Sharon is a research assistant and PhD candidate at EDC as well as an associate tutor on the product design Masters programme at Cardiff School of Art and Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University. Growing up in the countryside in Ireland fostered Sharon’s love of the environment from a young age. Her background is in Product Design and Technology, which she studied at the University of Limerick in Ireland and she also has a Postgraduate Certificate in research methods. During her time to date at EDC, she has presented papers at a symposium in Harbin, China, as well as an IEEE conference on Sustainable Systems and Technology in Chicago.

Her core research activity is to deliver a Knowledge Economy Skills Scholarship (KESS) funded PhD research project at EDC, which is being run in conjunction with an industry partner, Orangebox. The research is multidisciplinary, drawing on the fields of product design, materials science and communications. Her specific research interests include: exploration of knowledge transfer of ecodesign for small businesses through utilisation of tools such as Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and Cradle to Cradle (C2C) as well as the contribution such tools can make to open-sourcing of environmental attributes of materials we use in our everyday lives.

Other research interests include new paradigms in communicating traditional and non-traditional material attributes, such as metaphysical material characteristics.