The Role of Social Sciences in Nitrogen Research

Roger Jeffery

Professor

The University of Edinburgh

Professor Roger Jeffery has conducted a variety of research projects in India and elsewhere in South Asia, including research in village and small-town north India looking at how religious group membership and caste interrelate with childbearing, fertility behaviour, gender politics and schooling, in the context of agrarian change and the decline of the state. From 1996-1999 he was PI on a research project investigating Joint Forest Management in four Indian states. Since 2012 he has been involved in a series of projects on contemporary issues in public health in India and elsewhere. He has recently extended his research interests to include (a) environmental policy-making in South Asia; (b) the effects of India on Edinburgh, and more broadly, on Scotland, in the long 19th century, and the implications for contemporary Scottish society, culture and politics. He was Dean International for South Asia from 2011-2015. He is Co-lead of Research Programme 1 and of Work Package 1.1 for the GCRF UKRI South Asia Nitrogen Hub (SANH) project.

Anastasia Yang

Senior research fellow

The University of Edinburgh

Dr Anastasia Yang (Annie) is a senior research fellow at the University of Edinburgh based in the School of Social and Political Science and is a member of the Centre for Sustainable Forests and Landscapes. Her interdisciplinary research interests and expertise are on policy, people and the environment, more socio-ecological systems. She is a project member of the UKRI GCRF project South Asian Nitrogen Hub (SANH) and has a co-leading role in work Package 1.1. Her role is to evaluate nitrogen relevant policies and stakeholders in South Asia to identify progress and barriers across different scales to inform future policy choices. Annie’s research has often centred on forested landscapes in the tropics and in the Scotland, she was involved in the Climate KIC ForLand project, aimed at developing and testing participatory processes to improve forest restoration, she also conducted a review of Scottish forest policy as an academic fellow with Scottish Parliament. Annie previously worked for the Centre of International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Indonesia, and the Thünen Institute of International Forestry in Hamburg as a senior scientist examining community forest values and policy approaches for improving livelihoods and sustainable tropical forest management.

Smriti Das

Associate Professor

TERI-SAS

Dr. Smriti Das is an Associate Professor in the Department of Policy Studies at TERI-SAS. Her research and scholarship are focused on areas at the interface of environment and development at local and regional scale. She specifically engages with topics such as environmental policy, processes and politics, forest policy and governance, institutional analysis, sustainable livelihoods and communities, decentralized governance, gender and resource politics. Her research is mostly interdisciplinary but for exploring some pertinent community questions, she uses ethnographic, historical and sociological methods. She also uses participatory methods in her research with the tribal and other marginalized communities. Some of her recently completed studies look at the land-water-community nexus in the mid-Ganga basin using a landscape approach; implementation of SDGs in the context of Delhi with specific reference to health and water and sanitation issues. With her doctoral researchers, she is exploring a range of topics such as gender and forest governance; unpacking of the concept of community in forest governance; mainstreaming climate change in local governance and planning. She has been tracking the implementation of the Forest Rights Act (2006) in India, from resource and institutional sustainability perspective. Dr. Das has taught courses such as public policy processes and politics, governance of natural resources, social research methods. Dr Das is also a project member of the UKRI GCRF project GCRF UKRI South Asian Nitrogen Hub (SANH), and leads a team on the nitrogen stakeholder analysis research component.

Andrea Moring

Post-doctoral Research Assistant

The University of Edinburgh

Andi Móring studied meteorology MSc at the Eötvös Loránt Univerity, Budapest Hungary, then did a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Currently, she is a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Edinburgh. She has had a strong interest in atmospheric and environmental chemistry, with a special focus on modelling of ammonia emission from agricultural sources.

She is doing her postdoc within the framework of the NEWS India-UK Virtual Centre, of which she is the main coordinator. In 2017, she led the coordination of the conference and workshop on “Challenges and Opportunities for Agricultural Nitrogen Science in India”.

Andi is a keen science communicator. She won the Best Presentation Award in 2013 at the GeoSciences Postgraduate Research Conference, and in 2014 she was the runner-up at the university-wide final of the “Three Minute Thesis” competition at the University of Edinburgh. She also won the Best Poster Award at the Open Science Conference of the European Union ÉCLAIRE project at Budapest.