Submitted by Grainne Kennedy on Fri, 2017-06-23 10:34
The end of the academic year allowed time for reflection and celebration in what has been a busy year for the Living Laboratory for Sustainability. The 'Living Lab' provides opportunities for Cambridge students to develop their skills and improve the environmental performance of the University estate through projects, internships and research. Funded by Santander, the Living Lab is five years old and in that time it has helped many students gain “real world” experience while the University has been able to learn from and build on projects which may not have otherwise been possible.
On 13 June staff and students came together in Trinity Hall to celebrate the successes of 2016/17 and to plan for the future. Attendees heard about a variety of different experiences within the Living Lab. Dr Ruchi Choudhary from the Department of Engineering explained how beneficial hands-on experience is for students and the importance of access to real world data. Chris Galpin, an undergraduate in his final year of an Engineering degree, spoke of how useful it had been to access data for a research project through the Living Lab. Jacob Ashton described how the Living Lab supported the Cambridge Climate and Sustainability Forum whilst Lucy Bruzzone of CISL explained how she developed a research topic looking at procurement within Estate Management as part of her Masters thanks to the Living Lab.
Inspired by what they had heard students and academic supervisors were encouraged to write down any project ideas that they would like to develop with the Living Lab. Connections were made through the event which will hopefully lead to collaborations in the coming years.
If you have a project idea that you would like to develop through the Living Lab please, get in touch.