People

Dr. David Robbins, Director

Dave is an assistant professor in the School of Communications at DCU.

His research examines media coverage of climate change, and the intersection of the press, politics and policy.

His work examines framing effects, journalism practice and the sociology of journalism. He is a co-editor of Ireland and the Climate Crisis (Palgrave, 2020), and author of Climate Change, the Press and Politics in Ireland (Routledge, 2019), and his work has appeared in Environmental Communication, Journalism Studies, and The Sage Encyclopedia of Journalism.

Dave worked as a reporter, columnist and editor in the Irish national print and broadcast media for 25 years before joining DCU. He is chair of the Sustainability Network of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.

Dr. Diarmuid Torney, Co-Director

Diarmuid is an associate professor in the School of Law and Government at DCU.

His research focuses on comparative and global politics of climate change, environment, and energy.

He is Principal Investigator on two research projects funded by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency: Irish Climate Policy Evaluation and Citizens' Climate.

Diarmuid is the author of European Climate Leadership in Question: Policies toward China and India (MIT Press, 2015) and co-editor of European Union External Environmental Policy: Rules, Regulation and Governance Beyond Borders (Palgrave, 2018).

His research has also appeared in leading international peer reviewed academic journals, including Energy Policy, Environmental Politics, Global Environmental Politics, Journal of Common Market Studies, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics.

Prof. Pat Brereton, Co-Director

Pat is an eminent scholar of eco-cinema and other cultural responses to the environment.

He is the author of Environmental Literacy and New Digital Audiences (Routledge, 2019), and Environmental Ethics and Film (Routledge, 2015), as well as many other journal articles and book chapters.

Pat worked as project engineer with Ericsson for four years, having left Ireland with an Arts degree. He then moved fulltime into Education working at Northampton College and Luton University - before moving back home to DCU.

Having progressed to Senior Lecturer and working as Associate Dean of Research for the Faculty, Pat became  Head of School of Communications. He is currently a Professor in the School and chairs the MSc in Climate Change: Policy, Media & Society.

Dr. Declan Fahy

Declan is Chair of the BA in Journalism in the School of Communications at DCU.

He is an associate professor who researches the public communication of science, health, environment and technology. His work also examines journalists and scientists who are influential public intellectuals, a topic he explored in his 2015 book, The New Celebrity Scientists: Out of the Lab and Into the Limelight.

He earned three degrees from DCU and joined the School of Communications in 2015 after spending five years as assistant professor at American University in Washington, D.C.

His recent journalism has appeared at Slate, The Washington Post, Scientific American, The Conversation, and Columbia Journalism Review.

He is currently on the editorial advisory board of Public Understanding of Science, the editorial board of Journal of Science and Popular Culture, and the editorial board of Environmental Communication. 

Dr. Trish Morgan

Trish is an assistant professor in the school of Communications at Dublin City University.

Her research is concerned with the systemic aspects of the environmental crisis, and the communication of these multiple environmental issues. She approaches the communication of environmental issues through an interdisciplinary perspective from the domains of geography and communications.

Her key research interest is in analysing the nature/society relationship through political economy, (urban) political ecology, human geography and environmental geography perspectives. This research takes a systemic approach by acknowledging environmental crisis as connected to nine planetary boundaries, and safe operating limits for society. She is interested in the urgency of communicating transition towards sustainability through novel communication approaches, doing this through traditional research and multimedia practice-based research.

Trish has completed (as PI) two EPA-funded research projects concerning the communication of environmental matters and the role of communications in behaviour change towards sustainability.

She has most recently completed the project Sensing our world: How digital media cultural practices can contribute to changing social norms around consumption (2020). This project focused on the role of novel forms of communicating environmental data. This follows on from a previous EPA-funded research project, titled Going Green Digitally? Environmental Crisis, Consumption Patterns and the Evolving Role of Media (2017). This project centred on mainstream media and their role in fostering discourse and behaviour change around consumption practices and ecological sustainability.

Dr. Dawn Wheatley

Dawn is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communications focusing on

journalism, political communication, and social media. She received her PhD in 2018 for her research into news coverage of Irish healthcare policy, with a particular emphasis on sources and voices, and how newsroom practices are established and reproduced.

Dawn worked as a production journalist for the Irish Daily Mail and the Irish Times before turning to research and teaching in DCU.

Her research has been published in communications journals such as New Media & Society, Digital Journalism, Journalism Practice, and Information, Communication & Society, and on RTÉ’s Brainstorm, and she teaches both practical and theoretical subjects to journalism students in the School.

