Particle physics is a branch of science that utilizes elementary particles to observe and characterize matter around us. Sounds ominous and complicated, but it is rather elegant and even beautiful.

You may have heard of Higgs boson, quarks, or neutrinos (don´t feel bad if you have not!). But particles that you are definitely familiar with from the high school physics class are protons and neutrons – the basic subatomic particles that makeup our world.

But did you know these itsy bitsy flecks inform our actions and create new industries for decades now? In colossal facilities across Europe and the world, neutrons and electrons are used as unique vessels to look into materials, viruses, or cells where conventional microscopes cannot look. For it is these particles that allow us to look through what an eye never could.

The facilities are called synchrotrons, neutron sources, or free-electron lasers (FEL) – and they might be closer to you then you think! Have a look at the map and see if there is one close to you – they are all worth a visit, and quite often have open days for visitors.

Okay, now you suspect why scientists might be interested – but why should you be? What does a facility like this do for you? Glad you asked.

Looking into the protein structures that make up all living organisms helps us fight cancer, develop better medications or safer vaccines. Harvesting superconductivity can lead to cleaner and cheaper electricity, or we can develop more efficient biofuels and care for our ecosystem. If you are more of an artsy type, did you know these facilities can help with art restoration or fossil excavation? If none of these piqued your interest, may we highlight that perfecting the ice cream making process has also been thanks to the cryo experiements at photon sources? Are you sold now?

Something is missing though.

Electron without a scientist is like a note without a musician; ingredient without a chef; paint without an artist. It holds endless potential but it is only its master that unlocks its true purpose, advances its capabilities, connects it to a universe of harmonies only they can see; and given their virtuosity, turn the humble particle into a glorious masterpiece.

We may have the most wonderful technology at our fingertips – but without the bright minds to operate it, we are lost.

We tend to associate the greatest inventions with individual masters – Bell, DaVinci, Stodola. Were they really the Wunderkinder that managed to become such universal masters of their disciplines, or were they simply good at marketing themselves as the sole stars? Was it perhaps that their discoveries were less complex? Your narrator would doubt this particular explanation, for remember they had to know everything about everything before the invention of the omniscient internet.

Mastering particles has been a team sport for decades now. There is no single person that can run groundbreaking experiments on their own – the machines need someone to hit the ´´on´´ button, and to know what to do with it after. Without people, all technology is useless.

So who are these masters? And why would they work together? Who gets to be the top dog?

Equipes travel to faraway lands to live together as one for a few days, sleeping next to these giant machines while they purr away. Long before the invention of reality television, scientists would be living the reality in the experimental hutches, where they formed borderline familial bonds with their comrades, invent new hierarchies in under seven days, and envision life model dioramas with light flowing through peepholes.

The people that come out of the experiments are decisively different than the ones who walked in to the experimental hall on Day 1. Whether they described a new world or failed miserably trying, they leave changed by their process, by the interactions with each other, and by the eerie feeling of being able to perform a synchronized dance with the invisible particles.

Dear reader, let me part with you on the final note. They say Inter arma silent Musae. I beg to differ – it is exactly at this time that we must hold onto the human pursuits of science and art. It is exactly the time to cherish those who can create something beautiful, be it a symphony or a vital medication, from something that just popped into their head. It is also the time to support their grand plans with tools that enable them to deliver their masterpieces to us – and hence is how we become part of those masterpieces ourselves.

Check out how initiative such as NEPHEWS (www.beamtime.eu) support the masters of now. This article was produced under the work package 3 of the project “NEutrons and PHotons Elevating Worldwide Science (NEPHEWS)” and has received funding from the EU Framework Programme Horizon Europe under grant agreement nº 101131414. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or Research Executive Agency.

Author: Jana Pivoňková

Jana Pivoňková is a strategic expert for international cooperation and innovation, with focus on Central Europe and Visegrad4 countries, especially Slovakia. She is passionate about supporting fundamental research and physical sciences, and highlighting the impact of individual exceptional scientists.  Her goal is to balance national and regional technological sovereignty with global partnership, towards solving societal challenges.

On a national level, Jana is a part of NCPXFEL, a unit designed to champion Slovak scientific community abroad as well as bringing Big Science locally; also Slovakia´s Commission for the Coordination of Activities of the Slovak Republic in ESFRI Research Infrastructures in the Field of Physical Sciences, Materials Sciences and Energy Facilities.

Jana led communication and dissemination in brain circulation project NEPHEWS, or boosts promotional activities of groups such as LEAPS, EIROforum, MHz Tomoscopy, ATTRACT2, STEPHANIK, and others. She actively encourages private sector to collaborate with large scale research infrastructures through proactive business development as well as outreach events.

The hallmarks of her writing style are approachability, vivid imagery, and emotional connection to the world of science.

