PhD student commended for access and outreach initiative

A postgraduate student from St Catharine’s is part of a team that has been recognised for their contributions to education by the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Teaching & Learning. Lorena Gordillo-Dagallier (a Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology PhD student) and colleagues from the open-seneca initiative were highly commended in the Access & Outreach category in the Centre’s Outstanding Student Contribution to Education Awards.

The open-seneca initiative is developing educational tools for building air quality monitoring networks around the globe. The team, consisting of Lorena and five other postgraduate students who founded the initiative out of a University project, aims to raise awareness on the topic of air pollution while involving regular citizens in finding solutions.

Lorena commented:

“It is a great honour to have been highly commended for the Access & Outreach award. With open-seneca, we've been working passionately over the past years to deliver educational and empowering workshops about air quality monitoring around the world, and it has been really exciting to see the enthusiastic uptake and the positive impact of our initiative. I would like to thank the open-seneca team as a whole and the invaluable support of the Centre for Global Equality, with a special thanks to Lara Allen.”

In-persons workshops in Nairobi during 2020 allowed the local community to build 20 mobile air pollution monitoring devices. The combination of awareness-raising and education empowered local champions to tackle air pollution. The resulting data was fed back to the initiative and their analysis and resulting pollution map of Nairobi can now be used to drive policy change locally. The team has been passionately working on a scale-able ‘train-the-trainers’ framework that local stakeholders can use to accelerate knowledge transfer by empowering the local champions to teach about air pollution themselves.

The project recently gained traction across Europe after Lorena won the International Women4Climate Tech Challenge in 2020 and the team has become role models for educational outreach at the University of Cambridge.