Robert Boyle Summer School 2022

Dr Edwards is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, while studying there he developed an abiding interest in the medieval period. When arriving at UCC in 1993, Dr Edwards was able to merge the two areas and could pursue his research interests, which by then had begun to explore continuities between late medieval and early modern Ireland in order the better to identify and measure some of the profound political and social, religious and cultural changes that occurred during the 1500s and early 1600s.

Dr Colin Rynne BA, PhD is a graduate of UCC. He has published many books including: At the sign of the cow: the Cork Butter Market 1769-1924 (1998); The industrial heritage of county Cork (2019). He was also an editor of the multi-disciplinary volume titled The Heritage of Ireland (2000) and Plantation Ireland settlement and material culture, c. 1550-c.1700 (2009). His research interests include medieval agriculture, medieval and post-medieval iron working in Ireland and Irish industrial archaeology. His currently working on and IRC project, with Dr David Edwards of the Department of History, UCC, mapping the seventeenth-century colonial landscapes of Richard Boyle, Ist earl of Cork.

Eoin Gill is co-director of CALMAST – STEM Outreach Centre at South East Technological University. He has been the coordinator of Maths Week since its foundation in 2006. He is a chartered engineer and a member of the European Maths Society’s committee for Raising Public Awareness of Maths. Eoin co-founded Maths Week Ireland – the leading such festival in the world – that attracts annual participation of around 400,000 across the island of Ireland and the Robert Boyle Summer School, founded in 2012, which is Ireland’s first annual gathering for adults exploring science in our culture.

Dr Sherra Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Critical and Cultural Studies, teaching visual and material culture at IADT Dun Laoghaire.  Her work on the formation of the Natural History Museum Dublin as an interlocking set of historical, scientific, social, and visual frameworks was published as ‘The First National Museum’: Dublin’s Natural History Museum in the mid-nineteenth century in October 2021. The book was shortlisted for the 2022 Royal Historical Society Whitfield Prize. See her presentation at the Winter School 2023 here.

Rachel Hand is the Anthropology Collections Manager in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Her role seeks to balance the needs of the collections themselves with demands for access for exhibition and research by communities of origin, artists, academics and institutions. She continues to research the ethnographic collection at the National Museum of Ireland where she worked to catalogue the Ethnographic Collection from 2003 to 2006. She has published on Irish collecting within the British Empire and the early Cook-Voyage material from Trinity College, Dublin. See her presentation at the Winter School 2023 here.

Dr Matthew Jebb is director of the National Botanic Gardens. Matthew undertook his primary degree and D. Phil at Oxford University. His doctoral studies looked at the taxonomy and tuber morphology of the rubiaceous ant-plants. Following a 5 year appointment as Director of the Christensen Research Institute at Madang, Papua New Guinea, Matthew took up a 2 year post-doc position at Trinity College Dublin. This work worked involved preparation of a revision of the Araliaceae for the Flora of Thailand project. Matthew has revised the family Nepenthaceae for Flora Malesiana.

Emma is an Assistant Professor in paleobiology at Friedrich Alexander University (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg in Erlangen, Germany. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, she began her career as a zoologist studying living animals, before moving to the UK, and later Germany, to focus her research on fossilised critters. Her current research investigates how various environmental, physical, and historical factors drive patterns of deep-time biodiversity. She is particularly interested in how past climate change influenced the evolutionary patterns of extinct vertebrates (such as dinosaurs and pterosaurs), but she is especially passionate about ethical issues and the legacy of colonialism in paleontological research.

Dr Gozibert Kamugisha has been a lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) since 2006; specialising in sociology and in particular medical sociology. Kamugisha has worked on establishing Young Scientists Tanzania since 2009 when first introduced to the idea by Joseph Clowry. He later studied at Maynooth University in 2010 and gained first hand knowledge about all aspects of the Young Scientist project in Ireland and Science for Development. While in Ireland, Kamugisha worked with students presenting projects for the Irish exhibition and witnessed the transformational power of the project. He has been a strong advocate in highlighting the Young Scientist’s ability to create a much needed science culture in secondary schools in Tanzania. As Co-founder of Young Scientists Tanzania, he says his proudest moment was seeing the highly successful staging of the first ever Young Scientists Tanzania exhibition at the Mnazi Moja grounds on November 2011.