English original was first published in Slovak translation at: https://vedanadosah.cvtisr.sk/priroda/fyzika/majster-a-nasa-planeta-uvaha-o-casticovej-fyzike/

The scope of today’s environmental challenges is vast and demands careful and contextual evaluations, guidance, and policy interventions. One of the pressing issues is the depletion of fossil fuel resources, which has driven a shift toward renewable energy. While both the Global North and South encounter significant hurdles in this transition, the South faces a particularly intricate set of obstacles, especially when striving for a just energy transition.

For the Global South, this transition often needs to align with economic growth imperatives. Although the Global North now leads in renewable energy adoption, one must note that it reaped extensive benefits from fossil fuels during the colonial era. The South, however, cannot replicate that path and has yet to build similarly robust institutions.

This context highlights the complexities that nations in the Global South—such as Indonesia—must address in pursuing their just transition goals. Our recent study (Jazuli et al., 2024) uses Indonesia as a case to illustrate how political, social, and regulatory factors substantially influence its energy transition efforts under the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP).

An ‘un-environmental’ analysis

Our work employs a policy regime framework, focusing on political, social, and regulatory ‘realities’ to evaluate Indonesia’s JETP, which was initiated during the country’s G20 presidency in 2022. While Indonesia’s commitment to the JETP marks a promising step toward reducing carbon emissions and promoting renewables, it also underscores broader challenges faced by the Global South in moving away from fossil fuels. Indonesia’s long-standing struggles to reform fossil fuel subsidies (FFSR) reflect these difficulties.

Starting in the wake of the 1998 Asian financial crisis, FFSR aimed to divert funds from fossil fuel subsidies to essential sectors like health and education. However, the progress has been hampered by political pushback and social resistance. Similarly, the JETP—though encouraging—faces significant barriers. Achieving a fair energy transition demands more than environmental resolve; it requires solid political, social, and regulatory support.

Politically, resistance to foreign-controlled financing and concerns about national debt present considerable challenges for the JETP. Additionally, coal, a vital export and energy source, is deeply embedded in Indonesia’s political and economic systems. Socially, the JETP is promoted as a national priority, yet it remains poorly understood among much of Indonesia’s population. On the regulatory side, Indonesia’s inconsistent policy landscape hinders JETP’s progress; despite ambitious carbon reduction goals, energy policies continue to favor coal, the country’s primary energy source.

Recommendations for the Global South

JETP initiatives are being pursued not only in Indonesia but also in countries like South Africa, Senegal, and Vietnam. Although these nations have unique policy environments, they share common characteristics typical of the South, such as nascent institutional structures and diverse communities. Based on our analysis, we offer three recommendations for administrations and advocates of JETPs in the Global South.

Firstly, success depends on political support from key stakeholders. Advocates should frame the energy transition as a catalyst for economic growth and national security, not merely an environmental issue. Consistent dialogue with political leaders is essential to ensure JETP alignment with their agendas. Emphasizing how JETPs can expand political leaders’ constituencies will boost the initiative’s appeal.

Secondly, for an equitable transition, it’s vital to go beyond elite (English-dominated) discussions and actively involve affected groups, such as coal industry workers. Vulnerable populations, including women and indigenous communities, should also have a voice in decision-making to foster an inclusive transition. Engaging trusted entities like religious, social, and cultural organizations can build ownership and trust.

Lastly, existing regulatory frameworks need revisiting to ensure policy alignment, particularly in curbing fossil fuel dependency, which conflicts with renewable energy goals. JETPs can act as a lever for updating and streamlining policies that currently impede renewable energy growth and investment. Effective enforcement is also critical to overcoming the policy inertia and reversals common in energy-related reforms. (*)

Muhamad Rosyid Jazuli – PhD Candidate at UCL STEaPP, affiliate researcher at Paramadina Public Policy Institute

Related publication:

Jazuli, M. R., Roll, K., & Mulugetta, Y. (2024). A review of Indonesia’s JETP through the dynamics of its policy regime. Global Policy, 00, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.13452

As the 31st International Conference on Transdisciplinary Engineering 2024 kicks off at UCL East, over 100 engineers from around the world—including the United Kingdom, Brazil, Mexico, United States, China, Japan, Sweden, Singapore, and others—converge in London to explore how transdisciplinary engineering can drive social change and improve the world. This conference provides a platform for discussing the crucial role of engineering and science in addressing societal challenges through innovative, interdisciplinary approaches.

We already know that transdisciplinary research teams comprising engineers and others, tend to produce research that is more likely to have policy and commercial impact. Yet, with over 334 categorized research fields, there are more than 35 billion possible combinations for interdisciplinary work for teams of up to 5 researchers. Depending on the combination of researcher capabilities, some interdisciplinary teams may be better suited for disruptive science, developing patents, or informing policy. But which combinations of fields lead to which type of impact?

