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UCL Change Builders – The People and Nature Lab: Towards a more sustainable relationship
Meet the UCL Change Builders helping to drive progress for our community of staff, students and partners.
30 April 2024
Introducing UCL Change Builders
As part of our shared efforts to deliver on our Strategic Plan and respond to insights raised, teams across UCL have been working hard to drive progress for our expansive community.
It's often the combined efforts of many small steps of improvement, which build together to create immense impact, that make up much of our progress.
Recognising and celebrating the teams behind these efforts, UCL Change Builders spotlights these stories of change.
Know a Change Builder? Get in touch!
Humans and nature in harmony
The People and Nature Lab, a groundbreaking initiative at UCL East, is redefining how we approach the relationship between humans and nature.
“We’re social scientists, biologists, geographers, engineers, mathematicians and medical scientists… all trying to solve the problem of ecological degradation”, explains Dr Izzy Bishop, Lecturer (Teaching) in Ecology Genetics, Evolution & Environment.
Founded in spring 2022, the Lab’s research teams work to better understand how humans and nature interact and develop new and lasting solutions to key issues.
It’s a lot to tackle, but also the kind of challenge the teams thrive on.
“We know that biodiversity is changing really rapidly under human induced changes [and] what we need are biodiversity monitoring systems that can help us to understand rapid change”, says Dr Joanne Littlefair, Lecturer (Genetics, Evolution and Environment).
Located in the heart of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the lab is leveraging technology to find smarter solutions for conservation, urban planning, and ecosystem management.
“We work with new approaches like AI and machine learning to better [comprehend and] manage the environment,” Izzy explains.
The Lab isn’t a siloed research center – led by the UCL Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research (CBER), it brings together three institutions: UCL, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the London Natural History Museum (NHM).
Solving big problems together
Students in programs like the MSc Ecology and Data Science and the MSc Citizen Science work alongside researchers to co-produce knowledge and tackle real-world problems.
“The degrees we’re offering are setting students up with the skills they need to go into newly developed careers,” Izzy says.
At its core, the People and Nature Lab is about connection, bringing people across disciplines to develop solutions for a more sustainable and biodiverse tomorrow.