Mental Health in Social Sciences

Dr. Brian Cahill is Managing Director of the Career@BI programme at Hochschule Bielefeld and is a scientific employee in the Learning and Skills Analytics Lab of the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (TIB) in Hannover. He was Grant Manager of the COST Action CA19117 on Researcher Mental Health Observatory (ReMO). He serves as a Member of the Board of Directors of the SciLink Foundation and served as Chair of the Marie Curie Alumni Association from 2016 to 2018. In these roles, he engaged with early-career researchers on topics ranging from researcher career development, innovation, research funding, science communication, science policy, pension literacy, research integrity, responsible research and innovation and many more.

Dr. Sara Nikolić is an anthropologist and research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (IFDT) at the University of Belgrade. With a focus on critical, militant and visual ethnography, her research explores housing practices, appropriation of space, and urban self-management in post-socialist cities. Engaging with marginalized communities, Sara is particularly interested in the dynamics of transfer, counter-transfer, and the embodied impact of conducting ethnographic research. As a union trustee at IFDT, she advocates for the well-being of her colleagues, underscoring the importance of mental health in academia.

Dr. Alexandra Oancă is a postdoctoral researcher and programme coordinator at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the KU Leuven, Belgium. She is currently serving as a member of the EASA Executive Committee. Her research analyses discourses of expertise, and knowledge production in bureaucracies and policy networks. Alexandra’s research aims to further postcolonial and decolonial dialogues within EU studies. As a longstanding member of PrecAnthro and current member of the EASA Executive Committee, Alexandra is interested in strengthening EASA’s work on the theme of mental health and putting mental health and its relations to academic precarity on the agenda of the European anthropological community.

Dr. Ana Pastor Pérez is a researcher and lecturer with experience in critical cultural heritage management studies, conservation, and social archaeology. She has just finished a Margarita Salas postdoctoral researcher position of the State Research Agency (AEI) at the University of Barcelona. Ana currently works as Senior Project Specialist in Archaeological Collections at the Getty Conservation Institute (part of J. Paul Getty Trust). Her work is centered on developing innovative research design and dissemination actions in order to link academia with global societal challenges. Ana’s research interests stem from the need to innovate, both theoretically and methodologically, in the field of social cultural heritage practice from a gender and intersectional perspective. Part of her work involves an in-depth study of ethnographic methodologies to critically analyze participatory processes. Ana is also an academic who works to bring attention to structural violence and stop sexual, gender-based, and psychosocial harassment in the archaeological and academic fields. In this line, she was the co-chair of the Equality and Intersectionality Commission of the Institute of Archaeology of the University of Barcelona (CII-IAUB).

Dr. Klemen Senica holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Ljubljana. His doctoral dissertation focused on contemporary perceptions of the Great Japanese Empire in Japan. From November 2019 to October 2021, he was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) postdoctoral fellow. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Croatia. His most recent research interests include representations of the Great Japanese Empire in the travel accounts of the Slovene-German writer Alma M. Karlin.