Samantha Aspinall

Samantha has two jobs Professional Development Co-ordinator for Leeds University, Faculty of Biological Sciences and her own training and development company.

It has been a circuitous route to get to this point, including training as a teacher, living in Italy working in multi-national companies, designing and delivering software training. At the launch of the Environment Agency in 1996, she was given the job of creating the first education role and was nationally responsible for education on the Agency's Website. She also managed the development of learning case materials for postgraduate and undergraduate students.

Having worked in her previous job for a scary 10 years, Samantha and her partner Paul decided to leavetheir 'safe' jobs and do something completely different. So they moved to Barcelona, having never been there, not speaking Spanish, nor having anywhere to live. It felt like madness as they sat on the night flight out of London to a new life. They fell in love with the city but soon discovered that two was to become three so they moved back to have their daughter Rosa.

Samantha now concentrates on her work at Leeds and growing her own business.

Simon Berry

Simon is currently on full-time secondment to Defra working as Head of the Third Sector Team charged with the implementation of Defras Third Sector Strategy. He also supports the team delivering the Greener Living Fund.  He founded ruralnet|uk and is the former Chief Executive.

A tribute from consultant Martin Dudley: Defra is lucky to  have found such an innovator, a trusted, intelligent mischief-maker and bridge-builder who will  bring a huge breath of fresh air, understanding and awareness  where it is much needed.

As a rural development specialist with wide and varied experience, Simon has designed and implemented both practical and research projects, in Britain and developing countries. Although is academic background is in agriculture and tropical animal health (Reading, 1977 and Edinburgh, 1978), he quickly moved into working with communities through training and extension work, institutional development, and integrated rural development projects, under the UK Governments Overseas Aid Programme, spending 12 years in South America, the Caribbean and Africa.

In 1991 he returned to the UK as project manager to establish WREN Telecottage - one of the first public access ICT centres in the UK - and managed the centre for 2 years. He moved to WRENs parent, the National Rural Enterprise Centre as Project Manager (Telematics) in 1993, and worked on a range of initiatives, from RegioNet (Project Manager), a pan-EU community telematics project covering nine countries with 34 partners, to planning for individual community ICT centres. In 1995 he took over as the NRECs Director.  In 2002, Simon lead his team to independence from the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE). ruralnet|uk (http://www.ruralnetuk.org), an independent rural regeneration charity, was launched on 1 August 2002. ruralnet|uk continues to have links with the RASE and occupies the same premises (the National Rural Enterprise Centre, Stoneleigh Park, Warwickshire).

As well as financial and strategic management, Simon's work areas include: rural policy, project management, research and consultancy, online information (www.inforurale.org.uk), communications and collaboration (www.ruralnet.org.uk and www.networksonline.org.uk).

In his spare time he runs the ColaLife campaign to get Coca-Cola to use its distribution muscle in developing countries to save childrens lives(www.colalife.org).

Robert Brown

Amanda Chmura

Amanda is a portfolio manager in the Physical Sciences and Energy Programmes at ESPRC where her responsibilities include plasma, fusion and laser physics. She holds a PhD in Chemistry and during her PhD she developed initiators for the polymerisation of cyclic esters. She is originally from Ohio, USA and is in her second year of employment with the Research Council.

Rob Hopkins

Rob Hopkins, did his permaculture design course in 1992, and around the same time saw Bill Mollison lecture in Stroud, and both of these things dramatically changed his life. He became involved in the Bristol Permaculture Group, and at the same time did a degree in Environmental Quality and Resource Management at UWE Bristol. You can find his dissertation, Permaculture - a new approach for rural planning on this website. He is now teaching permaculture and laying the groundwork for the ecovillage development we wanted to undertake.

Garry Staunton

Garry is Technology Director, The Carbon Trust

Garry joined the Carbon Trust in April 2002. From 2003 to 2007 he was responsible for the development and delivery of the wide range of research and development activities within the Carbon Trusts Innovation business area, and was appointed Technology Director in 2007.

Garrys responsibilities includes ensuring that the Carbon Trust remains informed regarding opportunities where provision of support can have a material impact on the commercialisation of low carbon technologies.

Professor Fred Steward

Fred is Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Following his doctoral research in science and technology studies at the University of Manchester he joined the Manchester Business School to conduct research on risk regulation and technological innovation. He then moved to the Technology Policy Unit at Aston University where he was appointed Lecturer and researched innovation & consumer risk in the pharmaceutical and food sectors. Subsequently he joined Aston Business School where he established & directed the Innovation Research Centre and became Reader in the Strategic Management group. Professor Fred Steward is a member of BRESE (Brunel Research in Enterprise, Innovation, Sustainability and Ethics)

Main Interests

During the 1990s he led a range of ESRC and European Commission funded research projects on innovation (the successful exploitation of new ideas) & entrepreneurship. (innovation through new ventures). These brought together concepts from the sociology of innovation (heterogeneous networks) with organizational strategy (relational capabilities). A number of novel approaches to innovation networks were developed in terms of situated discourse, stakeholder interaction and visual mapping. The consistent focus of the research was on innovation in the business enterprise with particular attention to interaction with multiple stakeholders and the management of diverse goals of competitiveness, environmental sustainability, quality of life & social inclusion.

Recent projects have addressed these issues in contrasting domains of new technology. A project in the European Commission environment programme addressed conflicts over risk and bioscience innovation in the food sector including MBM animal feed and GM crops. A project in the ESRC Virtual Society programme investigated e-technology and the digital divide and the role of hybrid organizational innovations including the telecottage and the cybercafe.

Since joining BRESE in October 2002, Fred has concentrated on developing a research programme on Innovation, Risk & Environmental Sustainability with a focus on network theories of innovation and sustainable technology transitions. A new ESRC 2 year project in the Sustainable Technologies Programme has recently commenced in collaboration with Dr Anne Marie Coles & Dr Ruth McNally : Sustainable technology transition through innovation network reconfiguration - dematerialising the 'printed paper text'. This explores the prospects for transitions to sustainable technologies and uses innovation network analysis. It focuses on the environmental issues concerning the 'printed paper text' and the prospects for radical innovation arising from the generic technologies of information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology.

Fred Steward is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Innovation Management and of the journal Technology Analysis and Strategic Management and has been Chair of the ESRC postgraduate subject area panel on Science, technology and innovation studies. He has contributed to a range of academic journals including Organization, Nature, International Journal of Innovation Management, Journal of Applied Management Studies, International Journal of Technology Management. He is collaborating with Steve Conway in a book on innovation for Oxford University Press. He has had research links with China since 1987 and recently was an Expert member of a European Commission 'science & society' delegation to Beijing.