Supported by Elsevier and working with the Growth Lab at Harvard Kennedy School, we are applying complexity methods and machine learning on bibliometric data to understand which combination of researcher capabilities leads to high-impact research. For this blog, we’ll discuss our work within the context of the impact of interdisciplinary climate research on public policy.

To calculate interdisciplinarity, we determine the capabilities of authors based on their publication history in different fields. Each author is represented by a vector indicating the number of times they have published in each field. These author vectors are then used to calculate the disciplinary diversity (DDA) of each paper, reflecting the combined expertise and capabilities of the co-authoring team.

As a first step, we ran a series of statistical analyses and regressions to evaluate the relationship between a paper’s interdisciplinarity score and the number of policy citations it received. Preliminary results show that interdisciplinarity explains almost 15% of the variance in policy citations, making it the strongest predictor of policy impact we have identified so far. In fact, transdisciplinarity is found to be three times better at predicting policy citations than conventional metrics of research excellence, exceeding the combined effects of academic citations, journal impact factor, and author h-index.

We then aggregated our analysis at the topic level by calculating the average interdisciplinarity score of papers within each topic. The first observation is that climate change-related topics with high interdisciplinarity are less common than those with low diversity. The distribution of these topics is shown in Figure 1.

Fig 1: Distribution of paper interdisciplinarity in climate research

The second observation is that topics with higher ratios of policy citations have nearly double the average interdisciplinarity score compared to topics with relatively low policy citations. Figure 2 illustrates the difference in interdisciplinary distribution between the low and high policy relevance groups.

Figure 2: Interdisciplinary Distribution by Policy Relevance

Finally, using the paper vectors, we are developing a machine learning model to understand which combinations of author capabilities and team dynamics lead to high policy impact. The preliminary model has already found that for climate change-related research overall, teams involving researchers with expertise in economics, meteorology & atmospheric sciences, general & internal medicine, ecology, and horticulture tend to be associated with higher policy impact.

Moving forward, we are refining the model to predict the optimal team dynamics for high impact within specific policy topics. We are expanding the training data to include additional metrics and features, such as academic seniority, international collaboration, and research text. Furthermore, we will incorporate the distances between research fields to study the effects of deep interdisciplinarity, bringing together researchers from relatively less connected fields, on social impact.

As TE2024 brings together engineers and researchers from around the globe, this work exemplifies the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration in addressing global challenges and driving social change through innovative, data-driven approaches. Equipped with machine learning tools like this, researchers can develop targeted strategies to form data-informed transdisciplinary teams, optimized for maximum societal benefit and impact.

On 26 April, a cross-faculty student committee representing the MPA degrees from the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), UCL Department of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Public Policy (STEaPP), and UCL Department of Political Science (DoPS) hosted the second annual Summit on Sustainability.

The Summit brought together students, academics, and professionals for an interactive and collaborative learning experience as well as engaging discussions about ongoing action in sustainability. This year’s theme, the Power and Politics of Sustainability Transitions, aimed to navigate the increasingly complex world of activism, policy, and conflict surrounding sustainable transitions and solutions.

Collaboration with the UCL Climate Action Unit opened the Summit

Dr. Kris de Meyer from the UCL Climate Action Unit started the event off with a talk about climate change and the uncertainty of the future. He demonstrated how we are doing what we can because it’s what we know, but posed the question: “If we knew the solution, what might we do differently to get there?” The thought-provoking talk set the tone for the event and explored the different realities that can and do exist in sustainability.

Jon Alexander and Jane Davidson in fireside chat about collaboration

Co-founder of The New Citizenship Project and co-author of Citizens, Jon Alexander has worked to center the public at the heart of collaborative issues like climate change and economic insecurity – to treat people like Citizens not Consumers. He sat down with Jane Davidson, former Welsh Government minister and current chair of the Wales Net Zero 2035 Group, to discuss community participation in policymaking. Ms. Davidson delved into her history has a lawmaker in Wales, living through community collaboration for a better future. Her passion for sustainability led to the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act (2015), putting sustainability at the forefront of all government and public organization action.

Policy Pathways Simulation adapted from in-field work for MPA participation

After lunch, the UCL Climate Action Unit once again took the stage to deliver a two-hour activity in which the participating students and staff joined a Climate Strategy Advisory Board to advise on a hypothetical green transition plan set out by the Prime Minister. Policy Pathways was created by the Unit as a virtual exercise for policymakers and politicians to collaborate and deliver different methods of sustainability transitions through financial regulation, taxation, and public subsidies. The simulation was adapted for the Summit with the goal of providing groups with differing perspectives the chance to discuss and debate amongst themselves, leading to somewhat differing strategies.

