Douglas Mundie graduated from St Andrews University in 1974 and spent 25 years in industry, primarily in high-technology plastics. He worked throughout the UK, Europe, and America in senior positions in Sales, Marketing, and General Management. In recent years, he has been responsible for a number of Scottish SMEs, developing their business through new markets and innovation in their sectors. Douglas was elected a General Council Assessor (Non-Executive Director) to the Court of the University of St Andrews and was Convener of the Audit Committee for 7 years. He has been a member of the Business Committee of the General Council of St Andrews University for 16 years.
In 2000, he was appointed to review how business and academia can work more closely together in Scotland, joining Technology Ventures Scotland as their first Chief Executive. Since 2004, he has worked as a Consultant to both businesses and academic institutions helping them innovate effectively. He is a Scottish Council member for the Institute of Directors.
Jared has over 15 years experience at all levels of ecological research and monitoring activities, from carrying out field in a range of habitats to management multi-partner projects. He carried out monitoring of seabird populations for 5 years whilst working for Scottish Natural Heritage, completed his PhD on the impacts of habitat degradation in the Sahel of West Africa on Palearctic birds, and spent several years living and working in Latin America. Jared is an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Biology at St Andrews University.
Whilst working for the RSPB Jared carried out research on the causes for the decline in upland breeding birds across the UK, habitat preference of Black Grouse broods and dealt with planning development casework in SE Scotland. Before starting work with SOI Ltd, Jared managed the LIFE active blanket bog in Wales project which undertook landscape scale habitat restoration and research into the impact of restoration on a range of Ecosystem Services. He has been a birder for over 20 years and holds a BTO ringing licence.
Christina undertook an MSc in Marine Biology at Southampton University and specialises in taxonomy, biological and oceanographical sampling, and invertebrate physiology and reproduction. She also has extensive years technical business experience. As a benthic taxonomist Christina has experience of conducting both in-situ and laboratory based taxonomic identification of the benthic marine fauna of UK waters as well as macrofaunal identification from ROV dive videos. Christina also has experience of carrying out research of various habitats, from estuarine and intertidal areas to offshore deep-sea, using a wide range of biological and oceanographic techniques.
Emma is an ecologist with over 10 year’s experience of working with aquatic environments. Her work and research extends across freshwater, transitional (estuarine) and marine environments.
Emma has led a number of large scale field campaigns, is an accredited surveyor for River Habitat Survey, and is highly skilled in a number of laboratory techniques. Emma is familiar with the logistics of field survey, the handling and analysis of associated data sets, and the project reporting process. Emma has worked with sub-contractors and executive management groups at both UK and European levels.
Dr Lorraine Wilson, Associate Scientist
Lorraine has
over 10 years of experience designing and managing research projects, ranging
from small scale monitoring studies to landscape scale interdisciplinary
partnership projects. She was Reserve
Ecologist for RSPB Scotland and has assessed the impact of landscape scale habitat
restoration upon upland bird populations, vegetation, water quality, flood risk
and other Ecosystem Services. More recently, Lorraine has analysed bird and
marine mammal data from ship-based surveys undertaken to inform the ES for
marine renewable sites. Lorraine has extensive
experience with a wide array of analytical tools including the use of Distance
and MARK software to gain abundance estimates or population models, and
statistical modelling such as Information Theoretic GLM approaches, mixed
modelling etc.
Chris Hancock, Research and Project Coordinator
Chris’s back ground is in estate and contracts management gained throughout the Home Counties and London after graduating from Imperial College (Wye) with a BSc in Countryside Management in 2001. In 2008 he partook in a 2 year master’s programme at Otago University, New Zealand studying town planning (Mplann). In New Zealand he was fortunate enough to work with a transdisciplinary research centre, the Centre for the Study of Agriculture, Food and Environment (CSAFE) on Maori cultural issues and also worked for a number of regional and local authorities throughout New Zealand.
Upon his return to the UK he worked for the University of St Andrews in a number of varied roles, primarily as a project assistant with the Central library until accepting this post with Soi ltd in June 2010.