{"id":549,"date":"2022-01-06T14:21:38","date_gmt":"2022-01-06T14:21:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.imperial.ac.uk\/natural-sciences\/?p=549"},"modified":"2022-01-06T14:31:24","modified_gmt":"2022-01-06T14:31:24","slug":"beauty-of-a-more-colourful-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.imperial.ac.uk\/natural-sciences\/2022\/01\/06\/beauty-of-a-more-colourful-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Beauty of a more colourful world: CEP X Dyson X ICBS PhD Flash Mob #1"},"content":{"rendered":"

In December 2021 PhD students from Imperial\u2019s Centre for Environmental Policy<\/a> (CEP), Dyson School of Design Engineering<\/a> (Dyson) and Business School<\/a> (ICBS), organised an event in response to COP26<\/a> and the environmental crisis.<\/em><\/p>\n

‘Beauty of a More Colourful World’ brought together twelve postgraduate research students from six different departments to showcase how their research ties into addressing environmental problems. In this blog post one of the organisers, Yurong Yu<\/a>, reflects on the experience.<\/em><\/p>\n

Author: Yurong Yu | Photo credits: Yunwan Tao.<\/strong><\/p>\n

My fellow co-organiser, Neel Le Penru<\/a>, and I initiated this event because we realised that the complexity of environmental problems requires interdisciplinary collaboration, so opportunities for interdepartmental communication among researchers is vital. It\u2019s also crucial for junior researchers to learn how to communicate their research to a non-specialist audience, to achieve a greater impact.<\/p>\n

\"Organisers
Organisers of the event, from left to right: Neel Le Penru, Judy Xie, Yurong Yu, Ric Zhang<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After some discussion we came up with the idea of inviting interactive and entertaining presentations from multiple departments, using different formats such as demos, prototypes, installations and games to inspire members of our Imperial community. The title, Beauty of a more colourful world, not only refers to the colourful environmental system, but also our diverse Imperial research community. The \u201cflash mob\u201d element came about because of the tight timeline \u2013 normally an event like this takes months to plan and carry out, but we didn\u2019t want to miss the perfect window created by COP26, so we sped up and made it come true in five weeks! <\/p>\n

Getting together<\/h1>\n

Our cross-departmental initiative aimed to create a unique opportunity to gather researchers and the wider College community with shared interests in climate change and the environment, including conservation, biodiversity and sustainability. We eventually brought together twelve multi-background PhD student presenters to run nine stalls in the Queen\u2019s Tower room.<\/p>\n

\"Photos
Photos of all twelve PhD student presenters<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Engaging the audience<\/h1>\n

The event was open to everyone. Our audience from across Imperial was encouraged to learn about all nine projects with the incentive of demonstrating their engagement by taking part in quizzes and winning prizes. In fact, the quiz questions were consciously designed to \u201cnudge\u201d the audience to approach presenters and ask more questions about their research.<\/p>\n

It was a fun and interactive event which saw high turnout, with about 70 attendees enjoying the stalls, snacks, drinks and, of course, prizes!<\/p>\n

A taste of the projects on display<\/h1>\n

Planting coral reefs in Hainan, China<\/h2>\n

Yurong and fellow student Yuruo Lin shared a video showing their experience training students to plant coral reefs in Hainan, China, alongside a presentation explaining the whole project, receiving great feedback from the audience. This project is part of Yurong\u2019s PhD research exploring how to increase public awareness of conservation, which can further lead to fundamental behaviour change.<\/p>\n

The Bornean rainforest \u2018listening station\u2019<\/h2>\n

Neel\u2019s presentation featured a \u2018listening station\u2019 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).<\/p>\n

As part of the Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n