Author: Early Career Researcher Institute

“Beauty of a more colourful world” – CEP X Dyson X ICBS PhD Flash Mob #1

Blog by Yurong Yu, PhD student from the Centre for Environmental Policy

In response to the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) and the environmental crisis, we, a few of PhD students from Centre for Environmental Policy (CEP), Dyson School of Design Engineering (Dyson) and Imperial Business School (ICBS), initiated the event, “Beauty of a More Colourful World”. The event brought together 12 PhD students from 6 departments to showcase how their research ties into addressing environmental problems. 

Students are waiting to sign in (photo credit to Yunwan Tao)

The event took place on Wednesday 1st of December 2021 and was a cross-departmental initiative, aiming to create a unique opportunity to gather researchers and wider college community with shared interests in conservation, biodiversity, sustainability, and climate change & the environment more broadly. The 12 PhD student presenters ran 9 stalls with different topics in the Queen’s Tower Rooms. The detailed topics can be found in the map below.

Event map (created by Judy Xie)

A general public audience from across Imperial were invited to this event. They were encouraged to learn about all 9 different projects and could take part in quizzes with questions spanning each stall to demonstrate their newfound knowledge and win prizes. It was a fun and immersive event which saw high turnout, with attendees enjoying the stalls, snacks, drinks and, of course, prizes!

The prize for quiz winners (photo credit to Yunwan Tao)

As the organizers initiating this event, we (Yurong Yu and Neel Le Penru), realized the complexity of environmental problems requires interdisciplinary collaboration, so interdepartmental communication among researchers is critical. More importantly, it is crucial for junior researchers to learn how to communicate their research to a lay audience, to achieve a great impact. After some discussion, we came up with the idea of inviting interactive and entertaining presentations from multiple departments, using the formats of demos, prototypes, installations, games,  and so on, to inspire members of our Imperial community.  

Yurong and Yuruo played a video of training students to plant coral reef in Hainan, China, as well as a PowerPoint presentation to explain the whole project, receiving great feedback from the audience. This project is part of Yurong’s PhD research of how to increase public awareness of conservation, which can further lead to a fundamental behaviour change.

One group of the presenters, Yurong Yu (CEP) and Yuruo Lin (Department of Life Sciences) are explaining their research on coral reef conservation to the audience (photo credit to Yunwan Tao)

Neel’s presentation featured  a ‘listening station’ with sounds and images from the Bornean rainforest.  His research group  explore EcoAcoustic Monitoring, which involves listening to the natural environment’s soundscape to infer metrics of ecosystem health. They designed and deployed a network of low-cost, open-source field recorders to passively and continuously monitor various environments. They then analysed this data with techniques including machine learning (for predicting aspects of ecosystem health) and, more recently, spatial audio analysis (for locating sounds). As part of the Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems (SAFE) project, they are specifically using EcoAcoustic Monitoring to explore how human pressures are impacting globally vital rainforest ecosystems by analysing soundscapes across a habitat degredation gradient from primary rainforest to oil palm plantations in Malaysian Borneo.

Neel Le Penru (Dyson & Department of Life Sciences) is playing sounds from the tropical rainforest for an attendee (photo credit to Yunwan Tao)

Francesca Lugaresi and her colleagues from Department of Mechanical Engineering are part of Imperial Hazelab, the research group studying heat transfer, combustion and fire science. Francesca’s research is on improving the façade of a building, to increase its sustainability performance and reduce energy use.  

Francesca Lugaresi (Department of Mechanical Engineering) is explaining the lab work of her research group

Matilde Faralli is a second-year PhD student from Department of Finance, ICBS. Her research is about preserving financial stability. To achieve this, a key part is to understand how to correctly assess and price climate-related risks.  Her work studies: how to incorporate natural hazards such as wildfires, flooding, etc. into expectations and forecasts; how climate risks shape public perception of future natural disasters and the associated economic damages; and, how to forecast adjustments following climate events. 

Matilde Faralli (Business School) is presenting her research about climate risks in daily financial decisions

The event received great feedback from our audience. Professor Mark Burgman, the Director of CEP commented, “It is a very well-organized event, with impressive attendance across Imperial. I enjoyed these presentations very much.” Kevin Sum, our volunteer journalist, interviewed a few attendees on the day, and heard from  Xilan, an MSc student from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,  that the event made her realize there are so many disciplines at Imperial that are environment–related, and that they are all so fun!

