RESEARCH TRUST MALTA - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Dr Ing.
- Lecturer at the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering
Brian Zammit is a lecturer at the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering, where he teaches fundamentals of electronics and electronic instrumentation systems. His career started with STMicroelectronics Malta as a maintenance technician in 1998 after obtaining a diploma in Industrial Electronics from the Fellenberg Training Centre. He later joined the University of Malta where he obtained an honours degree in Electronics Engineering in 2003.
He worked in industry for another two years before returning to University in 2005 as a research engineer and later as an Assistant Lecturer. He obtained his Ph.D degree in air traffic safety in 2015 from the University of Malta. His doctoral work focussed on airborne flight safety systems for assisting the flight crews of large commercial aircraft in recovering from unexpected trajectory upsets during time-constrained descents.
Research interests: Air traffic management and operations, Vehicle localisation technologies, Trajectory planning and optimisation, Electronic design for unmanned aircraft systems, Electronic instrumentation and computer based simulations.
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer, Geosciences
Aaron is a marine geologist investigating global continental margins. He uses seafloor surveying and quantitative techniques to solve problems related to submarine landslides, submarine canyons, fluid flow processes, carbonate escarpments and continental shelf dynamics. His areas of study include the Mediterranean Sea, Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Aaron has a MSc from the University of Oxford and a PhD from the University of Southampton. He is the recipient of two Marie Curie fellowships and an ERC Starting Grant.
Job Titles:
- Director, Institute of Linguistics
Dr Albert Gatt currently holds a lectureship in Linguistics and is also the Director of the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Malta. He is additionally Research Associate at the Tilburg centre for Communication and Cognition (Tilburg University, the Netherlands).
His main areas of research are computational linguistics, experimental psycholinguistics, and semantics. A lot of his work focuses on computational and psychological processes underlying language production and he is engaged in research in Natural Language Generation, a field in which techniques from Computer Science, theoretical linguistics, and psycholinguistics are brought together in the design and implementation of systems to automatically generate Natural Language text from non-linguistic data.
He is the author of a number of papers on formal semantics (especially possessive constructions in Maltese), and on Natural Language Generation.
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer, Department of Physics / EDUCATION
Job Titles:
- Ass. Lecturer, Environment & Resources Law
Dr Antoine Grima read International Relations (European Studies) and law at the University of Malta, and obtained his Masters degree in European Studies from the University of Sussex. Dr Attard is currently working as an assistant lecturer at Environmental and Resource Law Department within the Faculty of Laws at the University of Malta. He is also pursuing his studies at Ph.D. level at the International Maritime Law Institute.
He has been involved, during the EU accession phase, in the transposition of extensive parts of the environment and consumer acquis and in the co-ordination of Malta's stand during the screening and negotiating stages. He has been actively involved in the Consumer Affairs Task Force which was entrusted to transpose the consumer acquis into Maltese law. During his stint with the regulatory entity responsible for consumer and competition matters he advised on general regulatory matters concerning consumer and competition law and in specific areas notably in agriculture, communications and energy sectors.
In July 2013 Antoine was appointed by the Commission as member of the European Consumer Consultative Group (ECCG) as representative of Consumer Organisations in Malta. The ECCG is the Commission's main forum to consult national and European consumer organisations on matters relating to consumer interests.
Prior to this appointment Antoine represented on various instances the Maltese Consumers' Association abroad most notably in meetings organised by BEUC - The European Consumers' Organistion.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer
- Senior Lecturer, Institute of Earth Systems
Dr Charles Galdies is a lecturer with the Division of Environmental Management and Planning of the Institute of Earth Systems. He holds a doctoral degree in Remote Sensing and Geographical Information Systems from the University of Durham (U.K.). Dr Galdies studied ways to improve small-scale weather and ocean forecasting in the central Mediterranean region using novel remote sensing observations of the ocean and the atmosphere. He also has a Master of Science degree in Biology and a BSc in Biology and Chemistry, both from the University of Malta.
Dr Galdies previously served as Chief Meteorological Officer of the Malta Meteorological Office from 2007 to 2011, and Deputy Executive Director of the International Ocean Institute Headquarters. He is the Permanent Representative of the Government of Malta with the World Meteorological Organisation.
Dr Galdies' expertise focuses on weather and climate, the application of remote sensing for coastal, benthic and terrestrial ecological mapping, as well as environmental data processing and analysis. He has provided consultancy to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the European Commission, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and to private companies related to ecology and policy formulation.
