Our staff

Staff categories

These are our Birkbeck staff categories within the Department of Geography.

William Ackah, Lecturer in Community and Voluntary Sector Studies
Andrea Ballatore, Lecturer in Geographic Information Science
Kezia Barker, Lecturer in Science and Environmental Studies
Joana Barros, Senior Lecturer in Geographic Information Science
Becky Briant, Reader in Quaternary Science
Sue Brooks, Professor in Coastal Geoscience
Rosie Cox, Professor of Human Geography
Paul Elsner, Lecturer in Physical Geography and Geographic Information Science
Stefan Engels, Lecturer in Physical Geography
Aideen Foley, Lecturer in Physical and Environmental Geography
Jasmine Gideon, Senior Lecturer in Development Studies
Ella Harris, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Urban/Cultural Geography
Mara Nogueira, Lecturer in Urban Geography
Simon Pooley, Lambert Lecturer in Environment (Applied Herpetology)
Tarek Qureshi, Associate Lecturer in Social Science
Olivia Sheringham, Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography
Shino Shiode, Senior Lecturer in Geographic Information Science
Penny Vera-Sanso, Senior Lecturer in Development Studies and Social Anthropology
Paul Watt, Professor of Urban Studies
Karen Wells, Professor of Human Geography
Kalpana Wilson, Lecturer in Geography

Jo Abbess is a published author on the topic of Renewable Gas, having started to ask the question about what can be done to decarbonise gas whilst a Climate Change Management MSc student at Birkbeck. Jo is now working on a second book on Renewable Gas around the demands of her full-time online tutoring in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and English.
Read Jo's blog

Harry studied at the City of Liverpool College of Higher Education for a degree in physical geography and geology awarded by Lancaster University in 1981. In 1999 he was awarded a PhD by Anglia Polytechnic University for a thesis on Sedimentological, Palaeogeographical and Stratigraphical Aspects of the Middle Pleistocene Geology of the Peterborough Area. His research interests are fluvial and glacial sedimentology, British Pleistocene history and stratigraphy, and Pleistocene history of the Peterborough area. He currently leads a multidisciplinary project on producing a long terrestrial fluvial record of the past 200,000 years based on Quaternary deposits at Whittlesey, near Peterborough.

Dr Ismael Al Ameri’s research focuses on climate change, paleoclimate, paleoenvironment, arid regions and biodiversity. His Honorary Research Fellowship started with an Iraqi Government award in 2017-2018, before which he was a lecturer in applied climatology at the University of Baghdad, Iraq (2012-2016). He has a BA (Hons) in Geography ranked 1 out of 208 graduated students (2001), MA in Physical Geography (2005), and PhD in Physical Geography (2012) all from the University of Baghdad and was a visiting student at Dalhousie University, Canada in 2010. Ismael has on Mesopotamian paleoclimate, paleoenvironment, paleo shorelines, and marshes and modern climatology.

Dr Girma Shimelis Muluneh has a PhD degree in Education Policy and Leadership from Bahir Dar University. He has nearly 12 years of experience in GOs and NGOs; currently, he is working at Partners in Education Ethiopia (Canadian NGO) as senior education specialist. So far, Dr Girma has published five articles and two book chapters alone and with his colleagues. His works include: “Building a change adaptive university: A system of composite indicators to measure and facilitate pervasive changes” and “Leading Changes through Adaptive Design: Change Management Practice in One of the Universities in a Developing Nation”.

John graduated from LSE in 1966. His first job was as a Research Officer at the Royal Commission on Local Government in England. Following a period teaching at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario he returned to LSE to work on his PhD joining the Department of Geography at Birkbeck in 1975. John’s teaching and research was in the field of applied human geography including in urban and regional planning and environmental policy. From 1985 to 2004 he directed the ESRC core funded South East Regional Research Laboratory which was established to demonstrate the role of Geographic Information Systems in applied research. From 2004 to 2009 he led Defra’s Rural Evidence Research Centre which developed the evidence base for important aspects of rural policy in England. Among the major achievements of the RERC was a new and much emulated definition of rurality, the spatial modelling of rural project funding and studies of the social and economic geography of small towns. John retired from Birkbeck in 2015 but continues his personal research on social enterprise in rural areas. He is a member of Defra’s Rural Academic Panel. Among his publications is a curious book entitled Postcodes the New Geography.