Prof James Windmill is the current Director of the Leverhulme Doctoral School in Nature Inspired Acoustics. He is a Professor in Electronic and Electrical Engineering, with a PhD in magnetic microscopy from the University of Plymouth (2002). He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, from 2003 to 2008, investigating the fundamentals of insect hearing. He also holds a first degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Plymouth.
Prof Windmill joined the University of Strathclyde as a lecturer in 2008. He was promoted to senior lecturer in 2011, reader in 2014, then professor in 2017. His research at Strathclyde focuses on the investigation of hearing systems in insects to inspire the development of new acoustic and ultrasonic sensors and systems. He also has interests in sustainable engineering through the process of remanufacturing, the development of new biomedical sensors, and the use of ultrasound in manufacturing.
Prof Windmill is the Director of the Centre for Ultrasonic Engineering at Strathclyde, and has featured in more than 100 publications. He is also the Co-Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Ultrasonic Engineering.
Dr KH Aaron Lau is a co-Director in the Doctoral School, and is an Associate Professor (“Senior Lecturer” in the UK) in the Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry. He is also a founding member of Strathclyde’s Bionanotechnology initiative. He obtained his ScB and ScM at Brown University, PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, and postdoctoral training at Northwestern University. His awards include the US NIH National Research Service Award (2011), RSC mobility fellowship (2014), Scottish Crucible (2015), and the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Young Investigator award (2016).
Dr Lau’s research focuses on developing molecular self-assemblies and synthetic surfaces that mimic the nanoscale organization and functionalities observed in natural biomacromolecules and their supramolecular interfaces. The main area of activity is peptide-mimetic “peptoids”, which can be conveniently prepared by solid phase synthesis to obtain designable chain lengths and peptide-mimetic sequences. This constitutes a powerful system to investigate the sequence design rules of biomimetic polymers that control self-assembly, secondary structure, bioactivity and cellular interactions. Synthetic sidechains can also be added to introduce “super-natural” functionalities. The research is supported by methodology developments in chemical coupling and surface functionalization. In particular, plant-based polyphenols crosslinking and/or surface coating offer a green chemistry approach to convenient material modification.
Prof George Wright, a psychologist, is a member of the Strathclyde Business School and has undertaken a wide range of consultancy and workshop-based assignments in scenario thinking and decision analysis.
His books include “Scenario Thinking: Preparing your Organization for the Future in an Unpredictable World” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, co-authored), “Scenario Thinking: Practical Approaches to the Future” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, co-authored), 2011 co-authored), and “The Sixth Sense: Accelerating Organizational Learning with Scenarios” (Wiley, 2002, co-authored).
He researches into the role and quality of management judgment in decision making and in anticipating the future. Are such judgments well-made or are there pitfalls and flaws? In fact, sometimes judgment is flawed and techniques, such as scenario thinking and the Delphi method, can be utilised to improve judgment and decision making.
He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Wiley’s Journal of Behavioral Decision Making and Editor-in-Chief of the new-start Wiley journal, Futures & Foresight Science, that was first published in March 2019.
Sonja Oliveira is an architect and Professor in Architecture and Sustainability Innovation at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. She has over 20 years internationally leading design innovation and research experience in architecture and sustainability sectors, having led delivery of complex multidisciplinary projects ranging in value from £200k-£29mil in the UK and internationally. She has an established international reputation in socio-spatial intelligent energy governance and climate action thought leadership.
Her most recent work is looking at how we use imagination and visual socio-spatial sense making to develop new forms of communicating collective resource use – energy, water, air, land across diverse designed environments and habitats – both physical and digital. Sonja works mostly across disciplines at the nexus of architecture, design, socio-spatial methods and computation to develop new experimental forms of communicating ways of sustaining life. She founded the Radical Architecture Practice for Sustainability initiative with leading design practitioners and researchers in Sweden, the Netherlands, Portugal, Austria and France. She is a Thought Leadership Specialist Advisor to the Design Council and a board member of the World Green Building Council (Serbia), as well as scientific and industry advisory member of numerous scientific committees including the newly launched New European Bauhaus Collective.
Currently, Sonja is leading delivery of multiple research and innovation projects aiming to transform interrelated energy governance systems to account for complex multi-phenomenon and multi-scale interconnected encounters between humans, nonhumans, spatial, socio-technological and environmental dimensions of everyday life.
