Lancaster Environment Centre

Dr Ruth Alcock

Welcome to the Winter Issue of the LEC newsletter from Dr Ruth Alcock, the new Head of Enterprise and Business Partnerships in LEC.

As the new Head of Enterprise and Business Partnerships in LEC, I’ll be leading our business engagement team to ensure that our expertise makes a demonstrable economic and societal impact.

My background is grounded in environmental chemistry (PhD Lancaster 1994) where I developed a distinctive international profile of research targeted on the human health implications of chemical exposure. This has developed into a truly inter-disciplinary engagement crossing natural sciences, social sciences, health and management domains focusing on managing complex environmental risks, the impacts of future change and sustainable resource management.

Since 2009, I’ve developed and led water-centred KE activity at the Lancaster Environment Centre via the NERC-funded Catchment Change Network (CCN). This network enables the exchange of best practice between the NERC research base and wider science user community in terms of understanding and managing uncertainty related to future change in catchments across three key areas - water scarcity, flood risk and diffuse pollution management.

My new team have joined part of a new wider team across Science and Technology at Lancaster, as part of a new approach to share expertise and offer businesses a more cross-disciplinary approach in line with complex challenges businesses face. There are 7 themes, Advanced Manufacturing, Energy, Environment, Health & Human Development, Information and Communication Technologies, Quantum Technology and Security. Across these themes we will all be working together to form partnerships in 5 key areas: collaborative research and consultancy, extra resources and skills from our students, award winning co-location buildings, bespoke professional training and product development. For more information on these see www.lancs.ac.uk/sci-tech/business/

We are currently developing our plans for the next 4 years, if anyone would like to talk to me about forming a closer partnership with LEC, please feel free to contact me.

I look forward to working with you all.

Dr Ruth Alcock