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Summary of the BE-Well Networking Panelist discussion by @Joshua Knowles, on the future of built environment and health research and funding landscape.

Networking event for ECRs

Meet new people over FREE lunch

20 April 2022 (10am to 2pm) at IOE Jeffery Hall (map)

Built environment and health researchers share a common research agenda, yet opportunities to interact and to collaborate on bids and outputs are scarce. The BE-Well Network aims to connect, facilitate, and sustain research collaborations between built environment and health science academics of all career stages. Bringing together researchers with different perspectives and methodologies, our knowledge exchange activities aim to promote new cross-disciplinary teams to address some of the world’s big challenges in built environment, health, and sustainability.

We kick-off with an informal networking event for all, especially ECRs, working in built environment and health research. Our expert interdisciplinary panel of five scientists will set the scene on the future of research in these disciplines, followed by the funding landscape, a ‘speed networking’ session over lunch. Grow your network, connect, all the while over free lunch!

Panel

Dr Evangelia Chrysikou

Associate Professor

The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction

Evangelia Chrysikou is Associate Professor at The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, Program Director of the MSc Healthcare Facilities, and a medical architect. She is also Vice-President of the Urban Health Section (EUPHA), RIBA Chartered Member, and member of the National Accessibility Authority in Greece by invitation from the Greek Prime Minister. She specialises in healthcare facilities, holding a rare PhD on mental health facilities from UCL and a very prestigious Marie Curie H2020 Individual Fellowship. She has been actively involved in policymaking, being Coordinator on the D4 Action Group of the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP on AHA) of the European Commission (EC). Evangelia authored the national guidelines for mental health facilities in the community for Greece on behalf of the European Union. Additionally, she authored the books ‘Architecture for psychiatric environments and therapeutic spaces’ and ‘The social invisibility of mental health facilities’, is a healthcare architecture editor, reviewer, active member of several professional and scientific associations and TED-MED speaker.

Prof Eirini Flouri

Professor of Developmental Psychology

UCL Department of Psychology & Human Development

Eirini Flouri is a Professor in Developmental Psychology at the Department of Psychology and Human Development at the UCL Institute of Education. She received her PhD in psychology in 2000 from the University of Exeter, was a postdoctoral research fellow at Oxford from 2000 to 2004 and joined the UCL Institute of Education as a senior lecturer in 2005. She was promoted to reader in 2008 and to professor in 2010. Eirini is interested in understanding the causes of children’s emotional and behavioural problems. Complementing her previous work on the role of family (parenting, parental mental illness, and poverty) and the broader context (neighbourhood and school), her current research starts to explore the role of biological factors, such as inflammation, in the development of emotional and behavioural problems in childhood.

Dr Niamh Murtagh

Senior Research Fellow

The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction

Niamh Murtagh is a Senior Research Fellow at UCL. Niamh’s first degree was in Computer Science, obtained from University College Dublin. She worked in software in a variety of industries in Ireland and the UK, including electricity, telecommunications, and logistics, and has achieved Chartered Engineer and Chartered Information Technology Practitioner status. Alongside her roles as an IT Project Manager and Systems Architect, she completed an MSc in Software Engineering at the University of Brighton. Having decided on a move to psychology, she completed an MSc in Occupational and Organisational Psychology at the University of Surrey and went on to complete a PhD in social psychology. Her findings from her PhD then led her into research in environmental psychology, particularly on pro-environmental behaviour and behaviour change. She worked for four years as a Research Fellow in the Environmental Psychology Research Centre at the University of Surrey. Her work there explored transport and energy behaviours from the perspective of sustainability, on projects funded by ESRC and EPSRC, co-working with disciplines including communications engineers, sociologists, economists, and political and environmental scientists. She joined UCL at the end of 2013 and has developed collaborations with colleagues across UCL and other UK universities, as well as in the UAE, Finland, and China. Her research interests focus on people and the built environment, particularly relating to sustainable behaviour and making the built environment more resilient to the changing climate. Her latest funded projects include Green Fronts on urban greening, and Almshouse Resilient Communities on social resilience in older living communities.

Prof Nick Tyler

Professor of Civil Engineering

UCL Centre for Transport Studies

Nick Tyler is the Director of the UCL Centre for Transport Studies and Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering and investigates the ways in which people interact with their immediate environments. He is the Director of the UCL PEARL facility (Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory), the new £50M transdisciplinary UCL research facility in Dagenham. The group works on a wide variety of projects directed towards making the world more sympathetic to people’s needs and creating a sustainable future for both people and planet. Nick’s work is highly transdisciplinary, and his team includes and works with, apart from civil and mechanical engineers, psychologists, architects, musicians, philosophers, neuroscientists, artists, urban designers, planners, economists, ophthalmologists, audiologists, and orthopaedics. He is a co-founder of the UCL Universal Composition Laboratory (UCL2) which undertakes multisensorial spatiotemporal design. Nick is involved in projects in several countries in Latin America, Japan, China, and continental Europe, as well as in London and elsewhere in the UK.

Prof Nicola Walshe

Professor of Education

UCL Department of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment

Nicola Walshe is Head of Department of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment and Executive Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education at the UCL Institute of Education. Her background is in geography education: she originally gained a PhD in glaciology and taught and worked as Head of Geography in three secondary schools in the UK before going on to teach and eventually lead the Geography PGCE course at Cambridge University for ten years. She then moved to Anglia Ruskin University where, ultimately as Head of the School of Education and Social Care, she had overarching responsibility for the leadership of education, research and knowledge exchange across both education and social work provision. Nicola’s research is predominantly in the field of environmental and sustainability education. She is Secretary of GEReCo (Geography Education Research Collective), a committee aiming to promote geographical and environmental education globally by undertaking and disseminating high-quality research, and co-convenor of the Environmental and Sustainability Education Research (ESER) network in the European Educational Research Association (EERA). Her recent research particularly explores pedagogies at the intersection of nature, the arts and wellbeing; her AHRC-funded projects, Eco-Capabilities and Branching Out, examine the processes by which creative, nature-based practice supports the wellbeing of primary school children.

Illustrations (live)

Josh Knowles

After graduating from a Theatre with Visual Arts BA course in 2002, Josh worked as a Production Designer for short films and immersive theatre events. Responding to increasing requests to utilise his abilities in storytelling and drawing, Josh developed a focus on the illustrative elements of his production work; Storyboarding, Set Design and Concept Visualisation. Over time the combination of mediating, interpreting and quick sketching ideas has become his primary skill set leading to live conference sketchnoting and animation as he does now for a variety of clients, including BBC News, United Nations, NHS, The World Energy Council, Ernst & Young, The Landscape Institute, Chatham House, Somerset House and The International Autism Research Festival.

In other areas of his work Josh taught the Film and Animation Foundation course at Arts University Bournemouth 2005-2010, serving as course leader 2011-13. Arts Education is a key part of Josh’s practice and he has an ongoing portfolio of schools and public participatory art projects. These include Live Art Curation of Gavin Turk’s ‘House of Fairy Tales’ 2008-2011, National Trust’s Sutton House Outreach Programme 2015-17, Curating and Managing Silver Cloud Gallery, Bloomberg Earth Day 2012, ‘The Illuminated River’ schools engagement programme, ‘Megaphone’ for Byline Festival,‘The Barking Stink’ social history project for Barking and Dagenham Council, RHS Hampton Court and Chelsea Flower shows, plus various events for ‘The Big Draw’ arts charity.

We are funded by:

UCL Environment Domain Early Career Network Small Grants Scheme as part of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Discipline Hopping Funds

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