Dr Rebecca Mancy
- Research Fellow (MRC/CSO Social & Public Health Sciences Unit)
- Senior Lecturer (Culture, Literacies, Inclusion & Pedagogy)
- Affiliate Researcher (School of Biodiversity, One Health & Veterinary Medicine)
telephone:
0141 330 3560
email:
Rebecca.Mancy@glasgow.ac.uk
School of Health and Wellbeing, University of Glasgow, Clarice Pears Building, 90 Byres Road, Glasgow, G12 8TB
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4667-9229Biography
I have two part-time posts at the University of Glasgow.
- Leckie Research Fellow: focusing on urbanisation, ecology and human health (3.5 days per week).
- Senior Lecturer in Education: focusing on science and mathematics education, as well as education in relation to socioeconomic inequality (1.5 days per week).
My background is interdisciplinary. I have a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Warwick, as well as a first PhD in Education and a second PhD in Computing Science (focused on ecological modelling), both from the University of Glasgow. While living in Geneva, Switzerland, I worked in commercial software development.
Research interests
In my Research Fellow role (see main webpage here), most of my research applies ecological theory to understanding the dynamics of both human and non-human populations. I work across the spectrum from theoretical projects with an ecological motivation to those with more obvious policy applications. In Education, my research has focused primarily on science and mathematics education.
The driving question behind much of my current work is whether urbanisation can generate benefits for both human and ecosystem health. Most of my work in this area is based on mathematical and simulation models (in R and Java), and I incorporate data from primary data collection as well as secondary sources, usually with a spatial dimension. Some examples of the work that I am doing on this theme are shown below.
Socioeconomic inequality and health risk: What do we learn from historical archives?
I have been working to understand health riskin conjunction with socioeconomic inequality, exploiting historical information that allows us to evaluate longer-run implications of health risks such as disease outbreaks. This work includes projects on various aspects of inequality, health outcomes and relevant interventions, exploiting lessons from history for the present. These projects are in collaboration with Konstantinos Angelopoulos from the Adam Smith Business School and colleagues from Athens University of Economics and Business, Lancaster University, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, and Glasgow City Archives. The projects have been supported by grant and PhD funding from the ESRC, College of Social Sciences and Erasmus+; this includes a grant funded by ESRC as part of UK Research and Innovation’s rapid response to COVID-19 with outputs including a Briefing Note on post-pandemic mortality dynamics.
Education in risk-exposed pastoralist communities
With Konstantinos Angelopoulos from the Adam Smith Business School, colleagues from Lancaster and Erasmus Universities, and from the NGO Friends of Lake Turkana, Kenya, I work with Turkana pastoralist communities to understand inequality by studying the effects of shocks and mitigating activities such as herding, education, family structure, and policy interventions. This work has been supported by the Scottish Funding Council as part of GCRF and has included household surveys, household and key informant interviews, focus groups, and policy workshops. Engagement with local communities, NGOs and policymakers has led to a Briefing Note and an educational booklet to be used in local schools.
Land-use change, urbanisation and biodiversity
In order to understand the effect of urbanisation on ecoystem health, I focus primarily on biodiversity. I have recently begun working with Davide Dominoni, Sofie Spatharis and Jason Matthiopoulos, on a project to understand the impact of urbanisation on bird biodiversity, using data on land-use change and bird surveys.
Educational research
In Education, I have mainly worked on science and mathematics education, public understanding of science and language acquisition. I have experience of working with both quantitative and qualitative data, and have used methods that span these, including phenomenography, grounded theory, content analysis and statistical data analysis.
