St Andrews Students Present at Europeaum event

Three St Andrews PhD students were invited to the Europeaum event, held at the Complutense University of Madrid between 4 and 7 February, to present their mobile app, ‘WillCO2s’. The app allows users to track the carbon emissions of research activity, currently centred around three main areas: experiments, travels, and direct emissions.

Europeaum is a network of eighteen leading European universities, including the University of St Andrews, and aims to foster discussion and collaboration between students around topics that will shape the future of Europe. Overall, eight St Andrews students attended the event, the largest participation from the University at a Europeaum meeting to date.

This specific event brought together experts, academics, and students from across Europe to take part in a variety of speeches, presentations, and discussions on The Future of the European Green Deal, a road map for making the continent more sustainable.

The three students, Aimee Bebbington, Ranjini Sircar, and William Smith, collaborated on the important issue of how researchers can contribute to sustainability.

Sircar stated: “Although none of our PhDs are in the area of sustainability, we wanted to do this as it seems very important for the future of science, in general.”

“The app helps estimate the carbon footprint of research by giving you a numerical value for how much carbon dioxide may have been emitted in order for you to perform a particular experiment or travel journey. Moreover, once set up, it does these calculations in real time so you can know exactly what your carbon footprint is, while you’re doing your research or while you’re travelling,” Sircar stated.

On the event itself, Sircar commented: “It was a much more intimate experience than we had imagined, while also being high quality. This meant that we were able to interact with experts across different fields and really discuss our ideas with them not just as a group, but also one-on-one. The setup was very conducive to asking questions and none of these senior professionals and academics minded being asked difficult questions. I thought this made for very stimulating discussion and allowed everyone to bring up their true concerns around sustainability.”

Image by University of St Andrews