Download New Staff January 2009

THE ERI
WELCOMES…
Anoop Singh
Anoop is from Kanpur in India and holds a Doctoral Degree from
AAIDU, Allahabad, India in Botany and a Masters in Environmental
Sciences from GBPUAT, Pantnagar, India. He is currently a Post
Doctoral Researcher in the Biofuels Research Group, Civil and
Environmental Engineering department working on compressed
biomethane generated from grass, utilized as a transport biofuel, EPA
funded project.
He has published 40 papers in National and International journals such as Energy and Fuels, Resources
Conservation and Recycling, Environmental Pollution, Chemosphere, etc. Earlier he worked at The
Energy and Resources Institute, New Delhi, India; Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi,
India; Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India and VBS Purvanchal University, Jaunpur, India. His
research interests are utilization of industrial, agricultural and household waste for sustainable and
ecofriendly energy production and their life cycle analysis.
Burkhardt Flemer
Burkhardt is from Berlin, Germany. He completed a diploma in
Biotechnology at the Technische Fachhochschule Berlin and prepared
his diploma thesis at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute in Bremerhaven.
The topic was “Assessing the diverse microbial ecology of sea ice in
eastern Antarctica”. Burkhardt has spent some time during his studies
working with marine related topics in Australia and Berlin, which is
due to his personal interest in marine environments. That is why
Burkhardt enjoys diving so much and will soon be found in Irish waters . Burkhardt just became father
to a little boy who is now six months old. Together with his family he loves to travel around.
Erin O’ Rourke
As an Environmental Protection Agency funded student Erin has
recently joined Dr. Mark Emmerson’s Biodiversity Group in the ERI
and is now at the initial stage of a Ph.D which is to examine “the
impacts of long and short term bioenergy crops on the biodiversity and
biological pest control potential of ground predators at differing
agricultural intensifications in the landscape”.
This Ph.D is one part of a larger research group called SIMBIOSYS (Sectoral IMpacts on BIOdiversity
and ecoSYStem services). SIMBIOSYS began in April 2008 and involves multi-disciplinary research
across three Irish research institutions: Trinity College Dublin (TCD), University College Cork (UCC),
& University College Dublin (UCD).
Erin is supervised by Dr. Mark Emmerson and Dr. Padraig Whelen, Department of Zoology, Ecology
and Plant Science.
Created on 23/01/09
Joern Ploennigs
Joern studied Electrical Engineering in Dresden, Germany out of
family tradition and found it less energetic than the name suggests.
Thus, he changed to Applied Computer Science and finished his PhD
last year on the topic of quality-oriented network design. He worked in
the area of network performance engineering, fault analysis, and
component-based design for building automation networks and
wireless sensor networks. He is now on a Feodor-Lynen fellowship of
the Humboldt-Foundation at UCC working in the Strategic Research Cluster ITOBO for a year. He
came to Cork to change his habit of going out to pubs and spend more time with reading and writing, but
while the weather supports staying inside his broken heating at home forces him to go out.
John Benzie
Professor John Benzie gained his BSc HON in Zoology from Aberdeen
University (Scotland) in 1978, and his PhD in Genetics from
Australian National University in 1986. He joined the Environmental
Research Institute as the SIF Professor of Marine Molecular
Biodiversity in November 2008. His work has focused on the
application of genetics to taxonomic, conservation, ecological and
evolutionary problems in terrestrial, freshwater and marine systems
and in the development of marine biotechnologies including aquaculture. This research has included
fieldwork in Africa, Asia and throughout the Indo-west Pacific region and the Great Barrier Reef
including work on a variety of invertebrates and fish. His work in aquaculture has focused on
reproduction, genetic improvement and genomics of shrimp and bivalves. He led the aquaculture and
molecular genetics programs for the Australian Institute of Marine Science (Australian Federal
Government) from 1988-2000; genetic improvement and reproduction programs in the Australian
Cooperative Research Centre for Aquaculture 1995-2000; was Professor and Director of the Centre for
Marine and Coastal Studies of the University of New South Wales 2000-2003 and Chief Scientist for a
multinational shrimp breeding company (Moana Group) 2003-2008.
Padraig Whelan
Pádraig is a Lecturer in the Department of Zoology, Ecology and Plant
Science and is a PI on the EPA-STRIVE funded SIMBIOSYS project
on the Sectoral Impacts on Biodiversity. His area of research is on
ecology with particular emphasis applied aspects of biodiversity
conservation (including alien species biology and management) and
has worked in this field in the Galapagos Islands (Ecuador), the eastern
Amazon (Brazil) and a number of protected areas in Ireland. He
currently supervises postgraduates carrying out research into: biodiversity management in 3 Irish
National Parks; sustainable road landscaping practices as an aid to biodiversity conservation using native
species; waste water treatment using plants, seagrass (Zostera) communities and soil moisture
determination. Padraig also speaks fluent Spanish and have a working knowledge of Portuguese. He has
found that other researchers have found his languages to be useful when it comes to developing contacts
with other institutions or checking technical stuff - most translators don’t have biology.
Zuzana Škrabáková
Zuzana is from Slovakia, where she graduated from Slovak Technical
University in Bratislava with BSc. from Chemistry and Masters from
Chemistry. Her current position is a researcher in PROTEOBIO (Mass
Spectrometry Centre for Proteomics and Biotoxin Research) in CIT
and her PhD project is based on Mass fragmentation pathways of
phycotoxins and food contaminants.
Created on 23/01/09