Some prize winners at the end of the event (photo credit to Yunwan Tao)

Many presenters found the interaction with the audience was beyond their expectations too. Sander Valk (Dyson) found it pleasant that so many students and faculty members are interested in learning his climate change related card game. Victoria Hoare (CEP), Riqi Zhang (CEP), Karina Corada Perez (CEP), Erika Piroli (CEP) and Ric Zhang (Dyson) all found the format of this event very engaging. The quiz competition “nudged” the audience to approach presenters and ask more questions about their research. Sander said, “I loved the format of the event!” 

Please read more about all presentations here: tinyurl.com/cepflashmob1  

Last but not least, we are grateful for the generous financial support from the Graduate School and Centre for Environmental Policy for this event.  

Urban Resilience Dialogues: Growing an online community through a research podcast

By Corina Angheloiu, PhD Student, Centre for Environmental Policy

As the pandemic has unfolded, as PhD students we’ve had to rethink the ways in which we conduct our research, share and discuss findings, as well as build networks and seed collaborations. In this blog post, I’ll share my experience of co-developing a podcast in this attempt to adapt.

Why a podcast?

I’m a third year PhD student in the Centre for Environmental Policy and my research focuses on the ways we can tackle increasing gaps between the knowledge and the implementation of urban resilience. As a field, urban resilience has never seemed more vital over the past year – we’ve seen the ways in which different cities have dealt with challenges posed by a shock such as the pandemic, as well as challenges arising from the overlap of shocks (such as hurricanes or wildfires) or the overlap between the impact of the pandemic and existing underlying stressors such as air pollution, demographics, or inequality.

However, as researchers, practitioners, and policy makers we’ve been lacking spaces to pause and reflect and to dig deeper into the tricky topics that we usually discuss on the sideline of conferences, official events, trainings or social gatherings. With most events being moved online, we’ve been overwhelmed by the volume of urban resilience webinars and conferences. Although these are valuable contributions, I sensed a gap in facilitated dialogues and smaller scale spaces for discussion and connection.

How did we do it?

With this in mind, myself and urban resilience practitioner Chiara Tomaselli decided to start a podcast where we can explore key urban resilience issues with different guests, as well as facilitate discussions among the wider community of resilience professionals. To do so, we decided to record our podcasts using Zoom, and invite members of our wider urban resilience community of practice to join us live for the recording sessions and stay for a conversation and reflections afterward.

So far we’ve produced four episodes and have plans for two more and one recap as part of this first season. In episode 1, we travelled to Santiago de Chile to explore the role of memory in urban resilience with Cristobal Reveco, episode 2 took us to Calgary where we talked about all things feminism with Jenna Dutton, while in episode 3 we discussed the topic of vulnerability in the context of Wayanad with Mrudhula Koshy. Our fourth episode is just out – and this time we interrogate the meaning, application, scaling (and failure) of urban experiments with Federico Savini.

What we’ve learnt

We started thinking about this idea of a podcast with no knowledge of the production skills required so it has felt like a steep learning curve! We’ve found that producing one episode a month is a manageable rhythm with our other commitments, and we usually plan one episode ahead. We’ve also found it really valuable to have a warm up chat with our guest of the month, to bounce ideas about the topic we want to explore and get to know each other.

When we started we thought our topics were relatively niche compared to many other podcasts, especially ones that explore wider urban issues. However, we were blown away by the success so far – we’ve had more than 400 listeners, while the live recording sessions have built a regular attendance of about 10-15 urban resilience professionals with whom we’ve had great conversations at the end of the live recording. This has been a great encouragement and we’re now already thinking of the structure for our next season.

In conclusion, I’d really recommend podcasting as a format for dissemination and engagement – and why not, as a research method in its own right!

You can listen to all the podcast episodes on your app of choice by following this link.

This research podcast has been made possible with financial support from the Graduate School Research Community Fund.

Department of Infectious Diseases PhD Student Welcome

At the beginning of October, PhD students from the Department of Infectious Diseases were able to come together at a welcome event. Students from all year groups and based across multiple campuses met at a local pub for a friendly drink. PhD Welcome eventAt the first of what we hope are many events throughout the academic year, we laid the base of a strong foundation to create a supportive, engaging and friendly network of students from across the department. We were able to discuss lab problems and share career planning advice, as well as stories from the lockdown and our favourite local take outs! This was a wonderful reminder of the community to be found within our department, and as the year progresses the student reps hope to continue to build an inclusive environment for PhD students. 

Please watch your emails for future DoID PhD cohort events, which allow you to meet and make connections with your fellow students from across the department. 

