Sustainability

  • The liFETIME CDT is dedicated to promoting sustainability and we endeavour to reduce our carbon footprint to make the CDT a more sustainable environment.

    Below are some examples of how we deliver our sustainability commitment:

    1. Laboratory work has a significant impact on the environment, ranging from plastic waste/lack of recycling to energy consumption. As we have students occupying many labs across all partner universities, we are working hard to raise awareness about sustainability within our student community.
    2. We have set up a sustainability working group, who meet regularly to share information and experiences of changes made at home or within labs to encourage and motivate other students to switch to more sustainable habits.
    3. We have two dedicated sustainability representatives who are both passionate about promoting sustainability and making real changes.
    4. We encourage students and supervisors to work towards achieving a sustainability accreditation for their lab either through My Green Lab or UCL’s Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF). We are working towards all our labs achieving a bronze award.
    5. We are working to align our centre with the United Nations sustainability goals.

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    Sustainability Representatives

    Student representatives Adam Efrat, Francesca Kokkinos, Lineta Stonkute, Paola Sofia Serrano Bravo and Louis Hutchings are leading our sustainability programme. Below they tell us about their personal connections to climate change.

    Adam Efrat

    Adam is a PhD student working on Bioprocess development for production of 3D tissues to underpin creation of engineered meat.

    Francesca Kokkinos

    Francesca is a PhD student working on small molecule induced stem cell differentiation. She has been a long-time rep for tackling climate change, having made multiple changes to herday-to-day over the years to lead a more sustainable and environmentally friendly lifestyle. Francesca hopes being a sustainability rep will give me the opportunity to do more, and truly believes that if we all do our part to improve, protect and preserve our ecosystem hopefully the rest will follow.

    Louis Hutchings

    Louis is a PhD student developing 3D printable scaffolds made of edible materials for bovine cells. His research will be in service of strategies for scalable cultivated or “lab-grown” meat. Louis’ project focuses on more environmentally friendly approaches to meat production and chose this due to a belief in stewardship towards the environment stating “The environment is in danger due to our technology, it is our responsibility to use our understanding to fix it”. Becoming a sustainability representative is an extension of this principle and will give him insight to methods for eco-friendly lab design and practice. Louis also believes this is a great opportunity to improve his university’s sustainability, awareness and motivation.

    Paola Sofia Serrano Bravo

    Paola is a PhD student in the CÚRAM lab in University of Galway. Her project looks at the intersection and interaction of sustainability, advocacy and public engagement in the context of biological research.