Sustainable Futures' focus on environmental sustainability

October 2018, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

The University funded two Early Career Researchers to attend this event: Ivano Bongiovanni (Adam Smith Business School) and Long Chen (Urban Big Data). Below is a summary of the event.

Valuable multidisciplinary collaboration

The U21 Sustainable Futures workshop was attended by nearly 60 researchers from across the U21 network who joined distinguished speakers including Professor Yong Geng (Dean, School of Environmental Science and Engineering, SJTU) and Professor Christoph Stückelberger (Executive Director, Geneva Agape Foundation) and Professor Fujita Tsuyoshi (Director of the Center for Social and Environmental Systems Research, National Institution for Environmental Studies, Japan).

After keynote speeches, half of the participants delivered engaging lightning talks. This quick format emphasised the importance for academics to be able to reach out to non-expert audiences and show the value of their work on topics such as

• climate change, 
• environmental issues in the digital age, 
• usage of digital technologies to protect the environment, 
• fighting animal poaching, etc. ‌

Later, there were more traditional research presentations and a poster session. Within the Smart Cities theme, University of Glasgow academic, Ivano presented his research project entitled 'Chasing Storms in the Tornado Alley: Information Security Management in Higher Education', receiving valuable feedback. 

‌The event took place in several locations including the Antai College of Economics and Management, the Minghang campus of Jiao Tong University, in south Shanghai and a visit to the Chronus Art Center to see the exhibition 'Machines are Not Alone' showcasing works associated with sustainability and technology.

Finally, there was a group team activity on innovative ways of tackling environmental issues. The workshop was concluded by a final, more general discussion on the future of the academic profession, from the perspective of early career researchers.

Upon return, Ivano reflected:
“Although the event did not focus entirely on my research areas – information security management and design-led innovation –it gave me the opportunity to explore how multidisciplinary research should be, stretching out to topics that enrich our approaches to academic investigation.

The workshop confirmed the need for academia to ‘push’ research and make it as practical as possible, exploring new ways of disseminating findings, presenting work, and establishing networking opportunities. We have the freedom to work on the topics that we are passionate about and we need to reach out to colleagues and establish synergies for real-world, high-impact research.

Shanghai is an amazing city, vibrant, modern and traditional at the same time, and I think it was a great choice for this workshop. I established two interesting connections with Jiao Tong University and the University of Johannesburg, which I hope will help me develop a project on ‘the future of higher education’ on which I am currently working.”

Previous ECR workshops