Dr Sarah Nason, Senior Lecturer in Law, Bangor University
After legal practice training Sarah moved into academia in 2007, she has written widely on judicial review (inc. monograph, Reconstructing Judicial Review (Hart Publishing 2016, paperback 2019)) administrative law and administrative justice (inc. Oxford University Press, Hart Publishing, Edward Elgar, Modern Law Review, Journal of Law and Society). Sarah’s areas of research interest are access to justice, including pathways to justice projects, administrative law and administrative justice, devolution and human rights. Her research has been funded by the ESRC, Nuffield Foundation, British Academy, Society of Legal Scholars and Welsh Government. Sarah is a member of the UK Administrative Justice Council Academic Panel, a member of the Law Commission Welsh Advisory Committee, and a member of the Steering Group of the North Wales Regional Advice Network.
Lindsey Poole, Director Advice Services Alliance
Lindsey Poole joined the Advice Services Alliance as Director in October 2013 having previously held interim CEO roles in both the advice and pro bono sectors. On leaving University, Lindsey lived in a squat in East London where she found out the hard way, the importance of good legal advice. As a result, she became a volunteer in a local advice centre and for local housing campaigns. This quickly led to paid roles in a London housing advice charity followed by work for two of national advice networks, both based in the North-west. She changed career direction, qualifying as a social researcher and moving into the criminal justice realm, working for government within the Home Office and the Cabinet Office. She did however, always maintain contact with the advice sector as a ‘first love’ and has served on several Board of Trustees of local advice organisations. The brief at the ASA is to work with advice networks, frontline organisations and key stakeholders in order to promote the sector, to drive quality and to undertake cross sector projects, including research and policy work. She sits on the Ministry of Justice Early Legal Support Advisory Group as well as the Administrative Justice Council, where she chairs the Advice Sector Panel.
Dr Sara Closs-Davies, Lecturer in Accounting, University of Manchester
Dr Sara Closs-Davies is a Fellow member of the Association of Chartered and Certified Accountants (ACCA) and member of the Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT). She is a Lecturer in Accounting and Taxation at the University of Manchester, and an active researcher focussing on real-life implications of tax and welfare policy on citizens, civil servants, society and social inequality, and explores the effectiveness of social policy administration in achieving intended aims. Sara has published her research in high-ranking academic journals, commissioned reports within the private and third sectors and responded to several Calls for Evidence announced by the Welsh Government and UK Parliament. Sara holds several key roles within academia and the community: Chair of the British Accounting and Finance Association (BAFA) Interdisciplinary Perspectives Special Interest Group (IPSIG); Executive Director for Tax Research Network (TRN) and Co-Editor of the TRN Blog; academic advisor for the Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT) Low Income Tax Reform Group (LITRG); Trustee and Board Member of Citizens Advice Ynys Môn; and External Associate of Centre on Household Assets & Savings Management (CHASM), Birmingham University. Sara was also the Academic Advisor to the Welsh Revenue Authority (WRA) (2018-2021).
Susanne Martikke, Lead Researcher, Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation
Susanne is the lead researcher at Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation (GMCVO), where she has managed and conducted a large number of qualitative research projects on various aspects of the voluntary community and social enterprise sector and volunteering in Greater Manchester. In addition to producing reports for GMCVO, her findings have been published in peer-reviewed journals. The latest of her projects is an ESRC-funded CASE PhD Studentship, for which she has been looking at the role of community-based organisations in facilitating social capital and which will conclude in 2022. Susanne has also led on GMCVO’s engagement with academia. This has included collaborative research and evaluation, hosting academics or students at our offices, organising joint events, enhancing VCSE organisations’ access to research methods training and working with colleagues from the local universities on funding bids. Susanne has hosted the Greater Manchester Third Sector Research Network, which she is co-founder of, for 13 years, to enable peer learning, support and networking among the VCSE research community in Greater Manchester.
Dr Lorien Jasny, Senior Lecturer, College of Social Sciences and International Studies, University of Exeter
Lorien is computational social scientist. Her work focuses on questions of public involvement and engagement in environmental decision making. In her research she explores two related themes – how the structure and dynamics of inter-organizational networks affect policy change, and how the structure and dynamics of belief networks affect behavioral change. Substantively, she studies how people try to bring about societal change in response to political and environmental concerns. Methodologically, the need to grapple with these often complex phenomena requires the use and development of techniques for handling large, dynamic, and relational datasets.
Ned Sharpe, Head of Early Intervention and Legal Needs, Access to Justice, UK Ministry of Justice
Ned is a policy adviser in the Ministry of Justice working on legal support policy, which primarily considers how best to support individuals experiencing social welfare legal problems. Through this work Ned has contributed to a number of pilot projects in the legal support space and to the development of the Ministry of Justice’s legal support policy more broadly. His particular areas of interest are in how best to monitor and understand the legal needs of individuals in England and Wales, and the most effective means of intervening early in the development of legal problems.