Research interests: Weather forecasting and Atmospheric dynamics; Earth observation technology - Oceanic and atmospheric component & Land use cover and coastal water monitoring using medium and high resolution data; Numerical weather prediction - Improvement of initial conditions, Data assimilation, Model verification techniques, Geostatistics, High resolution NWP, High resolution modelling of oceanic surface fluxes; Geographic information system - Geostatistics and spatial analysis, Raster data analysis and image processing; Climate change impact - Long-term climatic changes of physical parameters over the Mediterranean region, Climate data rescue.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer, Faculty for the Built Environment
Born in Italy in 1986, Dr Chiara Pasian is a wall painting conservator and currently Lecturer in the Department of Conservation and Built Heritage at the University of Malta, where she teaches at the MSc course in the Conservation of Decorative Architectural Surfaces, and supervises students in field projects. Pasian is strongly interested in applied scientific research and holds a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Before joining the University of Malta, she has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland and at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Beside academic research, she also works as an on-site conservator. She has being involved in projects in collaboration with different private and academic institutions (such as University of Tuscia, Italy and the Courtauld institute of Art, London) in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Job Titles:
- Researcher at the Department of Computer Information Systems
- Senior Lecturer, Faculty of ICT
Dr Conrad Attard is a Lecturer and Researcher at the Department of Computer Information Systems within the Faculty of ICT at the University of Malta. He obtained his PhD at the University of Sheffield, UK, Faculty of Engineering, Computer Science Department. His research interests are smart technology, enterprise applications, crowdsourcing Just in Time knowledge at workplace, designing applications for mobile devices, eHealth and persuasive technology.
His research is focused on organisations in particular on the use of Smart technology, Just in time knowledge creation and eHealth solutions at the workplace. In the last years, he managed various research projects such as reporting tools that can support caregivers of wandering patients suffering from dementia. In this research, a tool that utilizes the currently available Smart Mobile Technologies was designed focusing on the patient's' wandering patterns whilst identifying any possible dangers pertaining to the patient.
He is the principal investigator of Pervasive Electronic Monitoring (PEM) in health care currently being carried out at the St Vincent de Paule Residence, which is a nursing home and hospital for the Elderly in collaboration with the University of Malta. The research group is multi disciplinary involving medical doctors, caregivers, nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, building designers and ICT practitioners. His work involves the design of simulators that make use of Human Activity Recognition (HAR) that address the problem of incomplete data, collected from wearable devices. Creating a human activity datasets that can be used for research for specific case studies. The aim of this work is to help researchers and ICT practitioners working on hospital systems to improve the designs and the requirements, providing solutions to the relevant problems particularly addressing usability and trust in healthcare solutions.
In 2010, Dr Attard joined IEEE Region 8 committee as a professional officer and in 2013 was appointed as Science and Technology PR Officer. Recently became the vice-chair of IEEE Malta Section. He is local coordinator of IEEE Malta section TISP and various science projects through TechLAB. Dr Attard is currently the Chair 2017 -2019 for IEEE.
Job Titles:
- Editor for the Journal of Cancer Research
- Senior Researcher, Centre for Molecular Medicine and Biobanking
Dr. Duncan Ayers completed his PhD in Translational Medicine from The University of Manchester (UK) in 2011 and is currently a senior post-doctoral researcher (RSOIV) at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Biobanking within the University of Malta. Dr. Ayers also holds a MSc degree in Immunology and Immunogenetics from the University of Manchester and previously graduated as a Bachelor of Pharmacy (with Honours) from the University of Malta. He is also an Honorary Research Associate with the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of Manchester. During his doctoral studies, Dr. Ayers spent a 17-month attachment with the globally renowned Vandesompele research group at the Center for Medical Genetics Ghent, within Ghent University (Belgium), specializing in microRNA (miRNA) technology and neuroblastoma functional genomics.
Dr. Ayers' research focuses on non-coding RNA biomarker discovery and therapeutic applications for paediatric cancers such as neuroblastoma. Other research interests include the influences of genomic, miRNA and other non-coding RNA expression profiles in the development of human disease conditions, high throughput semi-/quantitative gene analytical techniques such as RT-qPCR, microarray platform utilization and the development of nanoparticle - based drug delivery systems for miRNA-based therapeutics in cancer.
Dr. Ayers' research has been published in 21 reputed peer-reviewed scientific journals and he also contributed to five book publications in his research fields, together with disseminating his research at 47 local and international scientific conferences, including Singapore, USA and Japan. His research was also awarded the Best Poster award in its category at a conference hosted by the Karolinska Institute (Sweden) in 2010.
