Work with thought leaders and academic experts from University of Bristol

Dr. Samir Sweida-Metwally is a Postdoctoral Associate at New York University Abu Dhabi. He holds a PhD in Advanced Quantitative Methods from the University of Bristol (funded by the UK Economic Social and Research Council), an MSc in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford (funded by the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies), an MSc in Political Theory from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and a BSc (Hons) in Economics from Brunel University. Dr. Sweida-Metwally has also pursued (and continues to pursue) formal education in the traditional Islamic sciences, equipping him with authentic knowledge of Islam rooted in classical Islamic scholarship. He is trilingual in English, Arabic and French. As a quantitative social scientist, Dr. Sweida-Metwally focuses his research on labor markets and workplace dynamics. His work specifically centers on measuring job quality, investigating ethno-religious disparities therein, and exploring barriers to employment access. Dr. Sweida-Metwally also examines Islamophobia in the workplace, studying employer attitudes towards religious accommodation. Additionally, his research addresses workplace bullying, emphasizing how racial factors influence its disclosure and impact on employees. As an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in political theory, Dr. Sweida-Metwally's research is also of a theoretical nature, advancing ideas around the conceptualization of Islamophobia. His research has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, and has been ranked in the top 2% of all research outputs scored by Altmetrics. Dr. Sweida-Metwally has been interviewed on TV about his research, which has also garnered significant attention from international media outlets, including The Guardian in the UK and The National in the UAE. Prior to joining academia, Dr. Sweida-Metwally worked in the private sector in the UK and the UAE. Combined, he has over 10 years of strategic advisory and research experience. This includes advising senior government stakeholders, and offering C-Suite strategic guidance to Dubai-headquartered multinational corporations. Dr. Sweida-Metwally's integration of mainstream education and training in the traditional Islamic sciences, combined with his private sector strategic advisory experience, uniquely positions him to offer valuable insights and cross-cultural competence crucial for expert advisory roles on Islamophobia in the workplace. For further details, including publications, work in progress and media coverage of my work, please visit my website here: https://www.sweida-metwally.com/bio

Katie Barr is a bioinformatician with a strong background in computer science. She received her Ph.D in Quantum Information from the University of Leeds in 2013. She also holds an MSc in Mathematical logic and the theory of computation from the University of Manchester, and a BSc in Physics and Philosophy with study in Continental Europe from the University of Bristol. Katie has extensive experience working in the fields of bioinformatics and software development. She has worked as a scientific programmer at the Earlham Institute, a postdoctoral bioinformatician in the Nanomedicine group at the University of Manchester, and is now an Associate Principal Scientist in Bioinformatics at Kromek. Katie is passionate about using her knowledge and skills to improve the lives of others and she is dedicated to the advancement of science and technology. She believes in the power of collaboration and works to create meaningful partnerships between industry and academia.

Dr. Justin P. Whalley was educated in the UK (M.Sci. Mathematics, University of Bristol) and France (Ph.D. Bioinformatics, University of Évry). He moved to Spain to work as a postdoc at the National Center for Genomic Analysis (CNAG). During his time there, he ran the Quality Control working group for the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project to assess the data coming in and reduce batch effects. This involved collaboration with researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the German Cancer Research Center and the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK. He returned to the UK to work as a [Senior Bioinformatician at the University of Oxford](https://www.well.ox.ac.uk/people/jpw/). His time there coincided with the global pandemic and he was deeply involved in the COvid-19 Multi-omics Blood ATlas (COMBAT) consortium as the lead for the Integration (Tensor) working group. Dr. Whalley became a member of the [faculty of the Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science](https://www.rosalindfranklin.edu/academics/faculty/justin-p-whalley/) in January 2023.

Hello, my name is Aidan Scannell and I am a postdoctoral researcher with interests at the intersection of machine learning, sequential decision making and robotics. My research aims at enabling autonomous agents to learn behaviours, such that they can learn to solve any task. I am particularly interested in controlling agents with natural language instructions and the challenges associated with developing a robotic foundation model which can generalise across tasks, objects and embodiments. I am a [Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence](https://fcai.fi/) postdoctoral researcher at [Aalto University](https://www.aalto.fi/en) in Joni Pajarinen’s [Robot Learning Lab](https://rl.aalto.fi/) and Arno Solin’s [Machine Learning Research Group](https://users.aalto.fi/~asolin/group/). I obtained my PhD from the [University of Bristol](https://www.bristol.ac.uk/) under the supervision of Arthur Richards and Carl Henrik Ek. During my PhD I developed methods for controlling quadcopters in uncertain environments by synergising methods from probabilistic machine learning, stochastic differential geometry and reinforcement learning.