After the activity, Dr. de Meyer showed that, in the field, stakeholders struggled to utilise the existing policy tools to deliver effective and affordable green transitions. He brought the conversation back to his opening talk, wherein he stated that we can only do what we know, so we must expand that knowledge in order to expand the reality of sustainability.

Multi-profession panel explores navigating power and politics in the field of sustainability

Moderated by one of the student organizers, the three-person panel discussed different actors’ roles in change, and how power plays into the sustainability movement when it comes to justice and representation. Selina Newell, Director of Climate Action Implementation at C40, Fatou Jeng, founder of Clean Earth Gambia and Youth Climate Advisor to the UN Secretary General, and Asad Rehman, Executive Director of War on Want, unpacked the different levels of action, from individual movements to global affairs. Much of the conversation focused on equity being utmost important for sustainability movements and recognising economic inequality as a major point of conflict when it comes to global change. The cross-sector backgrounds of the panellists offered unique insight into the different powers that activists and policymakers have to enact change through sustainability transitions.

Clare Farrell speaks on the failure of ‘sustainability’ and where to go from here

To round out the Summit, keynote speaker Clare Farrell, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, delivered a talk titled Why Sustainability Isn’t Working Out. She spoke on her background in fashion and ethics, and how her work on the ground in activism led to the group’s message of civil rebellion for democratic change. Her thought-proving talk demonstrated the slow-moving and barrier-filled process of change through established political and economic institutions, and how the conventional perception of ‘sustainability’ has failed to come to fruition. Ms. Farrell guided the attendees to think about what must change now in order to achieve future goals in green transitions. She wrapped up the event by evoking hope in action now for change later.

After closing remarks, guests and attendees were invited to food and drinks for a two-hour networking social with open discussion and further questions.

Continuing cross-MPA collaboration and learning

Last year’s summit paved the way for the collaborative effort made this year. The three departments delivered learning in different contexts. Unifying those views for a cohesive and multi-perspective educational opportunity allowed the attendees and the committee to learn from both each other as well as the guests. Collaboration between the MPAs is imperative as we the students prepare to embark on our professional journeys as decision makers. Our ability to learn from each other must be fostered now so that it is not limited to these formal institutions. After coming together for this year’s Summit, we hope the relationship between the departments’ MPA programs continues to grow and furthers collaboration in the coming years.

Authors Note

Written by Erin Sebastian.

Erin along with the other organisers of the Sustainability Summit would like to give a special thanks to Kazuhiro Naito and Liam Orme for photography.

This 4-part blog series covers the recent dismantling of the UK government’s department for Business, Energy and the Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and what it means for engineering policy. We take this opportunity to look at what we can learn from the creation and internal organisation of BEIS to reflect on how machinery of government changes affect engineering in and for policy. This blog series is written by final year PhD candidate Laurent Lioté, working on engineering advice for energy policy and part of STEaPP’s Engineering Policy Group.      

Science, Innovation and Technology… but still no engineering

My final point is somewhat more conceptual than my previous ones (posts 1, post 2 , post 3) but just as important. Engineering is clearly key for energy and innovation policy so why does it not get an explicit mention in the new ministries’ names or remit? Perhaps because the concepts of science, innovation and technology are thought to cover engineering – but this is not exactly true and has an important impact on engineering policy. All the arguments made in this post are adapted from this article written with Adam Cooper and Chloé Colomer, where we discuss this topic in more detail.

Science is often thought to include engineering because of the common belief that engineers “apply science” in the process of innovation or technology creation. But this is not always the case, a lot of engineering focuses on maintaining systems and optimising already existing processes. Moreover, a lot of science happens in publicly funded academic research institutions whereas most engineers work in private sector companies.

Taking a narrower view, we can also make the case that engineering and science advice for energy policy (now the in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s portfolio) is different too.  Within energy policy, science advice focuses on the biological (like the types of organisms in an anaerobic digester or amount of gas emitted) and engineering focuses on the physical features of the reactor (like how the reactor and engine are built). Engineering is about objects and their performance whereas science is about bio- and ecosystems. Science advice, because it is concerned with biological and ecosystems, is methodologically driven by a hypothesis that measurements can validate or invalidate. Engineering advice on the other hand is outcome-driven or solution-oriented, where measurements help achieve a goal that best meets project design criteria.

Focusing on innovation or technology doesn’t do engineering justice either. Indeed, such focus is necessarily rooted in objects, with the engineers in orbit. Whereas a focus on engineers is rooted in their skills, knowledge, and practices, often with technologies in orbit. Exploring engineering practice surfaces how engineers draw on existing and new knowledge, how they communicate amongst themselves and with others in a way that exploring technology does not.

If assumptions and concepts from “science, innovation and technology” do not apply equally to engineering, perhaps a distinction in policy terms is important if engineering is to be governed effectively. But perhaps we’ll have to wait for the next reshuffle to see engineering pop-up in the name or remit of a UK government department!