Moreover, Dr Ayers was invited to act as a scientific Peer Reviewer for over 30 international scientific journals, including PlosOne, Tumour Biology, Oncotarget, Cancer Letters and the European Journal of Cancer.
Dr Ayers was also recently appointed by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO, Belgium) to act as a Grant Reviewer for awarding post-doctoral Fellowships within Belgium. In addition, he was also bestowed the role of External Doctoral Examiner for doctoral students performing their thesis defence within Ghent University (Belgium).
Other academic activities performed by Dr Ayers include the supervision of several undergraduate and post-graduate / doctoral students within the University of Malta and the University of Wolverhampton (UK). Dr Ayers also currently lectures in Immunology to medical students for the Department of Pathology, within the University of Malta's Faculty of Medicine and Surgery.
Dr. Ayers is also an editor for the Journal of Cancer Research and Treatment, acts as a review board member for the Journal of Vaccines and Immunology and also serves as a member and sub-committee (STSM Board) chairperson within the European Epitranscriptomics Network (COST, EU).
Job Titles:
- Visiting Lecturer, Faculty of Arts
Archaeologist Dr Gianmarco Alberti received his PhD in Prehistory from the University of Udine (Italy) in 2012, his MA (cum laude) in Archaeology from the University of Lecce (Italy) in 2007, and his BA (Laurea, cum laude) in Classics from the University of Catania (Italy) in 2003. Dr Alberti has been member of two research projects coordinated by the University of Catania (Italy) in 2005 (Central and Eastern Mediterranean in the 2nd millennium B.C.: The development of an international network through inner transformations and external projections) and 2007 (Beyond equality: Communal space and the individual dimension in Mediterranean Prehistory). He has been consultant of non-governmental associations (2005-2009) for data mining and statistical analyses, and of the Archaeological Superintendence of Catania (Italy) for the preparation of an international exhibition (2006-2007).
Between March 2014-June 2016, he worked at the University of Malta as Research Support Officer II within the FRAGSUS project (Fragility and Sustainability in restricted island environments: Adaptation, Culture Change and Collapse in prehistory; PI: Prof. Caroline Malone, Queen's University, Belfast), and he was in charge of the GIS laboratory at the Department of Classics and Archaeology.
His research focused on GIS, spatial modeling, spatial data visualization, and landscape analysis in the Maltese archipelago, and has also comprised georeferencing and digitizing hundreds of modern survey sheets as well as historical cadastral maps, processing of LiDAR data, analysing and processing Digital Elevation Models and airborne imagery, 3D modeling and visualization, performing settlements suitability analysis. Dr Alberti built a GIS database of prehistoric and historical evidences in the Maltese archipelago with the aim to explore, model, and understand the relation between past communities and the landscape. He also developed a statistical model in GIS environment on the basis of mid-1800s cadastral maps (Cabrei), with the aim to assess which environmental and cultural factors have possibly influenced the agricultural suitability in Malta before heavy mechanization (http://fragsusuom.weebly.com/).
At the University of Malta, Dr Alberti has also delivered invited lectures on the use of GIS in archaeology, maritime archaeology, and urban planning, and on the use of quantitative approach for archaeological research. He also acted as co-supervisor and GIS advisor for MA students in archaeology.
He has published articles on internationally recognized peer-reviewed journals (average Impact Factor: 2.719) such as Radiocarbon, PLOS ONE, Journal of Quaternary Science, Journal of Archaeological Science, SoftwareX), as well as one monograph and contributions to conference proceedings. He acts as reviewer for many journals (Archaeometry, Current Anthropology, Radiocarbon, PLOS ONE, Journal of Archaeological Science, and others).
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer, Sociology
Dr Gillian M Martin is a medical sociologist, resident academic at the University of Malta. She came to academia as a mature student after a previous career in Nursing in the UK, and graduated summa cum laude BA philosophy and sociology at the university of Malta, then, with Distinction, MSc Sociology from Manchester University, UK. Her PhD in medical sociology was awarded by the University of Manchester in 2011. She has since been very active in establishing medical sociology as an area of academia and research in Malta, networking through active affiliations with European Sociological Association research network, and the British Sociological Association medical sociology study group.
She has a particular interest in the social and ethical implications of Biobank activities and genomic research and has been a part of the pan-European BBMRI ERIC ELSI team since 2015 where she contributes expertise in social and ethical issues related to biobanking, and is also an executive board member.
Locally, Gillian sits on the University of Malta Faculty of Arts research ethics committee, and acts as point of reference for ELSI issues at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Biobanking.
Job Titles:
- Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Education - Ex Officio
Job Titles:
- Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Finance - Ex Officio