Speakers 2018

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Deborah Hardoon is the new Head of Evidence at the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, where is responsible for leading the centre's research on what works to improve people's wellbeing in the UK and how governments, businesses and the charity sector can use the evidence on what works to lead to better wellbeing outcomes. Previously she was the Deputy Head of Research at Oxfam, where she led the organisation's research on global economic inequality and authored several high profile reports which drew attention to extreme inequality and its structural divers. She has worked as an economic planner for the government of Lesotho and as a commercial analyst at BP. Deborah has an MA in Economics from the University of British Columbia.

Miriam Kennet

Miriam Kennet has been a champion of green economics as a challenge to the mainstream orthodoxy in economics. Her work has made green economics a robust academic discipline that is gaining ground globally and in the corridors of power as the best alternative to solving climate change. Miriam has taught and lectured at a number of institutions, including the universities of Oxford, Oxford Brookes, Bath, Cambridge and Frankfurt. She has founded both the Green Economics Institute and the International Journal of Green Economics. Her impressive work got Kennet nominated as one of One World Action's 100 Most Powerful Women.

Danielle Kayembe

Danielle is a female futurist and serial entrepreneur who works on projects at the intersection of women, tech and social impact. Through her company GreyFire, she advises female founders on scaling their businesses and raising capital, and connects companies to ecosystems of underrepresented founders. Danielle was a founding partner in Tour of Tech: Lagos, an initiative to bring investors from Silicon Valley (TechStars, 500 Startups, Wingpact) to tour growing tech hubs in Africa. Danielle is an advisor to social impact startups and a mentor to Columbia University’s business accelerator, she has lectured at Yale School of Management and Barnard College's Athena Program. She is a frequent speaker on topics related to women, social impact, technology and Africa on CNBC, at the United Nations, TEDx, Google, General Assembly and other events, and has been featured in Forbes and Refinery29. She is also the author of "The Silent Rise of the Female-Driven Economy" a white paper on women and the future of business and innovation.

Miguel Ampudia

Miguel Ampudia is an economist in the Financial Research Division of the European Central Bank. He obtained a Ph. D. in Economics from Boston University and a B. Sc. in Business Administration for the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. His research interests cover household finance, financial markets and financial institutions.

His research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, such as the European Economic Review, Management Science and the Journal of Financial Stability, among others.

James Dyke

Dr James Dyke FRSA is an academic, writer, and public speaker based in Southampton, UK where he works as Associate Professor in Sustainability Science at the University of Southampton. James’ previous research on astrobiology and planetary evolution lead to his current interests in exploring how humans interact with the Earth and how such interactions will affect humans now and potentially far into the future.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the European Geophysical Union and serves on the editorial board of the journal Earth System Dynamics. He has (co)authored over 30 peer-reviewed science papers and book chapters, and is a contributor to The Guardian, The Ecologist, The Conversation and many other publications.

James works with community groups and local government authorities via Climate Conversations which he founded to help facilitate discussions on how cities can transition to low carbon and healthy places to live.

Doreen Grove

Doreen Grove works mainly on the Economy of Well-Being. She leads the Scottish Government’s involvement in the Open Government Partnership at both a National and International level. Globally, Open Government is driving changes that ensure people are able to see, understand and influence the decisions that affect their lives and are able to hold government to account. In Scotland, this work supports the reform of public services, the renewal of democracy, promotes openness, transparency and the use of innovative participative processes to help transform how people interact with public services.
Before working in Ingage, she previously worked in the Strategy Unit during the extraordinary times of 2013-14. This involved a range of projects including the development of the Scottish Approach, (something which continues to underpin the reform work of Ingage). As an Archaeologist and Historian, Doreen worked for 25 years in Historic Scotland – moving into government at a time when that understanding of our past made so much sense as we thought about the impact of constitutional change and public service reform.
Supporting the work to help develop Wellbeing Economy Alliance in Scotland seemed like an obvious extension of her experience, it is a vital movement to collectively build a sustainable future that values the wellbeing of all of the people living in Scotland.
To paraphrase ‘It is not just the economy stupid’.

Christina Gathmann

Christina Gathmann is Professor of Economics at the University of Heidelberg. She is also affiliated with the IZA (Institute for the Study of Labor), the ZEW (Center for European Economic Research) and the CESifo institute. Christina Gathmann obtained her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2004, held a postdoc position at Stanford University and was a Hoover National Fellow in 2006–07.

