Hi all.
We have been approached by our Doctoral and Researcher College (formerly Graduate School) to help develop a training course for Doctoral Researchers covering: why and how to integrate sustainability into every stage of a PhD project – design, purchasing responsibly, saving energy and water and the responsible use of lab consumables.
I wondered if anyone else had developed anything similar and would be willing to share their experiences and lessons learnt? What was the uptake? Was it well received? Is there already a template out there that we could use, or is anyone willing to share their course content?
Many thanks in advance!
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We are developing a checklist for our research community at the moment but there is an intention to develop training - I imagine lots of others doing something similar! If others are interested in sharing, would there be appetite to develop and standardise materials for use across all our institutions? @SusieCook-UoEdinburgh fyi
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Thanks Zoe, I’d be happy to share some UoE resources if that would be helpful
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We have also developed a checklist, it mainly focuses on environmental compliance for science based research, but we’d like to broaden it to account for wider sustainability and energy related topics and to back it up with training. Happy to link up with others if it’s helpful.
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There’s some guidance on the LEAF site and updates email, but I’m not sure how much of this is PhD-specific - A few groups are developing Lab Courses that might be in piloting in time for the next cohort.
For providing content, there’s the GW4-UKNSR project and another looking at research project funding and sustainability based in Bristol that might be able to contribute here! In particular we’ve been looking at guidance for Equipment Sharing and Procurement, with intent to develop guidance generally, so some of this could be fed into slides or a checklist for PhDs/ECRs
School-level: Where we’ve previously run induction slides and panels for staff and students in Physics, the feedback has been that reception tends to be best when it’s presented as a combination of best practice and compliance? So adding content into existing space training or project design has worked quite well to build good habits into independent work later
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Great! Do you want to drop me an email and I will link you up with our project team? z.l.hurley@bham.ac.uk
We’ve also been piloting some “skills for sustainable research” sessions for ECRs at Edinburgh. It’s more of a workshop to get people thinking than a checklist/guidance document but has yielded some excellent discussions. The second half of the session focuses on how they would discuss sustainability in the context of a grant application.
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