PhD Welcome event

Walking Tour in London

By David Uribe Saenz De Camara, PhD Student, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Friday 22nd October saw 13 tribology PhD students joining the “London City of Sin” walking tour and discovering that darker history that cannot be learnt from books. This activity was undertaken as a team building exercise to help integrate new students into the group as mingling in a non-academic environment has not been possible since the Covid outbreak.

Around 6PM, the group headed to Waterloo and stocked up on refreshments as preparation for the 2.5-hour walk. At 7PM, they met their tour guide Vincent and started the stroll along South Bank -now an iconic area but once a medieval red-light district-. They walked through both landmarks and some of the lesser-known side streets, and heard fascinating stories from history, of Shakespeare, vice, gore, and lust. Around 9.30PM, the walking tour came to an end, and some energetic students finished the day with a drink in the iconic pub “The Mudlark”.  

We are thankful to the Graduate School Research Community Fund for their financial support to sponsor the walking tour and help us improving the engagement in the Tribology research community.

The SynBIC goes to the Isle of Wight

By Javier Cabello Garcia, PhD Student, Department of Bioengineering

After a really tough year, the members of the SynBIC decided to organize a trip to bring back together PhD and Master’s students. This way, we could give a proper welcome to the new arrivals in the team! After thinking about what the best place for our meet and greet would be, we reached the logical conclusion that there is no better place than a garlic farm! So, we headed to the Isle of Wight to visit its garlic farm and the island surroundings.

SynBIC

The day trip to the Isle of Wight took place on Friday 2nd of July, 2021. Our voyage started at 8.30 when we got a coach from Victoria station. During the 2 hours trip, we hang out talking with each other and playing card games. Once in Portsmouth, we walked to the port where we rode the hovercraft that brought us to the Isle of Wight. The hovercraft was an experience itself! You do not fly over the water every day.

Hovercraft

Later that morning, a bus transported us to the Isle of Wight garlic farm, a place of international renown. There, we enjoyed lunch (always respecting current COVID restrictions!). We visited the farm afterwards, taking a stroll through the garlic while listening about all the different garlic variants that they grow.

garlic farm

After that, we took a bus back to Ryde beach. This bus also happened to be a tourist bus, so we could quickly see other attractions of the isle of Wight, like the big cat sanctuary or the vineyard. The discovery of the latest caused a small mutiny among some members of the expedition, that questioned why we went to the garlic farm instead of the vineyard (Author’s note: Even when garlic is far superior). After putting down mercilessly the insurrection, we arrived at Ryde beach where we hiked and carried out some team building activities. There, we had some time to know each other better and give a warm welcome to the newcomers! We even had some time to talk about our current projects, which sparked some collaborations between the members of the centre!

SynBIC

After a full day of activities, we took the hovercraft back to Portsmouth, where we took the coach back to Victoria. On the trip back, some were chatting, others fast asleep, but most of us were simply watching Spain obliterate Switzerland in the Euros! 

The atmosphere in the trip back was completely different from the outbound journey. We were more talkative, and the groups mingled together. So I guess the trip was a success! We had a great experience meeting new people and participating in the activities. New arrivals could introduce themselves and get to know their new lab mates. On the other hand, senior members were able to reencounter in a more relaxed and ludic environment. At the end of the journey, we all had a clearer idea about other members’ research and who they are outside the lab. Additionally, the experience increased our sense of belonging to a group. Everybody (even the vineyard insurgents) concluded that the trip was a great experience from a professional and personal point of view. 

And of course, we especially acknowledge Imperial College London Graduate School for sponsoring our day trip to the Isle of Wight. Their funding has been vital for the PhD and master students at the SynBIC!

Presenting my research at the Rising Scientist Day

By Jonathan Li, PhD Student, Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction

Hi, I’m Jonathan.  I’m a 3rd year PhD student studying signalling pathways in the myometrium. I presented my research at the Rising Scientist Day hosted by Faculty of Medicine. It is a one day conference that allows PhD students from multiple backgrounds to present their work. Usually, the symposium offers a great chance to network with other PhD students and to find out what their research is all about. This year, due to COVID-19, the format was slightly different than previous years, where everything was done remotely.  Nonetheless, the event was still a great success. 

The day started off with a number of 3 minute thesis talks, then this was followed by intermissions and lunch breaks where we could view the posters. Given the challenges of hosting a symposium remotely, the day went very smoothly with only a few technical hitches due to the overwhelming number of people wanting to listen in on the talks. One of the advantages of having a remote symposium is that students who are not based in London can attend these events, where we had one speaker dial in from South East Asia! 

