UCL International Policy Fellows announced

A delegation of UCL researchers engaged in environmental governance and climate change will take part in an international study visit, alongside peers from the University of Geneva and the University of Zurich.

Over three days of lectures, workshops and networking events in Europe’s UN capital, curated by the Geneva Science Policy Interface (GSPI), the cross-disciplinary group of participants will have the opportunity to learn directly from a range of experts about the policy landscape in Geneva, how research informs policy at international level, and effective strategies for bridging academia and policy engagement. The group will also be hosted by the UK Permanent Representative to the UN and the WTO Simon Manley CMG, for a networking reception with UCL alumni.

The UCL community plays a vital role in addressing the complex challenges we face today and has a transformative impact on local, national and international policy debates, including in influencing decision-makers to implement effective climate change policies.

Co-organised by UCL Global Engagement, UCL European Institute and UCL Public Policy in collaboration with GSPI, this pilot programme comes as part of a broader initiative to build capacity among UCL researchers to engage with international policymakers.

Dr Kate Greer, Senior Research Fellow, UCL Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education, said: “This fellowship feels like a remarkable opportunity to gain insight into Geneva’s policy landscape and how the people who work within it navigate its complexity. I am particularly looking forward to building this understanding together with a group of colleagues who have diverse research interests related to climate change and environmental governance.”

This year’s fellows

Dr Glory Atilola is a Senior Research Fellow in Environmental Epidemiology at UCL Institute of Child Health. He has been involved in multiple projects investigating the link between environmental exposures and health and birth outcomes, including respiratory infections, cardiovascular diseases, metabolic diseases and cardiometabolic biomarkers. His research interest lies at the interface of environmental health, epidemiology and public policy.

Dr Clemence Cavoli is an Assistant Professor based at the Centre for Transport Studies, part of UCL Engineering. She specialises in environmental and transport policy and planning, particularly linked with sustainable urban mobility. Currently, she leads the project 'T-SUM' (Transition to Sustainable Urban Mobility), a cross-sector initiative to develop sustainable and inclusive transport in rapidly growing cities in the Global South, specifically Mozambique and Sierra Leone.

Dr Kate Greer is Senior Research Fellow at the UCL Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education. Kate’s research is in the field of environmental and climate change education, and examines related policy and policy influence, as well as social and environmental justice concerns.

Dr Allison Lindner is a Lecturer in Law at UCL Faculty of Laws. Allison’s work focuses on waste, sustainable development, and the informal economy in the Global South. She runs the Waste Law Reading Group, a discussion group for early to mid-career legal academics. Prior to entering academia, Allison worked as a legal researcher.

Dr Maria Perez-Ortiz is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and the Department of Computer Science at UCL. She is co-founder and Director of the first MSc programme on Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Development, which trains AI engineers and researchers on emerging AI technologies and frameworks to tackle the United Nations sustainable development goals.

Jamie Rickman received her PhD at the Francis Crick Institute in the Physics of Living Systems. She is currently a senior research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Resources, UCL. Her research interests lie in applying complexity thinking to the area of climate finance. She uses computational, network and data science approaches to study the ecosystems of investors behind fossil fuel and green investments.

Pedro Schilling-de-Carvalho is a Lecturer in Financial and Environmental Law at UCL Faculty of Laws, working on topics related to sustainable finance, such as diffusion and interoperability of legal frameworks for disclosures and taxonomies and blended finance. His previous research explored how to improve international financial regulation in a context of increasing fragmentation and multipolarity and analysed the role of actors such as central banks and financial regulators in advancing the climate agenda.

Adriana Suarez Delucchi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on Indigenous Ecologies and Environmental Crisis at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL. Her research lies in the interphase between geography, sociology and decolonial studies and explores the marginalisation of rural and indigenous groups from dominant management arrangements, particularly those affecting their daily lives and environments.

Links

• UCL European Institute
• UCL Public Policy
• UCL Global Engagement
• UCL International Policy Engagement: support and resources for academics
• GSPI (Geneva Science-Policy Interface)
• UCL International Policy Fellowship 2023