Dr Gekara is Associate Professor in the College of Business and Law at RMIT University. His research expertise is in the area of skills development and workforce planning in the context of industrial transformations and the future of work. In this respect, he has undertaken research and published journal papers and book chapters on seafarer training and the changing global dynamics of skills development and labour supply in the shipping sector. He is the co-founder and leader of the Skills, Training and Industry Research Group (STIRN) at RMIT, which develops and disseminates important research in the general area of skills, work and employment. Prof. Helen Sampson has studied the shipping industry and seafarers since 1999. Her research and publications in this area have focussed on: work; skills and training; regulation; corporate social responsibility; gender; transnationalism; structured social space; health and wellbeing; ship-shoreinteraction and the use of mandatory equipment. Helen has also contributed to debates on research methods and has published articles and chapters on: researcher risk; Delphi groups; pilot studies; real life vignettes; and accessing elites. She is interested in the emerging area of Human-Animal Studies (HAS) and has undertaken research on horse welfare in Wales and power relationships between horses and their keepers. In 2014 she won the British Sociological Association/BBC prize for Ethnography for her book International Seafarers and Transnationalism in the Twenty-First Century.