Her research focuses on public economics, labor economics, policy evaluation, migration and political economy. Within these areas, she is particularly interested in the production and depreciation of human capital and its impact on turnover, wages, inequality and unemployment; and the effects of political institutions and labor market policies. She has developed, for example, new methods to quantify human capital in the labour market and studied the effects of social policies on population health, employment and wages. In her work on political economy, she has analysed the effects of direct democracy and the electoral system on public spending and fiscal policy.

Theodore Koutmeridis

Dr Theodore Koutmeridis is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow, where he co-ordinates the "Behaviour, Structure and Interventions" interdisciplinary research network. He holds a PhD in Economics from Warwick University where he was a Royal Economic Society Junior Fellow and an Onassis Scholar.

His work on economic inequality and crime has been recognised with various awards, such as the Sir Alec Cairncross Prize in Economics, the 1st Prize of the European Science Days Interdisciplinary Award, the British Academy Rising Star Award, and has been featured in the media and various symposia, such as his TEDx talk on "The Underground Economy". His work has been awarded grants for research, teaching, impact and engagement, and more recently an ESRC-DFID grant for fieldwork in underdeveloped Indian schools (£700,000, 2018-21). As a Member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh's Young Academy he has contributed to the "RSE/YAS Brexit Report". He is also affiliated with the Institute of Labor Economics IZA and he has recently been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University.

Dr Koutmeridis is the recipient of the 2018 RSE Henry Duncan Medal, which according to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he has been awarded "for his outstanding work in the field of economics where he combines a clear mastery of the microeconomic methodology, a keen instinct for its empirical applications and a deep commitment to engagement activities."

Keith Bender

Keith Bender is SIRE Chair in Economics at the University of Aberdeen. He specialises in labour economics and applied microeconomics. In addition to working at the Unversity of Aberdeen, he has held previous positions at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the US Social Security Administration, as well as visiting positions at Louisiana State University, University of Potsdam, Giessen University and the National Institute for Labour Studies at Flinders University in Australia.
Professor Bender's research interests include Labour Economics, Economics of Ageing, Subjective Well-being and Health Economics.

Tatja Karkkainen

Tatja is a current PhD research student at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, with a CoSS Scholarship. Her current study areas are in cryptocurrency research applying economic theories and critical analysis. She has many years of experience in working in finance, IT and also in social sciences research. She has sat on the panels about financial technology and she is member of Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst London chapter's event executive committee. She is also acts as an adviser to a board for companies. She is Finnish national and speaks a few European languages.

Neil McInroy

Currently the Chief Executive of CLES (Centre for Local Economic Strategies), McInroy is a leading commentator on economic development and public policy. He is passionate about achieving social justice and economies that work for all.

Neil has featured in Local Government Chronicle’s annual top 50 most influential people in local government, and he has been involved in public sector policy and delivery for over 25 years. He has collaborated with a wide range of local, regional and national governments all around the world and is an expert on strategic policy, local economic and social research, progressive commissioning, and social justice.

Sanna Ojanperä

Sanna is a researcher and doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford and at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. She is a Future of Work Fellow with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the lead author of a recent report on the future of work published by The Alan Turing Institute. Sanna's doctoral research investigates the relationship between accessing work through online platforms and informality, and how these practices impact inequality, social exclusion, well-being, productivity and economic complexity. She also co-convenes the Data and Inequality Interest Group at the Alan Turing Institute and through her research in the Digital Inequality Research Group at the University of Oxford endeavours to understand what development is and could be in the era of ever increasing data and computing abilities.

Paul Cockshott

William Paul Cockshott is a computer scientist and political economist. Currently a reader at the University of Glasgow, he works on value theory, planning theory and the econophysics models of production and money. He has made significant contributions to the application of computational complexity to the theory of economic planning and to the empirical verification of Ricardian labour value theory. Dr. Cockshott is the co-author of the book Towards a New Socialism, and has advocated for more efficient and democratic planning of a complex economy. His more recent books include Computation and its Limits, Classical Econophysics and Arguments for Socialism. In computing, he is also known for work on 3D imaging, the limits of computability, electronic voting and various other things.
Cockshott earned a BA in Economics (1974) from Manchester University, an MSc (1976) in Computer Science from Heriot Watt University and a PhD in Computer Science from Edinburgh University (1982).