Early Career Researchers
Brunel has made particular efforts to recruit and retain Early Career Researchers (ECRs - members of staff in the first three years of their academic career) as part of our long-term research strategy to create and sustain a solid research foundation over the long-term.
In the 2008 RAE 21% of our submitted staff qualified as ECRs, a sector-leading percentage. Half of the staff submitted into the Art and Design and Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences UoAs fell into this category.
Dr Lorna Lines
Dr Lorna Lines is responsible for Enterprise and Workplace Learning and Development for the School of Information Systems, Computing, and Mathematics. Her background is in Psychology and Human Computer Interaction.
“My research is focused on the design and development of innovative, multimodal system interfaces for older adults to support and maintain independent living.
I joined Brunel in September 2000 as a full-time researcher and part-time PhD student, contributing to the multimodal-user interface design for the Millennium Home Project, which is led by Professor Heinz Wolff. The design is for an interactive domestic alarm system for elderly individuals wanting to maintain an independent lifestyle.
On completion of the Millennium Home Project, I was appointed as a lecturer in Information Systems and Computing (I successfully submitted my PhD thesis the following month). Now, I am co-investigator on the EU (FP6) DIADEM project, which aims to enable older adults to access government and commercial services, while supporting independent living. I am involved in co-ordinating and designing trials that directly inform the interface design for an assistive web-based technology that facilitates older adults’ interaction with online forms.”
Dr Emma Wainwright
Emma Wainwright joined Brunel University as a research officer in 2003 and is now a lecturer in the Centre for Human Geography within the School of Sport and Education.
"The support I have received from my colleagues in Human Geography has been second-to-none. There is a strong research ethic here and we have a process of internal peer-review for all our research proposals prior to submission, which works extremely well. Sharing best (and worst!) practice helps us all to submit the highest quality research possible. Brunel’s Research Support and Development Office also contributes to a sustainable research environment at the University by providing useful, practical advice that helps early career researchers like me to ensure that they tick all the right boxes when submitting research.
My research has focused on the gendered geographies of education and training through a critique of the government’s widening participation agenda and neoliberal welfare-to-work policies. Research projects have included Meanings of work, learning and motherhood in family learning (funded by the British Academy), an evaluation of the learning needs and experiences of university students with dependent children (funded by Brunel University’s Learning and Teaching Development Unit) and The body-training choices, expectations and experiences of mothers in the West London area (funded by the ESRC First Grants scheme).
This latter ongoing project has three keys aims. First, to question how and why many mothers are making the decision to enter a narrow remit of training options that focus on the body and the care of others, and the range of choices current policy provides them with. Second, to explore how mothers negotiate the embodiedness and emotional demands of their training. And third, their expectations for future work, notably often gender-stereotyped and low-paid employment.”
Dr Antoaneta Serguieva
Antoaneta Serguieva joined Brunel in 2005 as a lecturer in Management Science, having carried out postdoctoral research on intelligent systems in cognitive analysis, funded by the EPSRC. She is also a member of the Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Optimisation Modelling Applications and the Centre for Empirical Finance.
Dr Serguieva’s main research interests are in the area of risk assessment and decision analysis in complex systems. Her work is particularly focused on hybrid approaches to the representation, fusion and processing of information from different sources characterised by variations in reliability and imprecision; risk analysis incorporating quantitative data and behavioural information; perception based decision analysis in finance and management; and intelligent decision support systems.
She is currently supervising a project on operational risk analysis for financial institutions, supported by the EPSRC and co-funded by Barclays. She has supervised four PhD students, and the first of whom has just completed successfully.
Dr Serguieva has published over 45 conference and journal articles, working papers and EPSRC deliverables. She is guest editing a special issue on Risk Analysis in Complex Systems for the Wiley journal of Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance and Management and has also organised and co-chaired a special session on Computational Risk Analysis at the 5th International Conference on Computational Management Science at Imperial College.
Dr Serguieva is building an international profile as vice-chair of the special interest group in Decision Analysis and Support associated with the Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing, as well as a member of the review panel for eleven journals in the area of decision sciences. She is member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, the North England Complex Systems Institute (US), and the British Academy of Management.
