People
Director
Gary Bending is Professor of Environmental Microbiology in the School of Life Sciences. His research focuses on the impact of a changing climate on the benefits soils provide to society, and how soils can be used to mitigate global warming. This includes processes by which carbon becomes sequestered from the atmosphere into soil, the effects of extreme weather on soil systems, and approaches to harness natural biota to sustain crop productivity. He also studies the environmental fate and persistence of pollutants, including pharmaceuticals, pesticides and plastic.
Co-Director
Alice Mah is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, with research interests in environmental justice, corporate power, and the politics of industrial transformation. She is the author of Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place; Port Cities and Global Legacies; and Toxic Truths: Environmental Justice and Citizen Science in a Post-Truth Age (with Thom Davies). Her next book, forthcoming with Polity Press, is Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It.
Co-Director
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa explores how emergence of ecological cultures are developing in a context of growing environmental concerns. She is interested in how different fields of practice may connect to imagine better ways to care for more than human worlds. Maria currently holds an AHRC Leadership Fellowship with a research project on Ecological Belongings, looking at how scientific, artistic and activist approaches invite to reconnect with soils, potentially generating alternative practices and stories of more than human belonging.
Co-Director
James Covington is a Professor in Electronic Engineering. His research interests are in the development of gas sensors and sensors systems applied to environmental monitoring and biosensing applications.
Co-Director
Jessica Savage is a Senior teaching Fellow in Global Sustainable Development. Her main research interests surround human-ecosystem interactions, marine resources monitoring, impact assessments, environmental management, marine plastics, climate change management, climate change mitigation, tourism, eco-tourism.
Co-Director
Robin Allaby is a Professor of Evolutionary Genetics in the School of Life Sciences specializing in archaeogenomics and palaeometagenomics. He uses evolutionary principles to investigate the evolution of domestication and reconstruction of palaeoenvironments. To do this his group retrieves ancient DNA from archaeological plant samples and sedimentary DNA (sedaDNA), from which ancient genomes are built following evolution directly through time and profiles of the plants and animals that existed thousands of years ago are reconstructed to gain insight into those past environments.