Dr Jane Conway
Dr Jane Conway is an SFI-IRC Pathway Fellow and Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Galway. She established the Scientific Arts Lab a mechanism for exploring the connection between art and science in 2023. She designed and delivered Ireland’s first scientific arts micro-credential in 2024 and established RARE with Lucy in 2024.
Jane completed her training as an experimental psychologist at King’s College London, in the Social, Genetic, & Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, & Neuroscience, where her research was funded by the Economic & Social Research Council UK. She also spent time as a visiting researcher at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, and at the Department of Experimental Psychology and Brasenose College, University of Oxford. Her work concerns the socio-cognitive ability to represent others’ minds and their mental states, and she is especially interested in studying individual differences in this ability.
Dr Lucy Elvis
Dr Lucy Elvis is a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Galway. Her research interests and teaching fall into two broad areas: Public Philosophy and Philosophies of Art and Culture. She is the current co-chairperson of the board of directors at TULCA Festival of Visual Art, a director of CURO thinking for communities and a steering committee member of the Irish Philosophical Society. She established RARE with Jane in 2024.
She has produced and curated gallery programming as a team member at Galleri Pictura (Lund, Sweden) as a director of 126 Artist-Run Gallery (Galway) and as an independent curator. She has facilitated public philosophical thinking at Electric Picnic, in art galleries, schools, theatres, libraries and civic spaces.
She is the PI of AIRE Attentive Inquiry Reclaiming Environment, and team member of the project Philosophical Inquiry with Data Analysts at the Galway InSight Centre.
She has a BA in Art History and international Relations from Leicester University (UK), an MA in Visual Culture from Lund University (Sweden), and a PhD in Philosophy of Art and Culture from the University of Galway.