Recent research work has looked at how environmental journalists operate and conceptualise their work, exploring themes around objectivity, science communication and journalistic roles.

Other areas of interest include mobile news dissemination, social media blocklists, and source use in contemporary news reporting. She is also involved in various international projects, working on the Irish contribution to the Worlds of Journalism study and co-ordinating the Irish data for the Global Media Monitoring Project.

Dr. Danny Marks

Danny is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Politics and Policy in the School of Law and Government of Dublin City University. Prior to this position, he was an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the Department of Asian and International Studies of City University of Hong Kong.

He also was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Urban Climate Resilience in Southeast Asia project at the Munk School of Global Affairs of the University of Toronto.

Danny has spent a number of years conducting research and working in Southeast Asia, particularly in the field of environmental governance.

He has worked for a number of organisations in the region, including the World Bank’s East Asia and Pacific Governance Hub, the Rockefeller Foundation, ActionAid and the NGO Forum on Cambodia.

His research interests are political ecology, environmental justice, climate governance, disaster risk reduction, with a focus on Southeast Asia.

Dr. Aideen O'Dochartaigh

Dr O’Dochartaigh joined the DCU Business School in September 2020 as Assistant Professor in Accounting.  Prior to this she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the UCD College of Business and the BiOrbic Bioeconomy Centre, specialising in sustainability accounting and responsible business.  She previously qualified as a chartered accountant, training in practice with Deloitte Ireland, and completed her PhD on sustainability accounting at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Her research projects include ongoing interdisciplinary work on sustainability networks and sustainability accounting at a multiple organisation level.  She has received research funding from the Irish Research Council (2015 GOI Postdoctoral Fellowship) and Chartered Accountants Ireland Educational Trust (CAIET) as co-PI on the project “Accounting and Reporting for Origin Green”. She is currently co-PI with colleagues in the School of Engineering, DCU, Paul Price and Prof. Barry McMullin, on the project “Carbon budgets to inform climate action: A society-wide, integrated GHG quota and accounting perspective”, funded by the Environmental Protection Agency.

She has worked in industry with Business in the Community Ireland, playing a key role in the initial development of their Leader Group initiative, which included the Low Carbon Pledge, launched in 2019.  With the Centre for Business and Society (CeBaS) in UCD she worked on numerous outreach initiatives in relation to responsible business and received the UCD College Research Impact Award (Postdoc) in 2019.

She serves on a pro bono basis on the An Taisce Climate Committee and works on a voluntary basis with several climate and social justice community groups and NGOs in Ireland.

Dr. Markus Pauli

Markus is a Lecturer in Political Science in the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University. He teaches modules on Public Policy Analysis and the Politics of Climate Change.

Dr Pauli has held positions in the Political Science Department at the National University of Singapore, Yale-NUS , Singapore Management University, and Heidelberg University, Germany.

His current research focuses on the political economy of  decarbonization in Europe and India. He uses experimental research methods to study international perceptions of global governance mechanisms. His earlier research projects focused on financial inclusion, microfinance and sustainable development in India as well as global food value chains in Southeast Asia.

He has co-authored work on India´s socio-economic development, democracy, citizenship, and human security. Other publications focus on financial inclusion and collaborative governance for the Sustainable Development Goals.

Dr. Darren Clarke

Darren is an environmental geographer with research interests in the social and governance aspects of climate change/environmental change and in environmental psychology.

His research has examined social, psychological and governance issues related to transformative climate change adaptation both nationally and internationally.

Prior to joining DCU he worked in the public sector as a Researcher with the Local Government Management Agency where he led the delivery of the first baseline assessment of the local government sector's climate actions in Ireland. This baseline is now being used to support the local government sector meet its climate change ambitions.

Darren also acted as the lead Irish researcher for an EU Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) Climate funded project between 2014-2017 examining transformative solutions to climate change across four European countries.

Dr. Ben Mallon

Ben is Assistant Professor in Geography and Citizenship Education in the School of STEM Education, Innovation & Global Studies in the Institute of Education, Dublin City University.

Ben’s current research explores pedagogical approaches towards education for sustainability, particularly those which deal with controversial issues, address conflict, and support the development of peaceful and sustainable societies.

