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 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, Aberystwyth University. 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 Nerys Owens 

Site: Cardiff
Contact details: Tel. 029 20 874970 - Email OwensNE@cardiff.ac.uk
Nerys joined the Observatory as a Research Associate in 2008 after completing a PhD in forestry governance at the School of City and Regional Planning at Cardiff University. Her doctoral thesis brings together key ideas on social nature, governance and regulation to provide a critical investigation of the shifting governance of forestry in the UK, with specific reference to two case study forests in rural mid-Wales. As a CASE award holder funded by the ESRC and the Forestry Commission, she has carried out research addressing both policy and academic audiences. Recent work has engaged with a broad range of rural themes, including the challenges of service provision in ‘deep rural' Wales, poverty and social exclusion, housing, renewable energy, and more recently, the impacts of the recession in rural Wales. She has direct experience in the design and delivery of rural policies and processes, gained during a period working within the Rural Affairs Division of the Welsh Assembly Government. From this, she developed a keen interest in issues relating to sustainable communities, in particular how local rural communities can be supported to fully engage with, and participate in, decisions affecting their localities. Her knowledge of developments in policy and social issues is therefore extensive and up to date, enabling her to work effectively in policy-oriented research.
Nerys is a fluent Welsh speaker.

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.