The remote nature of the symposium meant that a poster session was not possible. However, the posters were consolidated into one website that was very accessible. Whilst lacking the benefits of having a scientist explaining their work in person. The posters were submitted along with a 1 minute recording. One of the challenges is how do you explain your research in such a short amount of time without being there in person.  Suffice to say the approaches of how to tackle this problem were varied, where some chose to adopt QR codes, some used hyper-links.  The sheer amount of thought and consideration to these limitations, coupled with the high quality of research in these posters made it feel like I was attending an international conference.  

The sheer variety of fields was also very eye opening, ranging from preterm labour (my research focus) to things like embryonic stem cells or avian influenza viral research.  As a final year PhD student, I can say from personal experience it is very easy to focus on your own project, as the deadlines mount and you try to complete experiments or gather more data. The symposium provides an excellent chance to find out about other projects ongoing at Imperial. 

Overall, the day was a wonderful experience and having the chance to see the excellent research that is being carried out by my peers makes for a nice break from the routine of lab work. Whilst the symposium lacks the in-person touch this year, I’m looking forward to similar future events when COVID-19 restrictions are relaxed. I would highly recommend PhD students to submit their work if they have the chance next year.  

Many thanks to the staff members who helped organise the event. 

A Unique Rising Scientist Day

By Alexander Carver, PhD student, Department of Infectious Disease

Hi, I’m Alex, a second year PhD student studying in Professor Xiaodong Zhang’s group. On 20th April, I was lucky enough to take part in Rising Scientist Day 2021 and win the 3-minute thesis competition. It has been a tough year for PhD students across Imperial College with the coronavirus pandemic taking a toll on what has been possible to achieve in the lab; however, it was very impressive to see what people have been working on for the last 1-2 years. The day consisted of poster viewing sessions in which all 2nd and 3rd year PhD students in the Faculty of Medicine were expected to compete. The posters were of exceptional quality, and the winners did a great job in producing posters worthy of any conference. 

In addition to poster viewing sessions, 25 PhD students were also nominated to produce a single slide summarising their research which they would present to the audience (over Zoom) in a maximum of three-minutes. Undoubtedly a big challenge, the field was full of great talks, ranging from discussion of new Hepatitis treatments in Eastern Asia to understanding the role of microbiota in immunity. My talk examined the regulation of the DNA damage response, particularly the proteins involved in Homologous Recombination, a pathway of repair essential for the maintenance of genome integrity. 

We were also treated to two talks by two recent Imperial College alumni who gave us an insight into what they achieved with their PhDs. Despite both alumni completing a PhD in the Faculty of Medicine, they both had gone into different careers that have used the skills gained during their doctoral research. The first, Zoe Seager, told us much about what it is like to be a post-doctoral researcher in academia. It was a very interesting listen, and many questions were asked about how to go about writing an excellent thesis and articles for publication, as well as how to apply for jobs in academia. The second alumnus, Sophie Ward, did not do a post-doctoral research role in academia but had instead gone into strategy at the Wellcome Trust. In particular, she played a key role in the Covid-response by the Trust. Despite the exit from academic, *name* talk demonstrated that having a PhD gives you the skills necessary to turn your hand to any job, within or without academia. 

Overall, despite the obvious effect of Covid making the Rising Scientist Day not what it could have been, it was heartening to see the quality and diverse range of research that has continued to speed ahead. I would like to thank all the other competitors in both the Poster and 3-Minute Thesis competitions, especially the winners (as listed below). 

Three-Minute Thesis: 

  1. Alex Carver 
  2. Max Larkinson
  3. Catherine Cherry 

Poster: 

  1. Maddalena Cerrone 
  2. Jonathan Li 
  3. Golly Mobayen 

Most fun poster: Ioanna Panagi 

I would also like to thank the organisers of the day, including Hayley Kendall-Berry and Kevin Murphy, who expertly hosted the event despite the early Zoom-related technical issues. Hopefully we’ll be back to presenting in person next year and will be able to enjoy some well-deserved nibbles and vino afterwards!

The Crick-Imperial Symposium 2021

Every three years, PhD students from The Francis Crick Institute and Imperial College hold a symposium dedicated to enabling students from both institutions to share their research through posters and talks in a supportive environment. Obviously, this year had to be a little different. The event had to held virtually as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic which posed new challenges. A key objective of this event is the provide a platform for graduate students from a range of scientific backgrounds to network and work together, something we can all agree is much more challenging behind a computer screen!

