‘Facing the Future’ of the world at Dundee

Published On Fri 22 May 2015 by Grant Hill

Postgraduate students and early-career researchers from across the UK will next week descend upon the University of Dundee for an annual conference looking for solutions to environmental change.

The ‘Facing the Future 2015’ symposium, taking place on Tuesday 26th and Wednesday 27th May, is organised by postgraduate students at the University’s Centre for Environmental Change and Human Resilience (CECHR).

This symposium aims to equip new researchers from the sciences, social sciences and humanities with the knowledge to meet the problems of massive environmental change using interdisciplinary perspectives.

“Formidable problems confronting humanity, such as climatic variability hazards, resource depletion, or food poverty are highly complex and cannot be effectively addressed by one discipline or method alone,” said CECHR Director Professor John Rowan.

“Today’s early career researchers faced with the challenge of addressing these problems stand to greatly benefit from learning how to develop interdisciplinary thinking, and learn skills in designing the kinds of collaborations that are so vital to addressing these complex problems.”

Key note speakers are Professor Sue Black, Director of the University’s Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, and Professor David Sigsworth, Chairman of the Scottish Environment Protection Authority. In addition to presentations showcasing participant’s research, the event features talks and interactive workshops facilitated by the renowned International Futures Forum (IFF).

CECHR is a joint initiative between the University and James Hutton Institute established in 2009 to provide a focus for novel interdisciplinary research addressing societal responses to environmental change and promoting sustainability.

It acts as a framework to bring expertise from different disciplines areas together to work on complicated issues in the hope of influencing policymakers by utilising the skill sets of specialists working across subjects such as Environment, Engineering, Law, Humanities, Computing, Life Sciences, and Business to tackle pressing global issues of food, water, energy and health futures.

The centre’s PhD community is known as CECHR-Grad and provides important links between different part of the University and JHI.

More information is available at http://www.dundee.ac.uk/cechr/postgraduates/ftf/.

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