The BeneLex team is comprised of research fellows and research assistants. The team has been supported by a Board of Advisors and by visiting researchers from academia and practice. The team continues to welcome enquiries about possible collaborations.
Strathclyde Centre for Environmental Law and GovernancePeople
Elisa Morgera
Prof Elisa Morgera is the Principal Investigator of the BeneLex project. She focuses on the interface between international biodiversity law and human rights, particularly the right over natural resources of indigenous peoples and local communities, the right to science and the right to water.
Elsa Tsioumani
Elsa Tsioumani is Research Fellow to the BeneLex project, responsible for legal research in the areas of traditional knowledge, agricultural biodiversity and land tenure. Elsa is a lawyer and consultant in international and European environmental law and policy, based in Thessaloniki, Greece, with a decade-long experience in biodiversity and biosafety-related issues. She has attended meetings under the Convention on Biological Diversity as team leader and reporter of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin since 1999.
Louisa Parks
Dr Louisa Parks is Research Fellow to the BeneLex project, responsible for a political sociology study on the diffusion of benefit sharing in global environmental law. Louisa is a senior lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Lincoln.
She has carried out a comparative study of the impacts of social movement campaigns in the EU, and research on the contribution of volunteering to community cohesion. Prior to joining academia, she worked as a researcher in the European Parliament in Brussels.
Annalisa Savaresi
Dr Annalisa Savaresi was a Research Fellow to the BENELEX project from November 2013 to July 2016. She was responsible for legal research in the areas of climate change.
Wim Peters
Dr Wim Peters joined the BENELEX team in March 2018 as a research fellow. He is a computational linguist with experience in (semi-)automatic knowledge extraction and management. His task is to integrate language technology into BENELEX workflows in order to assist researchers with their investigation of text content.
Mitchell Lennan
Mitchell Lennan is a Research Assistant to the BeneLex project, joining the team in early 2018. Mitchell works mainly as part of the BeneLex Legal Informatics Team: Contributing to research into the language associated with indigenous peoples and local communities compared to other actors in the arena of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
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Mika Schroder
Mika Schroder has been working as a Research Assistant on the BeneLex project since December 2016, and continued after she joined the Strathclyde Centre for Environmental Law and Governance as a PhD student in October 2017. Within the BeneLex project, Mika works alongside Louisa Parks in exploring the meaning of local stakeholder participation within the context of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Daniela Diz
Daniela Diz has been a Researcher under the BeneLex project from August to October 2018, focusing on benefit-sharing under the law of the sea and building upon research undertaken in the sister project MARINE BENEFITS.
Dr Diz is also a member of SCELG, where she explores the evolution of the international law of the sea and its relationship with other policy and legal instruments contributing to coherent oceans governance. She has an inter-disciplinary background in international environmental law, marine science and technology and ecosystem-based management, and first-hand experience of international environmental law-making processes.
Visitors and collaborators: In the group photo above, the team is accompanied by Dr Adriana Bessa, who has established an informal collaboration with the BENELEX team with regards to the international legal concept of "local communities." Over the period 2015-2018, the BENELEX team welcomed amid its fold the following visiting researchers:
- Dr Saskia Vermeylen, at the time Senior Lecturer, Lancaster University Environment Centre (now with SCELG);
- Dr Lalanath de Silva, Director, Environmental Democracy Practice, World Resources Institute, Washington DC;
- Dr Margherita Brunori (PhD, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa), who is the author of the drawings featuring on the BENELEX website and social media;
- Komlan Sangbana, Researcher, Institute for Environmental Sciences and Member of the Platform for International Water Law, Faculty of Law, University of Geneva;
- Dimitri Pag-Yendu, PhD candidate, University of Laval, Canada;
- Marie-Catherine Petersmann, PhD Candidate, European University Institute, Italy;
- Núria Reguart-Segarra, PhD, Lecturer and Researcher in training at the University Jaume I of Castellón, Spain.
In addition, Mara Ntona and Kate McKenzie, PhD candidates at SCELG, have been collaborating with BENELEX researchers in managing BENELEX social media.
