The Wales Rural Observatory has a core research and management team of seven leading rural researchers drawn from the academic staff of the School of City and Regional Planning at Cardiff University and the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. In addition, it employs five full time research staff. Brief details of the research specialisms of Rural Observatory staff, together with contact details, are provided below:

Director

Professor Paul Milbourne
Site: Cardiff
Contact details: Tel. 029 20 875791 - Email milbournep@cardiff.ac.uk
Paul Milbourne is a Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University and Director of the University’s Rural Environment and Society Research Centre. His research specialisms include rural social exclusion, housing and homelessness in rural areas, social change and conflict in the countryside, and the rural environment. He is the Chair of the ESRC funded Rural Economy and Society Study Group (which brings together academic, policy and practitioner communities with an interest in rural areas), a member of the Executive Committee of the European Society for Rural Sociology, and an Editorial Board member of the journal Sociologia Ruralis. Paul has been awarded grants and contracts totalling £2 million to undertake research on a broad range of rural topics including poverty and social exclusion, housing, homelessness, young people, hunting, social forestry, in-migration and service provision. He has also written widely on these topics and has published five books and more than 70 journal articles, chapters and reports.

Core Research Team Members

Professor Terry Marsden
Site: Cardiff
Contact details: Tel. 029 20 875736 - Email marsdentk@cardiff.ac.uk
Terry Marsden is Professor of Environmental Planning and Policy in the School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University. He has a broad range of research and policy experience based around the themes of international rural development, sustainability and the rural environment. Terry Marsden is currently co-director of a major ESRC-funded research centre (£3.1 million) on sustainability at Cardiff University (Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society) and is involved in funded projects concerning food networks in rural areas, the multi-level governance of the rural environment, and intermediate labour markets in rural Wales. In addition to being the author of more than 150 reports, books and articles on these themes, he has acted as an advisor to the Welsh Assembly Government, Defra, the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and ESRC on rural research and policy. He is currently a member of the Strategic Advisory Committee of the ESRC’s Rural Economy and Land Use Research Programme.

Dr Sean White
Site: Cardiff
Contact details: Tel. 029 20 876015 - Email whitesd@cardiff.ac.uk
Sean White is a Lecturer in GIS and Spatial Analysis in the School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University. He is a specialist in GIS and the analysis of large data-sets, and has been involved in a number of major research projects that have provided detailed spatial analyses of national data-sets. For example, he was a member of the research team that developed the national spatial planning framework for Wales. Sean White has also applied his GIS skills to the study of rural services and has recently completed work on GIS-based accessibility indices for measures of rural disadvantage, spatial planning responses to peripherality, and the use of GIS in analysing the delivery of primary healthcare in rural Wales. He is a manager of the GIS laboratory located at Cardiff.

Dr Michael Woods
Site: Aberystwyth
Contact details: Tel. 01970 622589 - Email zzp@aber.ac.uk
Michael Woods is a Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has specialist expertise on rural policy, community governance, partnership working and regeneration, and participation and community leadership. He was co-director of the recently completed research study on the ‘Role, Functions and Future Potential of Community and Town Councils in Wales’ undertaken for the Welsh Assembly Government. His previous research includes work on participation in community leadership in England and Wales for the ESRC and on partnership working in rural regeneration in Mid Wales for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. He has written widely on these topics for both academic and practitioner audiences and has provided advice for Defra and the Countryside Agency on the introduction of the Quality Parish Council scheme in England. He is author of two books, Rural Geography (Sage) and Contesting Rurality: Contemporary politics in the British countryside (Ashgate).

Research Associates

Dr Lawrence Kitchen
Site: Cardiff
Contact details: Tel. 029 20 874970 - Email kitchenl@cardiff.ac.uk
Lawrence Kitchen is a Research Associate in the School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University. His research specialisms and interests include social forestry, particularly in the context of environmental justice, social exclusion, governance, intermediate labour markets, spatial planning, and social capital. He has worked on research projects concerned with rural food chains; relations between the Forestry Commission and communities in South Wales; the connections between environment and social exclusion in the post-industrial countryside; the evaluation of rural Intermediate Labour Markets; spatial planning and the Forestry Commission in Wales; and social capital and Forestry Commission projects in Wales. Lawrence is the author and co-author of a number of papers, book chapters and published reports on these topics.

Dr Kate Moles
Site: Cardiff
Contact Details: Tel. 029 20 874970– Email molesk@cardiff.ac.uk
Kate Moles is a Research Associate in the School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University. Her research interests include culture, place and identity; nature-society relations; socio-cultural construction of ideas and place; and landscapes of postcolonialism and liminality.

GIS Associate

Jonathan Radcliffe
Site: Cardiff
Contact details: Tel. 029 20 874970 - Email radcliffej@cardiff.ac.uk
Jonathan is a research associate at Cardiff University with a specialism in GIS. He has experience in using a range of the latest GIS software, to solve a wide variety of geographic problems, and has experience in maintaining spatial datasets.