RESEARCH COLLABORATION

The Biosphere Research Institute has been collaborating with people from around the world for a decade, and our strongest work has emerged from inter-disciplinary teams.  For example, Sustainable Economics, the 2017 book with Routledge, was a result of an economist (Professor Alan Murray) teaming up with us, bringing together expertise from very different backgrounds (economics and ecology) that would never normally work together in a traditional university setting.  The result was one of the leading books in the field, a book that neither individual could have written on their own, and which led to a number of really important research papers, one of which has been cited over 850 times (Murray, A., Skene, K. and Haynes, K., 2017. The circular economy: an interdisciplinary exploration of the concept and application in a global context. Journal of Business Ethics, 140(3), pp.369-380. Google Scholar). 

Other examples include the ground-breaking Art-Science collaboration with the artist Gina Czarnecki, leading to the award of a prestigious Welcome Trust Production and Research Award of £96 000, and resulting in major art installations and performance art, including Contagion.

Work with soil scientists in the Czech Republic led to a number of major, innovative research papers and book chapters, encompassing thermodynamics, climate destabilization and forestry.

The strengths of the Institute were recognized more recently when Taylor and Francis approached us to work on a project cutting across artificial intelligence and ecology, leading to the trail-blazing book, Artificial Intelligence and the Environmental Crisis, published, in 2020, by Routledge, and featured as book of the week in the Times Higher Education magazine.

We are always looking for pro-active partners, at any stage of their careers, who want to work on cutting-edge research, and, particularly, partners from a wide range of research backgrounds.  We fundamentally believe that it is in the interaction and fusion of different thinking that emerge the greatest innovations. So, if you want to bring your expertise to the table, shed some new light on an intractable research problem, or apply for funding encompassing inter-disciplinary thinking (an approach identified by the Stern Review as central the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) assessment of British universities), then contact us and let’s get to work.

We are, currently, particularly interested in a number of key areas: ecology, systems thinking, thermodynamics, agriculture, climate destabilization, anthropology, ecological design, transition, sustainable economics, First-nation (indigenous) philosophy, architecture and organizational structure and function.