Laurence is a social geographer with research interests centred on the interaction between environmental conditions – such as climate risks and landscape characteristics – and wellbeing outcomes, including both objective (i.e., poverty) and subjective measures (i.e., happiness).
He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery working on projects that explore the health and wellbeing benefits of nature in the UK and global context. Laurence completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Southampton, where he explored the relationship between objective and subjective wellbeing in the vulnerable coastal location of Volta Delta in southeast Ghana. He also has experience working at the UN Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) Regional Office for the Asia Pacific region, where he supported efforts to integrate broader concepts of wellbeing within nature-based solution projects.
Haoran is interested in tree pests and disease outbreaks worldwide. During the Master’s, he worked to understand the ecological consequences of ash dieback disease. He compiled a climate-demographics database to study how the environment interacts with the pathogen to change tree mortality rates.
He also developed a model to forecast disease impact on forest health at Wytham Woods. In his DPhil project, Haoran will compile a global database of forest pests and diseases, and assessing how they affect forest biodiversity and nutrient cycles through integrative modelling. He is passionate about providing data and modelling products to nature recovery in diseased woodlands.
Haoran has a BA in Ecology from Zhejiang University, and an MPhil in Biodiversity, Conservation, and Management from, the University of Oxford. His DPhil project will be funded by the Scottish Forestry Trust.
Tanaya (she/her) is an ecologist and artist from India. Her research interests in biodiversity resilience and nature recovery expand across scales (from fine scale to macro scale) and biomes. She is reading a DPhil in Geography and Environment at University of Oxford on a project that characterises microclimates in mixed tree and grass ecosystems in India and Africa to better understand how we can manage these vulnerable landscapes and the species that inhabit them.
Tanaya is most herself when she is outdoors looking for birds and plants, hovering over a coral reef with a magnifying glass, or walking long distances across forests and grasslands. She is actively researching and workshopping how art and science can come together to roll out research more meaningfully and urgently in the world.
Shiyang is a DPhil student at the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) within the School of Geography and the Environment (SoGE) at the University of Oxford, supervised by Dr. Tom Harwood, Prof. Yadvinder Malhi, and Dr. Samuel Cushman. He is passionate about interdisciplinary research, with a focus on spatial ecological modelling across scales, from global to local. His research interests span land-use, biodiversity, climate, food systems, genomics and genetics. Currently, Shiyang is working on a project that explores landscape connectivity for British biodiversity in the context of climate change.
Before joining the University of Oxford, Shiyang earned a master’s degree in Data Science from UCL, where he also completed his undergraduate studies in Mathematics.
Wendee is an urban geographer, with research interests mainly including environmental sustainability, wellbeing and urban planning. Wendee is now a postdoctoral researcher at Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery working on project investigating the health/wellbeing benefits of urban green and blue spaces. For the past two years, Wendee worked on projects funded by medical research council on health benefits of urban green and blue spaces in Merseyside and Cheshire. Wendee is the current secretary of Geographies of Health and Wellbeing Research Group at RGS. Wendee finished her My PhD in Geography from University of Melbourne, the thesis examined the sustainability transitions of urban planning in a future city, its implications on environmental policies on urban water management, and the usage of hydraulic missions to realise water sustainability. Her research findings had been published on Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water, Land Use policy, Journal of Environmental Management etc.
Tom Harwood is the Associate Director of the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. He is currently working with the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery to set local case studies within their regional biodiversity context, and build a globally consistent environmental infrastructure to support the next generation of integrative decision tools addressing biodiversity, land use and climate change.
He is a spatial ecological modeller with advanced software engineering skills who works across a wide range of environmental domains at fine resolution from local to global scales. Over the course of his career, Tom has worked on epidemiology, geneflow, weather and microclimate generation, terrain adjustment and downscaling of climate, land use and crop modelling. Tom has a particular focus on the delivery of spatial metrics for practical policy to address biodiversity loss and climate change, and joined Oxford from CSIRO in Australia in 2023, where he has been supporting national planning and monitoring for 14 years. Another key focus of Tom’s work is the estimation of the local condition of habitat using different remote sensing based approaches, as a prerequisite for biodiversity analysis.
As an interdisciplinary ecologist with a core background in zoology and conservation, Ella works on providing evidence for effective biodiversity restoration measures. Introduced to the fascinating hidden world of bats during her undergraduate Zoology degree, she was hooked, and has been studying bats ever since using them to understand impacts of anthropogenic environmental change on biodiversity.
Bats’ use of echolocation led Ella to a deeper exploration of the use of passive acoustic monitoring techniques for gathering vital ecological data, and she co-wrote the first guidelines for conservation practitioners on using passive acoustics. Ella continues to work on developing and improving tools for collecting passive acoustic data and extracting ecologically information from audio using machine learning methods. Ella is more widely interested in combining conservation technologies, Internet of Things systems, and AI tools for enabling automation, to improve the efficiency of biodiversity data collection and assessment of biodiversity recovery measures.
Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist, writer, and speaker with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. He received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), and sits on the advisory board of the Fungi Foundation.
Nicola works with financial institutions, governments and business to help integrate environmental risks into decision making and align finance and policy with the transition to a resilient, net-zero and nature-positive economy. She is Director, Greening Finance for Nature for the UKRI Integrating Finance and Biodiversity Programme and Director of the Resilience Planet Finance Lab. Nicola’s background combines complex systems modelling, public policy, international development, environmental economics and finance. Her academic work is centred on data, analytics and decision making and she works across the world, from the City of London to Ghana. For the Leverhulme Centre for nature Recovery, Nicola leads work on mobilising finance for nature in Kenya.
Dr Aoife Bennett is Departmental Research Lecturer in the Environmental Social Sciences at ECI, SoGE. She is an interdisciplinary environmental research scientist with expertise in the social sciences, a strong background in Political Ecology and a focus on the socio-political and environmental challenges and opportunities – particularly in Latin America and the Amazon. Her research involves a large amount of multi-methods field-based research, and always includes the most marginalized members of society as active members of her research. She is particularly interested in decolonizing research techniques and activities and working together on breaking down the North/South divide therein.
Aoife is an active member of the global social and environmental community within and outside of academia. She sits as Fellow to the Biodiversity Council at the World Economic Forum (where Aoife created the World Economic Strategic Intelligence Map for Biodiversity, Trustee for the charity Action for Conservation, as an author on the Science Panel for the Amazon (including in the Amazon Assessment Report), and as Advisor to a small indigenous charity that promotes cultural preservation in the Peruvian Amazon.
Aoife is a passionate researcher that likes to be involved in the lives of the people in the places where she works and as such is something of an activist academic she also engages in philanthropy and meaningful local capacity building and mutual aid.
