Throughout 2024 the strategic partnership has been running a new series of seminars intended to highlight and support collaborative, interdisciplinary research on global environmental challenges.

Six cross-institutional keynote seminars aiming to raise the profile of interdisciplinary research in areas of sustainability, biodiversity, and environmental challenges have been scheduled for 2024. They will be presented by researchers from UoR and NHM who have successfully designed proposals for large, interdisciplinary projects and received funding, including Dr Tim Littlewood (DeWorm3) , Professor Carol Wagstaff (FoodSEqual), Dr John Tweddle (Centre for UK Nature), Prof. Tom Oliver (SysRisk), Dr Vincent Smith (DiSSCo UK) and Professor Jacopo Torriti (CREDS/EDRC).

These seminars, delivered in hybrid mode, will be open to all staff and postdocs from both institutions. The physical locations will be the UoR London Road Campus and the NHM Neil Chalmers Seminar Room (South Kensington), and talks will be filmed with the videos curated online. The seminars will run once every two months throughout 2024 starting at 11.30am and lasting an hour.

Event dates: Wed 24 January @ Reading; Thu 14 March @ NHM; Thu 9 May @ Reading; Thu 11 July @ NHM; Wed 11 September @ Reading; Thu 14 November @ NHM. 

The seminar series for 2024 has now come to an end, please watch this space for future events.

Watch the sixth seminar in the series, Flexing energy demand to the timing of renewables, Jacopo Torriti, Professor of Energy Economics and Policy, UoR

Would you shift your daily energy use to match the times when renewable energy is most available? Making our daily lives more sustainable is something many of us aspire to, and flexibility has become a central concept in these discussions, and of future energy systems. Many of the proposed solutions hinge on the idea that demand can ‘flex’ to meet supply, particularly when energy is being generated from intermittent sources like wind and solar. But can these really work?
Professor Jacopo Torriti explores research on the extent to which pricing mechanisms, emerging technologies, and the relationship between people’s daily routines and their energy use can help us to understand how important balancing renewable supply with fluctuating demand will be for the future of greener energy.
Watch the seminar here