Dr. Roisín Lyons

Roisín (roisin.lyons@ul.ie) is a lecturer of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick. She has lectured for over 10 years, in DCU, Dublin and in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Her research focuses on innovation (open source innovation, entrepreneurial tendency development), social and sustainable enterprise, and pedagogy (hackathons, gamification, experiential activities for large-class contexts). She has published in journals such as International Entrepreneurship Management, Journal of Management Education and Small Business Economics. Rosin is very engaged in community entrepreneurship initiatives and industry collaborations (StartupWeekDublin, co-founder of OSV/OSVX (Covid response), Enactus, Young Scientist). A former science teacher (qualified in UL!), Roisin holds a Ph.D. in Entrepreneurship Education and a M.Sc. in Business Management. (@rolyonz/ https://ie.linkedin.com/in/roislyons)

Dr. Goran Dominioni

Goran Dominioni is an Assistant Professor in Law and works primarily on climate change law & policy. He is particularly interested in the design of climate change policies – especially carbon pricing – to increase their mitigation effects, their compatibility with international law, and their public acceptability. Goran’s research is informed by insights from economics and psychology and, from time to time, he enjoys designing and running survey experiments. He often collaborates with economists and psychologists in his research.  His research has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals and American law reviews including European Union Politics, Carbon and Climate Law Review, Health Economics, the Cornell International Law Journal, European Journal of Risk Regulation.  He is also the author of Biased Trials: Insights from Behavioral Law and Economics (Springer/Gabler, 2020), and I was a member of the team that wrote the World Bank flagship report State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2019. Prior to joining DCU in September 2020, Goran worked for various units of the Headquarter of the World Bank (Washington D.C.) on fiscal policy for climate change. Now that he came back to academia, he aims to keep his research policy relevant.

His research has been awarded prizes from various institutions, including three prizes from the MIT Climate CoLab, Yale Law School and the World Bank. Goran holds an LLM from Yale Law School and a PhD in law and economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has been visiting researcher at Cornell Law School, Copenhagen University, Honorary Bernheim Fellow at UC Louvain, and Research Fellow at Europa-Kolleg Hamburg.

Prof. Janet Walker

Janet Walker is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and participating faculty in the campus’s Interdepartmental PhD Emphasis in Environment and Society. A humanities-based scholar of documentary film from the perspectives of feminism, trauma studies, and spatial media studies, Walker has turned her research to matters of media, space, and environmental justice. Her books and essays on that latter topic include Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (co-edited with Nicole Starosielski, 2016), articles in the online journals Media Fields (2018) and NECSUS (2018), and chapters in the volumes A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film (2013) and Media and Risk (2020). She is honored to have collaborated on the 2017 program Water Is Life: Standing with Standing Rock (videos available here) and a continuing Mellon Sawyer Seminar on the theme of Energy Justice in Global Perspective. She is a founding co-editor of the open access University of California Press and Carsey-Wolf Center sponsored open access journal Media+Environment (mediaenviron.org).

Dr. Pádraig Murphy

Dr. Pádraig Murphy is Assistant Professor in Communication at Dublin City University and Chair of the MSc in Science and Health Communication programme.  His teaching and research interests include science communication, Science and Technology Studies and public engagement with science and technology. His research and writing focuses on deliberative and participatory dialogue models for biotechnology, nanotechnology, green innovation and other future and emerging technologies. Dr. Murphy has been the Irish Principal Investigator on several EC Horizon 2020 research projects on public engagement and Responsible Research and Innovation, including SMART-ER, SUPER-MoRRI, NUCLEUS, OSOS, RRING and PERARES as well as the Erasmus + project CASE. He conducted a citizens’ jury on the trialling of the GM potato in Ireland, the Irish GM Potato Community of Inquiry project, funded by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency.

Dr. Murphy also coordinates the Celsius research group at DCU. He was appointed to the Campus Engage working group on Engaged Research in 2015. He is author of Biotechnology, Education and Life Politics: Debating Genetic Futures from School to Society (Routledge, 2014) and co-author of Little Country, Big Talk: Science Communication in Ireland (2017).

Dr. Victoria Gomez

Victoria holds a Master Degree in Social Policy and Community Mediation from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a PhD in Environmental Communication, awarded by DCU´s School of Communication. Her research focuses on young audiences’ mediations of pro-environmental messages, having developed fieldwork from this perspective in Ireland and Uruguay. She was initially trained and works now at the School of Communication of the University of Montevideo (Uruguay) while developing consultancy and action-research projects on communication for sustainable development with the public and private non-profit sector.

