My name is Paul Oldham, I hold a PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and I’m the lead at One World Analytics.
My major interest is the conservation of biodiversity and the rights of indigenous peoples. For much of the 1990s and into the 2000s I worked with a people called the Piaroa in Amazonas in Southern Venezuela. As part of that work I used my research grant to help to establish the Regional Indigenous Peoples of Amazonas (ORPIA) to defend the rights of indigenous peoples in the region. Nearly 25 years on ORPIA is still going.
I remain passionate about the rights of indigenous peoples but I grew dissatisfied with the inability, or unwillingness, of anthropology to address issues of scale. So, as part of my research focusing on debates leading to the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity I moved into large scale analytics.
My work now combines my passion for biodiversity with scientometrics/bibliometrics and patent analytics. So, most of the stuff I write about involves combinations of these topics. I have also been working in R for the last three years and trying to write about it. I am very far away from being expert in R but I really enjoy the enthusiasm and helpfulness of the R community. I am also a big fan of open source and initiative such as ROpenSci.
In the work I do now I write for the World Intellectual Property Organisation on Patent Analytics and work with the German Technical Cooperation (GIZ) and ABS Initiative in capacity building projects to implement the Nagoya Protocol, mainly on Monitoring. This is challenging but fun and gets me out of the house. Most of the posts on the blog are part of work in progress for projects.
Having worked for 10 years at the ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen) my involvement in academia is through a senior visiting fellowship with the Institute for Advanced Study of Sustainability at United Nations University and as an Industrial Fellow with the Manchester Institute for Innovation Research at Manchester Business School. The Manchester group has a great team working on analytics and Responsibile Research and Innovation that I am happy to be a part of.
In my spare time I try to keep a 1972 VW Bay Window camper van and a 1970 VW convertible beetle on the road. I love gardening but am rubbish at growning tomatoes.
This blog is written in RStudio using the great blogdown package by Yihui Xie and built in Hugo.