector, a magazine for people who work for charities and Foster Care Magazine, for those who look after children in care. He studied an MA in public history at Ruskin College, Oxford and in his work for a PhD cultural geography at Royal Holloway, University of London he developed two oral history walking trails along the banks of the river Thames in London (available for free from www.memoryscape.org.uk). He has published academic papers on walking trails, sound art and cultural history.
Contact: t.butler@uel.ac.uk
Andrew Calcutt has been a musician and producer (Precint Records), a journalist (Arena, Esquire, The Modern Review) and revolutionary (Living Marxism), and a newspaper reviewer and cultural commentator (Talk Radio, Clarke TV for Channel 4). He now writes academic and trade books, edits Rising East for the London East Research Institute, and leads master's programmes in Journalism and Society, and Magazines, at the Docklands campus of the University of East London.
Phil Cohen is Professor Emeritus at UEL. His early research on youth culture and working class community has had an international influence and his more recent work on the impact of structural change on urban cultures has been supported by major grants from the Economic and Social Science Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust. His work over the last 20 years has focused on East London and has dealt with issues of racism and multiculturalism, public safety and danger, the role of the cultural economy in urban regeneration and popular participation in planning. His books include Rethinking the Youth Question, New Ethnicities ,Old Racisms and the forthcoming Questioning Ethnographies.
Contact: p.a.cohen@uel.ac.uk
Babak Davarpanah Varnosefadarani (Babak) is an international consultant with many years of experience working for World Bank, UNDP, and other agencies in Middle East, Central Asia and China, as well communities in London docklands and Sheffield. As an economist / urban and regional planner (Architectural Association) he has evaluated the socio/economic impact of local environmental initiatives and has developed national urban upgrading programmes. His prime focus is to help develop sustainable local economic development strategies through participatory planning and partnership, with particular interest in main streaming cross cutting issues such as gender, minority rights and information and communication technologies. He has taught, English business communication in Paris and alternative urban planning in UK and abroad.
Contact: b.davarpana@uel.ac.uk
Neil Herrington is a principal lecturer in the School of Education at the University of East London. Working with secondary trainee teachers in East London. Neil is interested in how professional and community identity develop and the impact that this has. In addition to the initial teacher education role Neil is interested in how members of the education related professions engage with research and policy development. Neil is currently a Fellow in Holocaust Education at the IWM.
Contact: N.Herrington@uel.ac.uk
Syd Jeffers is a senior lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at UEL and Field Leader of Sociology and Innovation Studies. His research interests centre around the changing politics of race and ethnicity, and Tocqueville on democracy and empire.
Contact: s.jeffers@uel.ac.uk
Phil Lane
Chief Executive Officer of the British Paralympic Association, Great Britain’s second largest multi-sport organisation, comprising, the charity and company limited by guarantee and its wholly owned subsidiaries British Paralympic Enterprises Ltd and British Paralympic Performance Services Ltd. He joined BPA in August 2001 as CEO.
Loraine Leeson is a visual artist and director of cSPACE, who uses the arts and the Internet in her work with local communities and young people around issues of regeneration. Current projects include VOLCO, a planet in cyberspace being constructed by children across the world, and CASCADE, involving students from three levels of education. Thirty years of her collaborative practice has recently been celebrated through a retrospective exhibition which opened in Berlin in 2005 and is now touring to London and Toronto. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of East London since 2001.
Contact: l.leeson@uel.ac.uk
John Newbiggin
John Newbiggin is a free-lance consultant and cultural entrepreneur. His portfolio ranges from Channel 4 and the UK Film Council to environmental projects in the UK and Bangladesh. From 2000 until the summer of 2005 he was Head of Corporate Relations for Channel 4. From 1997 until 2000 he was Special Advisor to the Rt Hon Chris Smith, MP, the Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport. Prior to that, he worked as executive assistant to Lord Puttnam, then the Chairman of Enigma Productions Ltd. From 1986 until 1992 John worked as a policy advisor to the Rt Hon Neil Kinnock, MP, Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition, with responsibility in the Leader of the Opposition’s office for environmental policy, local government issues and cultural policy. He was Director of the London Youth Festival for International Youth Year in 1985. Before that he worked variously as a youth worker in Brixton and Brick Lane, and as a journalist, writer, cartoonist and manager of a training workshop specialising in furniture making. He is Chairman of the 24 Hour Museum, the UK’s national online museum, a Trustee of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, and a Board member of Theatre Royal Stratford East, the Whitechapel-based Keen Students School and the Birmingham-based film project First Light Movies Ltd. He is also a Board member of CIDA, (the East London Creative Industries Development Agency), a Trustee of Channel 4’s Big Art Project, a member of the Advisory Board of the John Smith Trust and a member of the Advisory Board of BT’s heritage collection ‘Connected Earth’. He recently served as a specialist advisor to the Parliamentary Joint Scrutiny Committee on the Climate Change Bill.