Ms. Sadhbh O'Neill

Sadhbh O'Neill is a PhD candidate at the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin researching climate ethics and carbon trading. She holds an MA in Philosophy and Public Affairs (UCD), and a BA in English literature and Philosophy (TCD). She is currently working as a researcher on the IRC-funded Voices of Environmental Justice in Ireland Project which is a joint project between the DCU School of Law and Government and Community Law and Mediation. She will be taking up a post as lecturer in climate policy at DCU from September. She has a long history of leading climate advocacy and environmental campaigns in Ireland and is a former public representative having served 5 years as a Green Party member of Dublin city council in the 1990s. She has served on several government advisory groups over the years on climate and environmental policy and in 2021 was appointed to the EPA Advisory Board.

Dr. Fiachra O'Brolchain

Fiachra obtained a BA in Philosophy and English from University College Dublin. Following this, he completed a Masters in Film Studies in UCD. After working in an academic publishing company, he obtained his doctorate from the school of Politics, International Studies, and Philosophy Queens University Belfast in 2009. He wrote his thesis on the patenting of biotechnological products (GM crops) in order to analyse issues of justice in relation to patenting, technology, international trade, and the environment.

He has worked on various aspects of applied ethics, including the ethical and social implications of virtual reality and social networking in association with the EU's Reverie Project, and the ethical implications of human enhancement technologies.  He was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the ASSISTID program. His research focused on the ethics of Assistive Technology for Persons with Intellectual Disabilities and Autism, based in Queens University Belfast and Dublin City University. His focus on this project was on the moral issues raised by medical technologies, the exploration of justice in healthcare, the relationship between technological progress and human flourishing, and the role of assistive technologies in promoting diversity and inclusion.

He is currently involved in the H2020 Inbots project, as part of an international constortium dedicated to creating a responsible research and innovation paradigm that will potentiate EU leadership on robotics. his work in this project is to focus on the ethical strand, particularly on the moral status of robots, the ethical risks of design bias in the development of care robots, and the moral hazard associated with broader societal use of robots.  He is a DCU Rising Talent Fellow, focusing on the ethical aspects of technological development and environmental philosophy, including issues of the sustainability of robotics and the ethics of biologicalisation.

Rabia Qusien

Rabia Qusien is a PhD candidate at the School of Communications, Dublin City University (DCU). She holds a Master's degree in media and communication studies from the University of the Punjab, Pakistan. Her research focuses on media coverage of trade-off between economy versus environment and extreme climate events. Her PhD thesis examines media framing of floods, smog, and heatwave in Pakistan.  Rabia worked as a research assistant and lecturer at the University of Lahore, Pakistan before pursuing her PhD at DCU. 

Dr. Jimmy O'Keeffe

Jimmy is a Geographer and Hydrologist who uses social science and systems modelling to better understand our place in the built and natural world. He received a PhD from Imperial College London in 2016 and is currently based at the School of History and Geography at DCU. His main research interests surround understanding and evaluating natural capital, ecosystem services and the many complex links and feedbacks between the human and natural environments, including climate. This involves spending time with a wide variety of stakeholders including farmers, property developers, NGO’s, City Councils and regulatory bodies.



His work also focuses on understanding the challenges faced and opportunities available to stakeholders, particularly in developing regions of the world. He has extensive field experience and uses real world insights to develop modelling tools for improving understanding and testing potential solutions.  Jimmy has authored and co-authored high-profile publications investigating natural resource use and management, particularly water, in South Asia and the UK.

Dr. Sean Shanagher

Sean Shanagher lectures in Cultural Studies on the Media Production Management degree at Ballyfermot College of Further Education, a linked college to DCU. His research interests focus on alternative food networks, community food systems and climate-friendly agriculture. He has been a community food activist for 15 years, co-founding Dublin's first community-supported agriculture (CSA) project, and maintaining an ongoing involvement in community gardens in Finglas and Dublin 7. Given the centrality of agriculture to the Irish economy - and its contribution to our carbon emissions - developments in community food systems may offer templates for scaling-up and working through necessary changes in agriculture in a manner that respects rural communities and the livelihood of farmers. As a teacher in the Further Education sector, he is also interested in how Education for Sustainability and ecological literacy more generally, can be more closely integrated into school and college curricula at various levels. His most recent publications focused on social and ecological crises associated with Irish agricultural practices, as mediated through the film Pilgrim Hill as well as a critical weighing up of green consumerism.