Who We Are

Director

Academic Members

Matthew Collins

Dr. Matthew Collins is a Lecturer Above the Bar (Assistant Professor) in Economics at the University of Galway. His research interests lie in applied microeconomics, particularly in labour and development economics. For more details about Matthew's work, please click here.

Postdoctoral Researchers

Tom Gillespie

Dr. Tom Gillespie is a postdoctoral researcher on an EPA funded project "Climate Resilient Places", led by Dr. Tom McDermott. Tom recently completed his PhD in environmental economics at the University of Galway, which was funded by the Irish Research Council. His PhD research used house price data from daft.ie to look at flood risk in the Irish housing market and people's willingness to pay for blue and green spaces. For more details about Tom’s work, email tomgillespie07@gmail.com.

Julian Worley

Dr. Julian Worley is a postdoctoral researcher with the SmartDairy project at the University of Galway. Her work focuses on the intersection of sustainability and food production, where she aims to help maintain food security for all without bankrupting the environment, the farmer, or the consumer. This focus leads her to work in several areas, including behavioral, environmental, and production economics.  She earned her PhD in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Georgia, USA, under the supervision of Dr. Jeff Dorfman, where she studied the impacts of short term and long-term risk shocks on optimal production plant allocations for beef production firms. If you would like to know more about her research, please follow this link or email her at julian.worley@universityofgalway.ie. 

PhD Students

Felipe Aguiar

Felipe is a PhD student in Economics and a Teagasc Walsh Fellow. His PhD topic is Adaptive Management of Grassland to Improve Farm Level Sustainability and his supervisor is Dr. Doris Laepple. For more details about Felipe’s work, click here or email f.aguiarnoury1@nuigalway.ie.

Luis Garcia

Luis is a PhD student in Economics and Teagasc Walsh Fellow and his topic is Farm Labour and Productivity in Irish Agriculture. His supervisor is Dr. Doris Laepple. For more details about Luis’s work, click here or email L.Garcia3@nuigalway.ie.

Zaid Hattab

Zaid is a PhD student in Economics and an NUI Galway Hardiman Scholar. His PhD topic uses machine-learning methods to examine heterogeneous treatment effects for cost- effectiveness analysis and his supervisors are Dr. Edel Doherty and Dr. Stephen O Neill (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine). For more details about Zaid’s work, email z.hattab1@nuigalway.ie.

Edward Henry

Edward is a PhD student in Economics and an NUI Galway Hardiman Scholar. His PhD topic is Mental Health Spillovers from Serious Family Illness and his supervisor is Dr. John Cullinan. For more details about Edward’s work, email E.Henry4@nuigalway.ie.

David Horan

David is a PhD student in Economics at the University of Limerick (UL) and is co-supervised by Dr. Darragh Flannery (UL) and Dr. John Cullinan (CERIS). His PhD topic is Higher Education in Ireland: Identifying Inequalities within the System and Evaluating Outcomes. For more details about David’s work, see https://www.ul.ie/business/david-horan or email David.K.Horan@ul.ie.

Terence Hynes

Terence is undertaking a PhD in Economics while working in the Research Services and Policy Unit of the Department of Health. His PhD topic is Applying Simulation Modelling and Econometric Methods for Strategic Workforce Planning in the Irish Healthcare System and his supervisor is Dr. John Cullinan. For more details about Terence’s work, email T.Hynes9@nuigalway.ie.

Research Affiliates 

Lorrain Ballaine

Lorraine is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Agricultural Economics and Farm Surveys Department in Teagasc and was previously a PhD student at NUI Galway supervised by Dr. Doris Laepple. She has particular interest in using economic analysis to reconcile the three sustainability dimensions (economic, environmental, and social) of agricultural production, and inform farmers’ technology adoption decisions and public policies. She is currently working on the MilKey project (Decision support system for sustainable and GHG optimized milk production in key European areas). For more details about Lorraine’s research, please visit her ORCID page (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5085-4205) or email Lorraine.Balaine@teagasc.ie.

