SoGE winners at the Vice Chancellor's Environmental Sustainability Awards 2022
Congratulations to our Facilities Manager, Alex Black, for winning a Special Environmental Sustainability Staff Award, and to our graduate students Josh Ettinger, Alexis McGivern and Marcus Spiegel for coming runner-up in the Environmental Sustainability Students Awards.
The University of Oxford recently held its seventh Environmental Sustainability awards ceremony, hosted by the Vice Chancellor, Dame Professor Louise Richardson. Roughly 150 staff and students from across the University came together at the Sheldonian Theatre to recognise and celebrate their contributions toward the University’s strategic environmental goals.
Alex Black, Facilities Manager in the School of Geography and the Environment, was awarded a Special Environmental Sustainability Staff Award for his extraordinary contribution to several energy saving pilot projects in SoGE. Some of these projects include: a large solar panel installation on the roof, a trial of active room heating controls, fume cupboard heat recovery and free air-cooling of an IT suite.
Alex’s colleagues know him for his enthusiasm, knowledge, and dedication to exploring every opportunity for carbon reduction projects. Many of the technologies are at early stages of development and Alex patiently guides implementation around multiple obstacles. By his activities, Alex demonstrates the enormous potential of technological solution to save energy and reduce carbon emissions.
Laurence Wainwright was also nominated in this category for the creation of the new MSc in Sustainability, Enterprise and the Environment degree programme.
Current SoGE graduate students Alexis McGivern, Josh Ettinger and Marcus Spiegel, were runners-up in the Environmental Sustainability Students Awards for their work initiating a global campaign to promote and encourage interpersonal climate conversations, as a powerful yet forgotten form of climate action. The campaign, Talk Climate Change (talkclimatechange.org) invites people to have a conversation relating to climate change and to write messages to the COP26 conference to make their voices heard. Altogether, 500 of these messages were brought to COP26 as part of Oxford’s delegation.
Alexis McGivern, said:
We learned to leverage the knowledge of experts while also opening out to different opinions and ways of viewing the climate crisis by encouraging people to submit their conversations to our collaborative website.
Find out more about the awards on the University’s Sustainability webpages.
SoGE winners at the Vice Chancellor's Environmental Sustainability Awards 2022
Congratulations to our Facilities Manager, Alex Black, for winning a Special Environmental Sustainability Staff Award, and to our graduate students Josh Ettinger, Alexis McGivern and Marcus Spiegel for coming runner-up in the Environmental Sustainability Students Awards.
