Win for Downing Fellow at Vice-Chancellor's Awards
Dr Alec Christie, Henslow Research Fellow at Downing, was a winner at this year's University of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor’s Awards as a member of the Conservation Evidence team.
The team, which Dr Christie has been a member of since 2017, received its award for Research Impact and Engagement.
The team aims to bring about transformational change in conservation by ensuring policy and practice are more efficient and effective. It’s worked with over 1,100 practitioners, policymakers, funders, and others to support fundamental strategic and cultural shifts towards more effective conservation action.
It has co-produced an open-access database summarising global evidence (8,634 studies and counting) on the effectiveness of over 3,600 conservation actions, which has been visited by 1.1 million users. Helping to make the global evidence base more accessible to decision-makers who rarely have the time or resources to spend searching or synthesising the literature.
An open-access book, Transforming Conservation, and a toolkit have also been produced by the team, to generate, evaluate and integrate evidence to strengthen decision-making.
The Conservation Evidence team’s work with global organisations has resulted in over 100 commitments to using and generating evidence to improve outcomes for nature and society.
Dr Christie’s key contributions to the project have been highlighting the research gaps and biases in the evidence base, training organisations in evidence-based conversation, and co-designing and developing decision support tools for practitioners to improve their use of evidence.
He said the award was: “A testament to the hard work of a lot of collaborating researchers, practitioners, decision-makers, funders, and journals.”
Published 19 December 2023