Meet The Faunalysts

Chris Bryant holds a PhD from the University of Bath, and has focused on consumer adoption of cultured meat. He collaborated with Faunalytics on our report investigating naturalness concerns around cultured meat. He is also the Social Science Director for the Cellular Agriculture Society, and co-organizes the Research to End Consumption of Animal Products (RECAP) Group with Faunalytics’ Research Director. He has also worked on research projects with Faunalytics, The Good Food Institute, and Viva!. He earned his BA from the University of Exeter, and his MSc from the University of Bristol.

Jah Ying Chung is a user and market researcher and the co-founder of The Good Growth Co. She has collaborated with Faunalytics on several projects and is a co-leader of the RECAP (Research to End Consumption of Animal Products) group. Her work focuses largely on qualitative and mixed methods research for the animal welfare and alternative protein industry in China. Previously, Jah Ying founded and sold a sponsorship platform serving students across the Asia Pacific, and ran climate change campaigns in China. 

Maneesha Deckha is Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia. She has published in the areas of feminist animal studies, animal law and legalities, law and culture, and bioethics and reproductive law. She is a recipient of multiple national grants and has held the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law and Society at New York University. She is the author of Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders (University of Toronto Press, 2021) and directs the Animal Studies Research Initiative at the University of Victoria. She is a graduate of McGill University, the University of Toronto, and Columbia University.​

Marina Milyavskaya is an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University and collaborates with Faunalytics on our research about the strategies new veg*ns use to maintain their diets. She conducts research on goal pursuit, motivation, and self-regulation, and is excited to apply her skills and passion to research on dietary change and other animal-friendly behaviors. More details about her research can be found on her lab page.

Jamie Parry is an independent researcher who collaborated with Faunalytics on the project Relative Effectiveness of Different Approaches to Advocacy. He previously worked as a consumer research scientist at The Good Food Institute, conducting research on perceptions of the plant-based food category, and also has experience conducting market research for food and beverage companies. He earned his BA from the University of Sussex and his MSc from the University of Glasgow.

Steven Shepherd is an Assistant Professor of Marketing and International Business at Oklahoma State University’s Spears School of Business. He researches how various beliefs and ideologies (e.g., political ideology) and social issues (e.g. related to gender, race, and socioeconomic status) relate to issues in marketing and management. He has a PhD is social psychology (University of Waterloo) and completed a post-doctoral research position in marketing at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

Gregg Sparkman is a postdoctoral research associate in the Andlinger Center at Princeton University. His research is focused on understanding social change, including the causes and consequences of norms shifting over time on behavior and policy attitudes. He completed his PhD at Stanford University in social psychology, where he investigated how people are influenced by witnessing social change (dynamic norms) and how this can be incorporated into interventions in social, environmental, and political domains, including how to reduce meat consumption. Gregg collaborated with Faunalytics on our “Reduce” Or “Go Veg” study.

Laura Thomas-Walters is a PhD researcher at the University of Kent. She working to improve the design and evaluation of interventions to reduce demand for wildlife products, drawing together research from multiple fields such as public health and international development. She has used both quantitative and qualitative research methods to measure the success of demand reduction campaigns, and has developed a theoretical framework of motivations for wildlife use. She is also exploring how local cultural values can be used to create more effective messages.