Melanie Hoewer joined SPIRE in 2012. Before that she was teaching in the UCD School of Social Justice and in the Irish School of Ecumenics in TCD and she worked in a EU-Daphne funded project on Gender Violence and LGBT rights and on issues of conflict transformation, human rights and social justice for Amnesty International (Irish Section), the Latin American Solidarity Centre and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (Mexico and Colombia). She is academic adviser to the Consultative Group of the Department of Foreign Affairs on the UNSCR 1325 Action Plan on women, peace and security in Ireland.

Melanie's primary areas of research are comparative ethno-national identity, conflict and settlement processes, gender equality and women's rights, Latin American politics and Northern Ireland. Her PhD thesis examined gender and identity in peace and conflict processes in Northern Ireland and Chiapas, Mexico. She has since written on intersecting boundary processes in the ethno-national conflict and settlement processes, gender identity and women's rights in Iran and Ireland, approaches to Gender Based Violence in Ireland and the status of women in Ireland.

Ben Tonra is Jean Monnet Professor ad personam of European Foreign, Security and Defence Policy and Associate Professor of International Relations at the UCD School of Politics and International Relations. In UCD he teaches, researchesand publishes in European foreign, security and defence policy, Irish foreignand security policy and International Relationstheory. From 2005 to 2010 he was Director of the Graduate School at the UCD College of Human Sciences. Outside the university Ben serves as chair of the Royal Irish Academy's Standing Committee on International Affairs and is the Project Leader for a research programme in EU security and defence policy at the Institute of International and European Affairs (IIEA), Dublin. From 1997-1999 he was a Lecturer at the Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth and from 1993 to 1996 he was a Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Trinity College Dublin (TCD). From 1989-1991 he was a Research Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Washington DC. Professor Tonra was born in the United States, is a graduate of the University of Limerick (BA and MA) and completed his doctoral studies at TCD in 1996.