Robert Miller is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Queen's University, Belfast. He was a co‑founder of ARK and is a former Associate Director.

His career focused on questions of social mobility, broadly conceived; beginning with quantitative academic survey work as Research Associate and then Principal Investigator on the project ‘Determinants of Occupational Status and Mobility in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic’, the benchmark study of social mobility in Ireland, and continuing with often highly controversial applications of mobility techniques to the investigation of religious discrimination and gender and political involvement in Northern Ireland. He helped create the European Sociological Association at the beginning of the 90s and served a term as its General Secretary. He moved to qualitative biographical methods in mid-career and directed Euroidentities, a major European Commission-funded investigation of European identity.

He is now largely retired but maintains an interest in academic life, mainly through the use of in-depth family histories to investigate poverty escapes and the intergenerational transmission of poverty within families in developing countries.

Gillian Robinson is Emeritus Professor of Social Research and ARK Associate at Ulster University. Based in the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences, Gillian worked with colleagues to establish ARK as a cross-university resource (with Queen’s University Belfast) providing access to social and political information on Northern Ireland in 2000.  She has been involved in the monitoring of social attitudes in Northern Ireland since 1989 and was co-director of the Northern Ireland Life and Times survey series. She led the ARK Ageing Programme at Ulster University.

Gillian co-ordinated the Accounts of the Conflict project www.ulster.ac.uk/accounts, a digital archive of personal accounts of the conflict in and about Northern Ireland. This archive is a valuable new addition to the CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet www.cain.ulster.ac.uk) web resource. Gillian worked closely with INCORE (International Conflict Research Institute www.ulster.ac.uk/incore) where she was Director 2003-2008.

Her research interests include peace monitoring, social attitudes, gender roles, policy development in transition and research methodology including issues around researching violent societies and comparative methods.  She has published extensively on these issues and has led teams that have developed over 40 online publicly accessible databases. She is the 2003 Eisenhower Fellow from Northern Ireland.