Management Board

The role of the Digital Futures Management Board is to provide leadership to the University’s multidisciplinary Digital Futures activity, maintaining an overview of the University’s current capabilities in the broad fields encompassed by Digital Futures and identifying actual and potential areas of excellence.

The Board reports to the Digital Futures Strategic Advisory Board.

Key objectives 

The Digital Futures Management Board is responsible for:

  • Raising the profile of Digital Futures within the wider University community, bringing researchers from different disciplines together into multidisciplinary communities
  • Identifying opportunities to build critical mass, maintaining an overview of the current external landscape in terms of research and funding opportunities
  • Building the profile of Digital Futures, encouraging and strengthening links with external stakeholders
  • Encouraging the community to increase the impact of the Digital Futures work on the world of practice

Membership 

The Board is chaired by the Associate Vice President for Digital and comprises the leads for each thematic area.

 

Digital Futures Theme Leads

  • Photo of Richard Kingston

    Director of Digital Futures - Richard Kingston

    Richard Kingston is Professor of Urban Planning and Geographic Information Science at the University of Manchester. His work explores how data and geospatial tools can be harnessed to make cities and regions more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive.

  • Digital Cultures - Luca Scholz

    Luca Scholz is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities, Cultures and Media at the University of Manchester. His work combines archival research and computational methods to study the history of weather, information, law, and freedom of movement.  

  • Digital Cultures - Łukasz Szulc

    Dr Łukasz Szulc (he/him) is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities, Cultures and Media at the University of Manchester. He specializes in critical and cultural studies of digital media at the intersections of gender, sexuality and transnationalism, currently working on dating cultures. 

  • Digital Worlds - Dave Topping

    David Topping is a Professor of The Digital Environment at The University of Manchester. He has spent more than 20 years exploring and expanding the digital ecology that underpins environmental science. 

  • Digital Economy - Mabel Sanchez Barrioluengo

    Mabel Sanchez Barrioluengo is Senior Lecturer in Science Policy and Innovation at the Alliance Manchester Business School and Deputy Director of the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research.  

  • Digital Society - Rachel Gibson

    Rachel Gibson is a Professor of Politics at The University of Manchester. Her research focuses on how digital technologies are changing the way in which election campaigns are fought and won. 

  • Digital Health - Sabine Van der veer

    Sabine is a Professor of Health Informatics in the Division of Informatics, Imaging, and Data Sciences. Trained in Health Informatics at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands), her research focuses on developing, evaluating and implementing digital health technologies to collect and use patient-generated health data to improve care, equity, and outcomes for people living with long-term conditions.