YESI Fellows Discipline Hopping Success
£195K of funding has been delivered via the NERC ‘Cross-Disciplinary Research for Discovery Science’ and investment from the University’s ESAY initiative.
YESI Fellows at the University of York (UoY) met for the first time on 26 January to showcase the successful projects which were awarded in the first phase of the YESI Fellows Discipline Hopping Programme. This investment brings together teams of researchers to explore new synergies, enhancing interdisciplinary working around environmental science challenges.
“It's great to see our first cohort of YESI Fellows are now in place. The people and disciplines that were awarded funding are working together in new ways to advance knowledge on important environmental challenges and I look forward to hearing what they come up with"
YESI Director Professor Lindsay Stringer
The 5 projects span a wide range of disciplines:
- The role of Blue Carbon in coastal environments seeks to position UoY as a hub of interdisciplinary research into the role of “blue” carbon in salt marshes, mudflats, seagrass, and mangroves as an avenue for achieving both climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts through a multifaceted nature-based climate-solutions approach.
- The Natural language processing of biodiversity policy documents project aims to build an annotated corpus of text consisting of national policy documents on biodiversity and climate change, which will then be used to align these two sets of documents in order to extract structured information, which can be used to evaluate how actions in these two areas align, overlap, or possibly contradict each other.
- CraftWell examines the wellbeing benefits of outdoor heritage craft workshops. It is an interdisciplinary research collaborative to undertake an evaluation of the wellbeing benefits of an outdoor Heritage Craft (HC) intervention (called CraftWell) across the student population.
- Identifying opportunities for the ‘digital environment’. This three-month project will bring together specialists from the Digital Creativity Labs community within the School of Arts and Creative Technology and the Environment and Geography Department to identify innovative ways to communicate environmental science to stakeholders.
- Indoor air pollution and the relationship to lung health. This project aims to further the understanding of the effects of indoor air pollutants on respiratory (lung) health. It will combine expertise in clinical academic chest medicine and public health, indoor air quality, and experimental chemistry, in a new collaboration between the Departments of Environment and Geography, Health Sciences and Chemistry (Wolfson Atmospheric Chemistry Laboratory).
We look forward to sharing more about these exciting projects and their outputs once the data modelling, workshops and field work are underway.
A new YESI Fellows Knowledge Exchange scheme will follow in March 2023.