Publications
Selected publications
Mancy, R. et al. (2022) Rabies shows how scale of transmission can enable acute infections to persist at low prevalence. Science, 376(6592), pp. 512-516. (doi: 10.1126/science.abn0713) (PMID:35482879) (PMCID:PMC7613728)
Schroeder, M. , Lazarakis, S., Mancy, R. and Angelopoulos, K. (2023) An extended period of elevated influenza mortality risk follows the main waves of influenza pandemics. Social Science and Medicine, 328, 115975. (doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.115975) (PMID:37301110) (PMCID:PMC7614920)
Sakavara, A., Tsirtsis, G., Roelke, D. L., Mancy, R. and Spatharis, S. (2018) Lumpy species coexistence arises robustly in fluctuating resource environments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(4), pp. 738-743. (doi: 10.1073/pnas.1705944115) (PMID:29263095) (PMCID:PMC5789903)
Haddou, Y., Mancy, R. , Matthiopoulos, J. , Spatharis, S. and Dominoni, D. M. (2022) Widespread extinction debts and colonization credits in United States breeding bird communities. Nature Ecology and Evolution, 6(3), pp. 324-331. (doi: 10.1038/s41559-021-01653-3) (PMID:35145265) (PMCID:PMC8913367)
Angelopoulos, K. , Stewart, G. and Mancy, R. (2023) Local infectious disease experience influences vaccine refusal rates: a natural experiment. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 290(1992), 20221986. (doi: 10.1098/rspb.2022.1986) (PMID:36722077) (PMCID:PMC9890117)
All publications
Grants
Assessing policy to address the medium-run impact of COVID-19 on income and health inequality with models informed by the history of disease outbreaks
ESRC as part of UK Research and Innovation’s rapid response to COVID-19
2020-2021
Understanding inequality using administrative data from municipal archives: The case of Glasgow
College Strategic Research Fund - College of Social Sciences
2019-2020
The insurance role of education in pastoralist communities
Global Challenges Research Fund - Scottish Funding Council
2019-2020
Poor among the pastoralists: The importance of bad luck for inequality
Global Challenges Research Fund - Scottish Funding Council
2018-2019
The Leckie Fellowship: Can urbanisation generate benefits for human and ecosystem health?
2017-2022
Modelling persistence in spatially-explicit ecological and epidemiological systems
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
2010-2014
EmergeNET (Network grant)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
2008-2012
Supervision
I supervise students in Ecology/Epidemiology/Population Health, and in Education. Please contact me if you are interested in working with me.
I am currently supervising 4 PhD students, having previously supervised 10 PhD students to completion, as well as numerous MSc projects.
Current PhD Students with a web profile
- Haddou, Yacob
N/A - Qiao, Siqi
Health, Income Inequality and Risk in the Past and Present - Stewart, Gillian
Urban health inequalities from Victorian times to the present
Former PhD students in life sciences/ecosystem and population health
- Ciaran McMonagle - Diversity in causes of mortality in the measurement of population health in Scotland.
- Jaime Earnest - Methods matter: computational modelling in public health policy and planning (co-supervised with Dan Haydon and Kate Reid, Kelvin-Smith studentship)
- Bilal Usmani - Investigation disease persistence in host vector systems: dengue as a case study (co-supervised with Dan Haydon, funded by home institution/government)
Former PhD students based in social sciences
- Haifa Albazie – The factors affecting the use of E-Learning at a Saudi University.
- Tianyi Zhang – Investigating the effects of productive failure and scaffolded learning on the acquisition of communicative competence for Chinese learners of speaking English as a second language.
- Renato Margiotta - Global citizenship education in the biology classroom: an exploratory study in Scotland (co-supervised with Cathy Fagan, funded by home institution)
- Kristen Layne - Environmental communication and behaviour change in the Bible Belt of the United States (co-supervised with Stuart Hanscomb, funded by the College of Social Sciences)
- Alexia Koletsou - Climate change mitigation at the individual level: examining climate change beliefs and energy saving behaviours with the aim to encourage the reduction of end-user energy consumption. (funded by College of Social Sciences studentship)
- Pratchayapong (Kak) Yasri - Views of the relationship between science and religion and their implications for student learning of evolutionary biology. (funding from Royal Thai Government studentship, now a Lecturer in Science and Technology Education, Institute for Innovative Learning, Mahidol University)
- Julie Smith - An investigation in the use of collaborative metacognition during mathematical problem solving. A case study with a primary five class in Scotland. (co-supervised with Vic Lally, funding from College of Social Sciences)
- Vanessa Rasoamampianina - How is encyclopaedia authority established? (co-supervised with Professor Alison Phipps)
Teaching
I am Course Leader of the Fundamentals of Formal Education. I also teach on Seminar in Contemporary Issues in Education, a course that I previously led. Both are compulsory courses of the MSc/MEd in Educational Studies.
I have also taught science and mathematics education/communication, ecological modelling, statistics and programming.
Professional activities & recognition
Prizes, awards & distinctions
- 2013: Best Research Supervisor, Student Teaching Awards (Student Representative Council, University of Glasgow)
Research fellowships
- 2017 - 2022: Leckie Foundation
