The Trust Lab
Dr Gabriela Jiga-Boy
Principal Investigator
Prof Yvonne McDermott Rees
Co-investigator
Dr Dion Curry
Co-investigator
Gabriela is Senior Lecturer in psychology at Swansea University. She has a BSc from Babes-Bolyai University (Romania) and a MSc and PhD in experimental social psychology from Universite Grenoble Alpes (France). Gabriela researches political trust, motivation, and behaviour change. She advised Public Health Wales on embedding behaviour change knowledge in public health interventions. Gabriela teaches behaviour change and research methods, and was affiliate teaching staff at UCL in social cognition and attitude change.
Yvonne is Professor in law at Swansea University. She is Principal Investigator on project TRUE, which explores trust in user-generated evidence of human rights violations. Prior to this, she led OSR4Rights, a multi-disciplinary project that examined how open source research has transformed the landscape of human rights fact-finding. Yvonne is Legal Advisor to the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) and Associate Academic Fellow of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple.
Dion is Associate Professor in politics at Swansea University. He studies interactions between actors, policies, and processes involved in public service delivery and governance. His research focuses on mechanisms that enable or hinder effective governance, and how they affect political trust, legitimacy, and accountability. He translated research to policy by working with the EU, Welsh Government, Senedd, and Cabinet Office, and in diverse academic/professional contexts in Canada, Hungary, the Netherlands, Lithuania, and the UK.
Keiron Burgess
Research Assistant
Keiron is Doctoral candidate in Politics at Swansea University, UK. His PhD research focusses on the complex relationship between pandemic health crises and political regime stability. He is also Senior Teaching Assistant within the Faculty of Politics, Philosophy and International Relations, and is associate members of the Royal Society of Medicine and the Royal Society for Public Health.
Jellen Olivares-Jirsell
Research Assistant
Jellen is Doctoral candidate in Politics at Kingston University, UK. Before joining Swansea University, she co-developed research at the Technical University of Munich (Germany) and Malmo University (Sweden), and published in Global Affairs and Populism journals. Her research interests encompass politics, norms and ideologies, focusing on populism, neoliberalism, welfare states, trust, liberalism, and polarisation.
Does trust matter? Setting up a research agenda and engagement toolkit.