Horizons Institute announces four new Challenge Networks
The Horizons Institute has announced four new interdisciplinary Challenge Networks, due to launch this coming September, following an open call in the Autumn.
The networks — Reimagining Ageing; Re-Making Places; Interdisciplinary Research Network for Time; and Global Biosphere Sensing Network — will receive funding and support to launch and develop their ideas over a 12-month period.
These will be part of the second cohort for the network building programme, with successful networks from the 2022/2023 cohort including the InterActiveUoL; Leeds Interdisciplinary Mental Health Research Network (LIMHRN); and AMR at Leeds.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation Professor Nick Plant said: “These new Horizons Challenge Networks will significantly impact on key scientific and societal challenges, and I’m delighted to see each has fully embraced the university’s vision to make a positive difference locally, nationally, and globally.
“I’m looking forward to seeing how these research networks develop over the next year, creating meaningful connections across our University and beyond. I hope colleagues from all faculties will feel inspired to join, support and benefit from these exciting collaborative initiatives.”
Horizons Institute Director Stuart Taberner said: “The Horizons Challenge Network programme is designed to galvanise novel Interdisciplinary research and collaboration right across the University.
We’re delighted that our new networks on Aging, Time, Biosensors, and Re-making Places will do precisely this — create opportunities for colleagues at all career stages and from all disciplines to work together on developing cutting-edge research ideas and workable solutions to contemporary societal challenges”
The successful networks will now officially launch in September, but if you would like to get involved, you can find out more about each below.
Reimagining Ageing
Network Leads: Dr Sarah Astill, Professor Anne Forster, Dr Maria Kapsali
Reimagining Ageing aims to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration to develop novel, imaginative solutions to the global challenge of healthy ageing, with a focus on reducing inequalities in later life.
Recognising the potential for ground-breaking interdisciplinary research across Leeds, the Reimagining Ageing network will grow ideas and engage with a range of underserved populations. Addressing the opportunities of ageing is also identified as a priority by the United Nations, the UK Government, research funders such as UKRI and NIHR and communities in Leeds and Bradford. The Network builds on these firm foundations, with all Faculties within the University undertaking research relevant to the ageing process.
The focus for the Network is centred around the ideal view of ageing — How would we like to age? What information is needed to inform creation of a better, and more enjoyable, environment in which to grow old? What can we do to support this vision?
Remaking Places: an interdisciplinary network for safe and thriving places
Network leads: Dr Radhika Borde, Professor Paul Chatterton, Dr Helen Graham, Professor Gehan Selim, Dr Katy Wright
Remaking Places is a network which supports place-based coalitions to radically reimagine, rethink, learn, act upon, and make practical interventions to build thriving, hopeful, joyful, safe, resilient places.
Drawing on research from across University of Leeds on place and the urgent challenges that arise from the triple emergencies (climate, nature, social) the Remaking Places network seeks to catalyse research from across faculties into a transformational force, able to activate new ways of knowing into radical experimentation and action.
Remaking is urgent. Emergencies of climate, growth, nature loss, resource use, poverty, inequality, cost of living, global pandemics are converging and accelerating. It is also complex: a constant process of change and contestation.
In the face of these emergencies, Remaking Places requires disruptive and transdisciplinary teams that can draw on ideas such as doughnut, foundational and diverse economies; community ownership and wealth building; post-growth and post-carbon places; climate justice; just transitions; decolonization; inter-species ethics; rewilding; and nature-based solutions.
Remaking also requires a shift in the way we work and organize — investing in horizontality, inter-generationality, co-production, hope, imagination, openness, sharing, commons, abundance, and lived experience.
The Interdisciplinary Network on Time
Network leads: Professor Tim Heaton, Dr Kahryn Hughes, Dr Chris Birchall
Time plays a fundamental role in our lives, spanning the deepest mysteries of the natural world, the formation of our societal and individual belief systems, and the basis for decisions we take for the future. But time is usually in the background of research. This research network will make intellectual leaps in a number of disciplines by moving it to the foreground.
Different to most research networks and centres, this network is not attempting to resolve one problem, but instead is focused on fundamental knowledge creation, using interdisciplinary approaches with potential application to many of today’s challenges.
The network takes three global challenges — climate change; social inequity; and productivity — to generate ideas for research questions. Applied to each theme, time presents novel and interesting research questions. When considered in the light of “alternative” disciplines for the global challenge, intellectual boundaries can be pushed yet further.
This unique network will confront and blend viewpoints of physicists, astronomers, geologists, psychologists, social scientists, historians, prehistorians, artists, economists, philosophers, the community, organisations, and policy makers.
Global Biosphere Sensing Network
Network leads: Dr Ryan Neely III, Dr David Williams, Dr Simon Goodman
New technology is needed urgently to address the interconnected global challenges of biodiversity loss, emerging pathogens, and sustainable agriculture.
Real-time biosensor networks return information about the status and stresses of ecosystems, or detect and monitor pathogens in the environment. In the same way global weather and climate observing networks revolutionised understanding of the physical environment, deployment of biosensing networks will fundamentally change how we collect information about the living world and make environmental policy decisions.
At the same time, global collection of bio-monitoring data creates unprecedented ethical challenges around surveillance, and equitable information access.
Such advances are coming in the next decade, and this network will utilise this early opportunity to lead that agenda, building internal networks to unite dispersed activity across the University and make new relationships with external technology users and policymakers.
The network will incorporate postgrads, professional staff, technicians and academics, and aims to host seminars and workshops, generate synthesis reviews, and conduct outreach to the public, data and service users, and policymakers.
Horizons Institute support
Leading this work from the Horizons Institute is Research Manager for Creativity, Partnership and Impact Abi Rowson, together with Challenge Network Coordinator Rosemary Sannaee.
Abi said: “There is huge potential within each of these new networks to harness the power of collaboration to deliver solutions to seemingly intractable global challenges. Horizons provides a platform to make connections across campus, to facilitate new conversations between researchers, and to forge strategic partnerships beyond Leeds.
“These new groups follow in the footsteps of three dynamic networks whose activity to date has shown how much can be achieved with some targeted support, whether in novel interdisciplinary research development, policy engagement, or commissioned research. Our new cohort will be able to learn from these successes as they begin to build relationships and make a start on what I am sure will be exciting journeys.”
Rosemary said: “My role will be to support the new networks with their initial launch, events, communication, and general administration, as well as helping to form links between the networks and supporting new collaborative conversations and relationships as they emerge.
“I’m really excited to be working with these interdisciplinary networks in developing their ideas further, and in building their communities.”
If you would like to learn more about these networks, or be put in touch with the network leads, please contact the Horizons team via horizons@leeds.ac.uk
