Ruth Brennan is the principal investigator on CO-SUSTAIN Collaborative Sustainable Innovation: co-designing governance approaches for a sustainable and innovative small-scale fishing industry in the Irish islands. She is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow (2018-2020) in the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities at Trinity College Dublin where she works as a marine social scientist drawing from fields such as marine science (natural and social), environmental humanities, political ecology, law and anthropology. She specialises in ethnographies of small coastal communities and environmental governance at the arts-science-policy interface. Her work offers insights into different ways marine and coastal spaces are conceptualised by users, managers and human-environment interactions, how this relates to natural resource governance challenges and what it means for community engagement. Her research has been published in academic journals and her art-science work has been widely exhibited.