We decided that alongside using Zoom for the talks we would use Gather.Town for the posters and networking. We felt this best replicated the networking opportunities normally facilitated at these events as Gather.Town lets you speak with people 1-1 and in small groups. You can design different rooms for people to browse (see pictures for the main foyer and Perkin Elmer’s room).

Alongside the PhD speakers we had Professor Aldo Faisal and Geraldine Cox as plenary speakers. Apart from being inspiring and captivating speakers, their talks also complimented the interdisciplinary nature of the symposium.

Professor Faisal is a Professor of AI & Neuroscience jointly at the Dept. of Bioengineering and the Dept. of Computing at Imperial College London, where he leads the Brain & Behaviour Lab. He talked about his work on using wearables to record natural human behaviour and training AI with this data to improve performance of machine vision for self-driving cars or help mobility of wheelchairs of paralysed patients. (find more about his work https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/a.faisal).

Geraldine Cox has degrees in physics and fine art and began her project called ‘Finding Patterns’ in 2011 at Imperial College London with an ‘Artist in Residence Award’ from the Leverhulme Trust. Since then, her work has grown to involve scientists from other universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and MIT. See her talk here. Both talks were really engaging and offered interesting new perspectives. As Geraldine’s talk rounded off the day, she joined us in Gather.Town for the final networking session and facilitated some excellent discussions!

Examples of Geraldine’s work: Harmony and Universe

Prizes were awarded for the top 3 talks and posters, voted for by the other attendees. This gave us an opportunity to recognise the excellent work being done by PhD students from both institutions and helped to engage the audience. We also held a raffle based on who attended the Perkin Elmer booth, for which they kindly donated 10 £25 vouchers as prizes. This added an incentive for participation as we know this can sometimes be difficult at virtual events!

We know that virtual events can be a challenge and we just want to say a massive thank you to everyone who participated so enthusiastically in the symposium! We hope it was a good opportunity to present your work to an audience of more diverse backgrounds and that you got the chance to engage with each other as much as possible. We look forward to seeing you all in person sometime soon!

From the lab to the ward, and back again

by Dr Sonia Wolf, Department of Infectious Disease

In January 2020, talk of a new virus in Wuhan emerged. As whispers spread about what it was and where it had come from, my curiosity was only that of an interested PhD student in the Department of Infectious Disease. As the epidemic grew and spread, however, I became increasingly aware that, as a medical doctor, my skills on the frontline were going to be needed. As college shut down, my research samples sat sadly in the freezer, while I tried (and failed) to write from home. The email came at the end of March; I was going to Newham Hospital, as an Acute Medical Registrar.

It was a daunting redeployment for me. I had been out of clinical work for over 2 years; I had never worked at Newham, and this was not my usual specialty, Haematology. I went for training on how to use a ventilator. The hospital was eerily quiet; busy but calm, everyone transporting patients briskly from A&E to the wards, behind expressionless masked faces. I started on night shifts, covering the Care of the Elderly wards. I had never in my career seen anything like this. There were 9 wards, excluding Intensive Care, at Newham, and 8 and a half were filled with Covid patients. For most of the elderly, deemed too frail for Intensive Care, this was their only option. For many of them at that time, the only thing we could do was increase the oxygen to the maximum level, then watch to see if they made it through. Many did not.

Dr Sonia Wolf
Dr Sonia Wolf

In the doctors’ mess, doctors of all backgrounds and ages rested, chatted or ate midnight noodles, supplied by the canteen. Many of us had come from research, or non-acute specialties like HIV Medicine and Dermatology, and those who traditionally filled Acute Medicine roles helped support us as we adjusted to the circumstances.

After about two weeks I fell ill with Covid myself and spent two weeks recovering. When I returned, the usual diversity of hospital life was returning. Covid was still there; plenty of it, but now we had suicide attempts, alcohol withdrawal and late-presenting cancers. These were the unseen casualties of the pandemic. We also had to talk to each relative by phone every day, trying to pass news one way, and love, without sight or touch, the other.

I returned to my lab work in June. It was a relief but also sad to say goodbye to so many incredible colleagues, both old and new. I learned that I love clinical work, but the toll it took on us was huge.  I hope what I did was able, in a small part, to buy some time, in order to allow the scientific community to continue their incredible efforts.