Bradford Barham

I am a Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I have been on the faculty since 1987. I am an honorary professor at NUI Galway. I have had the pleasure of visiting Ireland on multiple occasions and spent a sabbatical there in 2019-20, which was truncated by the Covid pandemic. My research and teaching focus on two main themes: 1. Identifying and addressing the drivers of inequality and poverty in Latin America, especially in rural areas, and 2. Examining policies, technologies, and farmer management decisions shaping agricultural sustainability outcomes in the US, Ireland, and Latin America. To better understand individual economic decisions, I use field work, such as surveys, interviews, and well-framed experiments as empirical evidence to test economic models and ideas. For more details about my research, click here or email bradford.barham@wisc.edu.

Paula Byrne

Dr. Paula Byrne is a Postdoctoral Researcher with Evidence Synthesis Ireland & HRB-Trials Methodology Research Network at NUI Galway. Her work focuses on evidence synthesis, scientific uncertainty, and how health ‘facts’ and ‘misinformation’ are defined and dealt with. Previously, Paula worked with the Health Technology Assessment Directorate within HIQA. Here she developed a new method of justifying new practices in medical exposure to ionising radiation, which is currently being finalised. Also, she produced rapid reviews on a wide range of scientific topics to inform the National Public Health Emergency Team during the Covid-19 pandemic. Her PhD focused on the use of statins for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease and was supervised by Dr. John Cullinan. In particular, she considered the process of medicalisation and how ‘low-value’ medical care might be delineated or defined in the context of absolute risk reduction or number-needed-to-treat. For more details about Paula's research, email paula.p.byrne@nuigalway.ie.

Garreth Gibney

Garreth is a Research Assistant at CERIS working with Dr. John Cullinan and Dr. Tom McDermott on a number of projects relating to the impact of climate change on health outcomes. His current work focuses on the relationship between extreme temperatures, morbidity, and behaviour.

Diarmaid Ó Ceallaigh

Diarmaid is an economics PhD student at the Erasmus Centre for Health Economics Rotterdam at Erasmus University Rotterdam.  His PhD is titled Designing sustainable interventions to encourage preventive health behaviour using insights from behavioural economics and health psychology. His supervisors are Prof. Kirsten I.M. Rohde and Prof. Hans van Kippersluis. He is a graduate of NUI Galway. For more details about Diarmaid’s work, click here or email oceallaigh@eur.nl.

Wellington Osawe

Wellington Osawe is an Agricultural and Development Economist. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), Dublin and a Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. Before joining the ESRI, Wellington was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Economics Discipline at NUI Galway where he worked with Dr. Doris Laepple. Wellington holds a PhD in Agricultural Economics from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria during which he spent a full year as a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics (AFRE) at Michigan State University, USA. He holds an MA in Agriculture and Rural Development from the University of East Anglia, UK and a Bachelors in Agricultural Economics from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Wellington’s research and policy interests reside within the intersection of the economics of technology adoption and policy, agricultural productivity, animal welfare and biosecurity provisions, as well as the implications of agricultural intensification on environmental challenges with a focus on policies. He has previously consulted in Nigeria for the WorldFish, African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) and the Nigeria Agribusiness Group (NABG) under the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant on projects broadly related to agricultural and rural development. For more details about Wellington's research, email wellington.osawe@esri.ie or visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/Wellington-Osawe/.

Michelle Queally

Michelle Queally is a Lecturer in Economics at Galway Mayo Institute of Technology. Her research interests include obesity economics, complex public health intervention design and evaluation, clinical trials, medical device economics and also public patient involvement (PPI) in health economics research. Her work to date has involved the application of discrete choice experiments, systematic reviews, qualitative evidence synthesis and economic evaluation techniques to explore and inform a wide range of health policy questions. Michelle was a recipient of the Irish Research Council Scholarship, the Hardiman Scholarship and the Interdisciplinary Capacity Enhancement Fellowship. Michelle was a Visiting Scholar at Cornell University, New York, 2016. For more details about Michelle's research, email michelle.queally@gmit.ie.

Daniel Vila

Daniel is a market analyst for the hydrogen energy storage firm STOFF2 in Berlin. His work consists of applied econometric research on the European energy market. He is also working with Dr Thomas McDermott on a project examining the relationship between poor air quality and COVID-19 outcomes. He is a graduate of NUI Galway's master's programme in Global Environmental Economics. For more details about Daniel's research, email vila@stoff2.com.