Alan Sloane

Dr. Alan Sloane is a Lecturer in the Department in the Department of Food Business & Development, UCC. From 2007 to 2010 he held a Government of Ireland Postgraduate Research Scholarship at UCC, and has been a Lecturer (P/T) in the Dept. of Food Business & Development at UCC since 2011, where he teaches Research Methods and Quantitative Data Analysis at post-graduate (M.Sc.) and under-graduate level. He has published in Mathematics and in Computer Science, as well as in Rural Development and Supply-Chain Management. In addition, he is an active participant in European Social Network workshops and conferences, and was a regular speaker at academic and industry conferences in Software Development. Dr Sloane has extensive experience in large-scale systems architecture and software development in a range of programming languages, as well as having been external examiner in Computer Science at the University of Limerick. As a senior software engineer at Sun Microsystems, he played an active role in developing industry standards, and represented the company on the ISO C++ Programming Language Standards Committee. He is currently consulting and responsible for data analysis, using an online survey platform and SPSS, for a research project on Social Enterprise for the Social Finance Foundation, supported by the Dept. for Rural & Community Development. His research interests are in Business Networks, Supply-Chain Management, and Rural Development.