Dr Simon Goodman Policy & Evaluation
 Dr Simon Goodman |
- Simon did his undergraduate degree in Genetics at the University of Sheffield and a PhD at Cambridge in population and conservation genetics, and then progressed to do a post-doc at the University of Edinburgh, followed by a research fellowship at the Institute of Zoology in London with the Zoological Society of London.
- He joined the University of Leeds in 2004 as a lecturer in Evolutionary Biology. Simon’s group, in association with his collaborators, has a strong track record of conducting research with powerful impact on society through advising stakeholders in conservation projects. He has formed and managed teams in many difficult and remote environments. Simon’s presence with the Bioenterprise Club is in advancing and enabling Policy & Evaluation activities.
The following is from a short interview with Simon...
- Can you please explain what Policy and Evaluation actually means in relation to Knowledge Transfer?
‘[Its basically] taking research outputs and then transferring that new knowledge to Policy makers and decision makers and that can be at any level from local NGO to national government. It’s about using science to guide policy and help it inform solutions to practical problems that fit mainly within the public sector’
Could that be a technology aswell as a service?
‘Yes, it may be that you are helping organizations to apply a technology which will then generate research output that will then inform policy. Using technology can be part of the process. People may also be offering policy advice about new technologies, for example nano-technology is something that’s in the media a lot at the moment and is something that people are concerned about. So it’s very important to understand what the implications of new technologies are and be able to come up with the appropriate policies to deal with that’
It was when you were doing your research fellowship that you became interested in applying your knowledge in this way?
‘That’s when it became a strong interest. The work that I had done for my PhD and my post doc did have some implications for policy. For example, on the basis of the work for my PhD the Swedish government assigned protection to a particular population of harbour seals on the Swedish Baltic coast because they were shown to be genetically distinct from other seals and enough to justify them having protection………’obviously that was satisfying to show that something that I had done could have such an impact’
‘When I was at the Institute of Zoology we were encouraged there to try and build upon the basic research where that had potential applications to support or direct conservation policy’
What are the difficulties involved in balancing an academic career and also focusing your research outcomes in this way?“As an academic you have to do two things , you have to do the things that you need to do to be successful and survive in your academic environment and that’s focused on generating basic science outputs because that’s essentially what all academics are measured against or are seen to be the most important criteria by other academics. It’s also quite important that you can then translate those academic outputs into influences on the real world and ways to solve problems. That is an equally important driver for me as well as producing well regarded papers. All the policy work that we do comes form the research, so when we do some research that has a practical application in order to publish we try and extract the basic science component from that and publish that in the highest profile academic journal that we can . The applied aspects of that will then generally be written up as reports for the stakeholders”
Related Links
Project Case Study - A brief overview of Dr Simon Goodmans' work in the field.