Meet our latest cohort of Fellows working on climate data
Meet the Subak UK 2022 Fellows
One of the things that’s inspiring at Subak is having the chance to meet a group of people who are trying to do something to tackle climate change. It isn’t every day you get the chance to meet people inspired by a mission; and have the opportunity to help them along in that mission.
We at Subak had the pleasure to welcome five new individuals to our Fellowship programme in March. Our Global Fellowship programme, which provides a £10k (AUD$20k) grant for individuals to conduct an innovative, data-driven climate project, is open to applicants from across the globe. With strong competition for these places, we're super excited to welcome five new Fellows to the UK node, and will shortly be announcing who has joined us in Australia.
It has been a long process to get here - we opened the call for applications back in December 2021, closed the call in January 2022, held interviews in February, and completed onboarding and contracts in March. The competition was strong for the places, and through this however we have a really strong group of Fellows, with some exciting projects to come.
Firstly - who is in the cohort?
Abhayraj Naik teaches Law at India University and is combining state-level carbon footprint datasets with legal and policy information to provide better decision making support for policy makers.
Alvin Chan is using his experience in energy and technology to develop an open source tool to help people make the most informed decisions on how to make their house a low carbon home.
Christina Last is taking her machine learning research from the Turing Institute to create a global map of particulate emissions, which can be used to put pressure on companies, cities and governments to clean up their emissions.
Max Aragon is extending his current academic research into actually building land based sky imagers (cameras pointed at the sky) and making their pictures able to identify clouds for better solar energy forecasting.
Vickesh Solanki is moving from creating mobile applications for finance into creating a mobile application to track and ultimately reduce packaging waste in the products you and I buy every day.
Images showing a sky image from Max and Christina’s work on pollutant concentrations.
Each Fellow is running their own data-focussed project of between six and twelve months. The dual aims of the Fellowship are to:
Catalogue a data asset Subak’s Data Cooperative, which will help in some way to address climate change, and
Give the Fellow the time, money and support to really deep dive into their chosen area of interest, and make them ready to propel their career in climate.
To ensure we maximise the Fellows’ chances of success, we have invested significant time and effort to strengthen the structure, content, and governance of the Fellowship. One of the things we were told by our early Fellows was how much they valued having a sounding board - someone with interest and expertise in climate and data - who can give feedback and encouragement as they are going. Each Fellow is now allocated a Subak Coach - one of the Subak team who will meet with them every month to enable us to provide the support necessary and identify blockers to the project.
Further, we have touchpoints at the beginning, middle and end of the project to ensure we are on track. We look to identify through this where we may be able to provide connections or skills from the Subak network - whether that is technical, data-related, or even how to set up a business. Many of the Accelerator learning programme sessions are available to the Fellows, allowing both learning and networking.
One of the lenses through which we like to look at our work at Subak is how we are managing diversity. It is early days, but over half the combined UK and Australian cohorts are people of colour, although we are doing less well on the gender balance, with just one third of our Fellows who identify as women. There is certainly room for improvement, and Subak is committed to continually monitoring and taking action to improve the diversity of our cohorts.
With that, I’d like to just reiterate how it is genuinely inspiring to see people who are making a big move to make a difference, and to welcome everybody. Here’s to a successful set of projects!