TEAM
Current Team Members
Dr. Rebecca Tapscott
Principal Investigator
Rebecca is the Principal Investigator of the SNF-funded project, Governing Research Ethics, held at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Politics and International Relations Department and the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa at the London School of Economics. Beyond the regulation of research ethics, her interests include authoritarianism; international development; political violence; and gender, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. She has published on these topics in journals including Perspectives on Politics, International Affairs, and African Affairs. She is the author of “Arbitrary States: Social control and modern authoritarianism in Museveni’s Uganda” (Oxford University Press, 2021). Rebecca holds a PhD from the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
Dr. Sophie Moxon
Research Associate
Sophie joined the Governing Research Project as a Research Associate in September 2023. Her work on the project includes conducting a comparative document analysis on national structures of ethical review. Sophie holds a PhD in Politics and a Master’s in Social Research from the University of York. Her PhD research, ‘Can money buy access?’, explored the role of political finance contributions in obtaining privileged access to legislative committees. Her main research interests include comparative politics, representational inequality, and industry influence at the legislative and regulatory level.
Research Trainee
Tom is a PhD candidate in History at Sheffield Hallam University and joins the project team as he approaches the submission of his doctoral thesis. His thesis – ‘AIDS and the New Right’ – adopts a transnational methodology to explore the policymaking response to the AIDS Crisis of the 1980s in the US and UK. His research interests span AIDS policy, transnational politics, epidemic response and the medical humanities generally.
Former Team Members
Daniel Rincón Machón
Research Assistant
Daniel is a Research Assistant at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy of The Graduate Institute. His work for Governing Research Ethics involves diverse areas, from co-authoring the Research Ethics Governance Dataset to creating this website. He holds a Master in Development Studies from The Graduate Institute, and two bachelor’s degrees in Law and Political Sciences from University Carlos III. Besides research ethics, he is interested in armed groups, non-state governance, and urban violence, with a focus on Latin America.
Bart Gabriel
Doctoral Researcher
Bart is a doctoral researcher at The Graduate Institute. He has contributed to Governing Research Ethics by conducting bibliometric analysis on the demographics and power relations inherent to the field of Research Ethics in International Relations and Political Science. Besides research ethics, his research interests include Sociology of Knowledge, (Bibliometry of) International Relations Theory, digital participatory politics, and the World Politics-Popular Culture Continuum. He is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on the organizational relationalities of scholarly International Relations, aimed at interrogating the construction of disciplinary identity and its often exclusionary political commitments. During his doctoral research, Bart contributed to several research projects and currently works as a Teaching Assistant at the International Relations/Political Science department of The Graduate Institute.
Research Assistant
Ragnhild is currently undertaking a master’s in international and European politics at the University of Edinburgh. In addition, she holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Bergen in Comparative politics. Previously, she was a student writer and podcaster reporting on local politics for different student associations in Bergen. Besides research ethics, her main fields of interest are foreign policy, national identity, international security and Nordic party politics.
Research Assistant
Jonas is a postgraduate master’s student at the University of Edinburgh and Research Assistant for Governing Research Ethics. His contribution to the project involves research on the Norway case of ethics within social science. He holds bachelor’s degrees in both Political Science and Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where he was also able to specialise in Neuroscience and System Dynamics. His current research focus is on demographic research and its relations with the decision-making process of Russian foreign policy aggression. Other academic interests include predictive models of foreign policy, political economy, economics, and leadership psychology.