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UCD's Dr Orla Kelly receives WUN Research Development Fund 2020 Award

15 Dec 2020

UCD Global is delighted to announce that Dr Orla Kelly, UCD School of Social Policy Social Work and Social Justice, has been awarded £9,994 from the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) Research Development Fund (RDF) 2020 for her proposal: Education in a Warming World: A Collaborative Research Network on Education and Climate Change.

Dr Kelly will be the first UCD Principal Investigator on a WUN-funded Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG). As a newer member of WUN, UCD is involved in a small number of projects in collaboration with other universities in the network.

Following this year’s theme of Sustainable Recovery and addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of Good health and well-being, Quality Education Reduced Inequalities and Climate Action, Dr Kelly has drawn together a team of 14 co-investigators to form the IRG. They are from the UK, Europe, Australia, and Africa. This coalition will explore new research partnerships on a broad range of topics at the intersection of climate change and education, such as climate change belief, and the drivers of social, cultural, and institutional change. The group will also produce a best practice framework for promoting a robust climate change and sustainability education agenda at Institutes of higher education.

Dr Kelly and her research team join 73 existing WUN IRGs.You can read more detail here about the awarded projects and teams. 

Peter Lennie, Executive Director of WUN, said “This year’s applications, focused on the challenge of sustainable recovery, were particularly strong. They show very clearly the value that diverse teams drawn from partner universities can contribute to solving problems of real significance.”

The WUN Research Development Fund is open to all UCD academic staff to foster innovative, international collaborative research across the network of WUN member universities and offers grants of up to £10,000 for one year. Grants from the RDF are intended to help stimulate larger collaborative projects that will strengthen WUN and make the collaborating partners competitive for major awards.

For more information on the Worldwide Universities Network and its Research Development Fund, please contact Roslyn Reddy, UCD Global (directorucdglobal@ucd.ie).