1st MRC Centre for Environment and Health’s Sustainability Workshop

by Aina Roca Barceló

On the 29th of January 2020, a group of students and staff members from Imperial College London gathered with one objective: to identify the barriers to a more sustainable workspace. This was part of the 1st MRC Centre for Environment and Health’s Sustainability Workshop, organised by the MRC Researchers Society’s co-chair Aina Roca Barceló (1st year President PhD Scholar), supported by the MRC Centre for Environment and Health, within the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department (EBS), represented by Drs Fred Piel and Eduardo Seleiro. This was kindly funded by the Graduate School’s Research Community Fund.

For a long time, I (and a lot of people out there) believed that information would lead to change. We now know this is not necessarily correct for climate action. The planet is warming – we know it. Long-term changes in climate, biodiversity, air, water and soil quality are caused by human actions – we know it. We are running out of time to minimise the damage to Earth – we know it. We need to change our behaviours if we want to save humanity and the planet – again, we know it. We are probably the most well informed generation that the Earth has seen [1] and yet, we can’t seem to change fast enough, and not at all in some fronts. Even more alarming is the fact that those advocating for this change often fail to make the necessary changes themselves. Ironic, isn’t it? Yet, this is the reality for many Academic environments. The 1st MRC Centre for Environment and Health’s Sustainability Workshop was designed to change this drift and create the momentum to initiate a sustainability journey in the department. This involved creating an engaging space for students at the School of Public Health (staff members were also welcomed) to identify barriers to sustainable behaviours and generate ideas for action.

Prof. Paul Lickiss, Academic Sustainability Leader at Imperial College London, presenting the current reality of the university and its future plans in relation to its sustainable practises.

The first stop of our journey; where are we starting from? To do so, we invited Prof. Paul Lickiss, the new Academic Leader in Sustainability for Imperial College London. He guided us through all the past, present and future initiatives happening at Imperial. Several of the initiatives described and available resources were unknown by most of the audience, which highlighted the need for better communication.

 

Dr. Nicola Hogan, Sustainability Manager for the Sustainability Team at King’s College London, giving some useful tips on how to make institutions greener, building on her previous experience.

Second stop; how are others moving? Dr Nicola Hogan from the Sustainability Team at King’s College London shared with us a collection of “lessons learned” from their long-running and highly-successful sustainability programme, giving us useful practical tips for achieving rapid changes.

Third stop; why are we not moving? We were determined to identify concrete problems and the barriers to more sustainable behaviours. To do this, we ran a behavioural change co-creation workshop with a user-centred approach. The idea was to promote an environment and state of mind that puts aside prejudice and preconceived ideas and fosters empathy, introspection and creative thinking. One of the activities we used to endorse empathy and explore barriers was role playing. In small groups, participants mapped potential unsustainable actions in a normal day of a fictional character and discussed reasons for such actions, based on that character’s story. To the surprise of most participants, barriers were often neither financial nor relating to knowledge (despite these being the focus of most campaigns and initiatives) but emotional, cultural or social instead. This, and the rest of activities highlighted the complex mixture of barriers that conditions behavioural changes, while also creating a nice engaging drive to push for change.

Participants and keynote speakers networking during our sustainable and eco-friendly lunch.

Final stop; let’s move! Of the barriers and unsustainable practises identified in the activities, each group picked a few and brainstormed ideas on how to break those walls that inhibit people to change. Groups were encouraged to think big, to think outside the box, we wanted to drift away from the standard initiatives and create something unique and suitable for our audience.

What is next, you may be wondering? Well, the workshop helped to create a nice momentum that we aim to keep exploring in the coming months. So far, the lines of work that have arose from the workshop include: the creation of a working group focusing on looking in more detail into the ideas generated in the workshop and suggesting potential changes to make the university more sustainable; organizing awareness campaigns; continue to grow our relationship with the Academic Sustainability Leader Prof. Paul Lickiss, and starting some conversations with other groups across the college with similar interests to join up and bring forces together. So, stay tuned to know more about what we found out. Soon on our website!

Overall, the workshop was well received by both the participants and the keynote speakers, who engaged in part of the co-creation workshop. Based on the feedback, the workshop helped to create a great space to discuss with peers’ and institutional representatives’ views, concerns and ideas to keep pushing our university forward and set the seed for a sustainability network.

Co-organizer Aina Roca Barcelo (1st year President Scholar PhD student) introducing the first activity of the co-creation workshop.
Picture of the “Know your problem” activity, where the different issues raised where classified based on “how many people is affected” and whether the problem is “institutional or individual”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Funding disclaimer: This initiative has been possible thanks to the generous support from the Community Research Seed Fund, Imperial College London.

[1] Obviously, with some communities remaining in the shadow of this information pandemic due to social, economic and technical limitations