Director of the newly formed Institute for Performing Arts Development at UEL, Mark previously worked for BBC Television as a channel director, the Royal Court Theatre as a script adviser and translator, and is a playwright and theatre practitioner. Born in the East End and educated in Canning Town, Mark is particularly interested in the role of artists in urban regeneration projects and the need to engage the local with the global.
David Powell
David Powell runs a research and development company, DPA, which is active the arts and cultural matters and in the wider creative economy. Its work covers the development of arts and creative projects, comment and research, and the establishment and review of policy, strategic and action programmes. David is Thames Gateway London Partnership’s strategic advisor on creative and cultural industries. He developed the Joint Cultural Framework for the East London Host Boroughs (2004) and is now working on a similar framework for the Gateway Boroughs in E&SE London and with the Central London Boroughs. He also developed a number of programme propositions for the London 2012 bid including (with John Lock, UEL and London Higher) the London Olympic Institute. DPA has researched the creative and cultural sectors and developed strategies and programmes for EEDA in the East of England, SEEDA in the South East, Brighton & Hove and at Kings Cross. It contributed to the British Academy’s 2004 Report “That full complement of riches’:the contributions of the arts, humanities and social sciences to the nation’s wealth”
Jay Redgrove is one of LERI's consultants.
Professor Mike Rustin is on the LERI Board of Management and the Management Team. He is currently co-editing London’s Turning: The prospect of Thames Gateway.
Alice Sampson heads the urban regeneration research team at the Centre for Institutional Studies at UEL as well as being a member of LERI faculty. She has been involved in evaluating the impact of the London Dockland Corporation initiative, City Challenge, Single Regeneration Budget programmes and the current Sure Start and Children's Fund initiatives for young people and children living in disadvantaged areas. Through her research she has extensive local knowledge and many contacts with the public, private and community sectors. Her innovative approach to evaluative research is focussed on understanding how urban developments bring about changes to an area, both intentional and unintentional. This directly involves service users and recently a group of young people were trained to be researchers, along with parents/carers.
Contact: A.Sampson@uel.ac.uk
Mary Smith is currently the Project Manager for CEDAR, the Clustering and Enhancing Digital Archives Research project, funded by JISC and based at the Library and Learning Services and the Institute for Performing Arts Development. She was previously (2008-Sept 2009) project manager of the East London Lives 2012 project, a pilot digital 'living' archive documenting the experiences of people in the 5 Olympic Boroughs towards the London 2012 Games, a joint project between LERI, LLS and IHHD funded by JISC. Mary joined LERI in late 2007 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and formerly led the Newham Olympic Cities Research Project, which carried out research on the experiences of host populations in past Olympic cities. Her specialization is in urban and political Anthropology, in which she has a PhD and two Masters degrees, and the impacts of the Olympics and Paralympics in host cities. She researches on placemaking, narratives on alterity, belonging and dispossession, genealogical tracing. East London and Canadian cities, and is also interested in using and researching on digital media and resources in teaching and narratives.
Contact: m.k.smith@uel.ac.uk or www.twitter.com/eastlondonlives
Alan Walsh is a community sports funding and development consultant with a special interest in linking sports provision for minority and disadvantaged groups to urban regeneration initiatives. In the last two years he has carried out contract work for Sports England , the London Simba Football Academy ( a refugee sports project),Haringey Sports Development Council, and Hhackney Downs User groups. Prior to going free lance , he worked full time for the Peabody Housing Trust as their community sports development manager and prior to that for the London Community Cricket Association. In the latter he role he was instrumental in the establishing the UEL/CNER partnership which delivered the much quoted Anyone for Cricket report looking at patterns of racial discrimination in the sport. He has substantial knowledge and experience of most of the statutory funding streams available to sports development and is a member of the Active Communities Development Fund grants panel. He has also worked with initiatives such as Priority Areas, Awards For All, Education Action Zones, and Health Action Zones.
Contact: A.walsh@blueyonder.co.uk
Paul Watt is a Visiting Fellow at the London East Research Institute and a Reader in Social Policy at the Policy Research Institute, University of Wolverhampton. His research interests focus on the changing socio-spatial parameters of inequality, exclusion and difference with special reference to global cities and their hinterlands. Research projects on London and the South East have included: suburban migration from London to Essex; social class and council tenants in the London Borough of Camden; youth, safety and danger in the Home Counties. He is a recipient of research grants from the British Academy and the Canadian Government (the latter for research on migrant service workers in Toronto), as well as a range of local government and voluntary sector organisations. He has published widely including in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, Housing Studies and Journal of Social Policy. His recent co-authored book, with Tim Butler, is Understanding Social Inequality (Sage, 2007). Currently he is an editorial board member of Sociological Research Online and Social Policy and Society.
Contact: p.watt@wlv.ac.uk
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