Alec’s fellowship project has two key stands: 1. Finding ways to assess different forms of evidence (e.g., the scientific literature and indigenous and local community knowledge) to help improve evidence-informed decision-making; and 2. Developing new approaches to assessing the reliability and relevance of evidence to different decision-making contexts. Alec’s work helps to ensure that in the future, evidence-informed decision-making combines diverse sources of knowledge for decision-making, whilst making sure to assess the reliability and relevance of each piece of evidence so we can provide tailored recommendations to decision-makers based on their local context. Alec is also particularly interested in how the effectiveness of conservation interventions varies geographically, taxonomically, and socioeconomically, and whether we can predict this – i.e., how can we predict whether a conservation intervention is likely to work in a given local context?
A key and rewarding part of his work is co-designing and developing online tools to help practitioners in the field to determine the best conservation interventions for them to use in their local patch for a given issue using a structured evidence-based process. This has involved a fruitful collaboration with over a dozen different conservation organisations in the UK and abroad called ‘Evidence Champions’ that promote and deliver evidence-based conservation. Alec is continuing to work to create decision support and evidence assessment tools that combine different forms of evidence and knowledge to make better evidence-based decisions in conservation. He works within the Conservation Evidence project and was recently part of the team that won the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Research Impact and Engagement 2023 for their work on transforming conservation through promoting and facilitating evidence-based practice and decision-making.
A newer element of Alec’s research focuses on Artificial Intelligence and whether machine learning can help to accelerate the evidence synthesis pipeline, translating scientific evidence into useful recommendations for practice and policy more quickly and rigorously. He is also working on applying AI to invasive species surveillance to see whether Open Source Intelligence can help us better stop biological invasions before they become too difficult to control. Overall, Alec’s work is tied together by the unifying theme of applying the patchy global evidence base to inform more effective, local conservation actions.
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Kipling’s “Iron‒Cold Iron‒is master of them all” captures the familiar importance of metals as structural materials. Yet common metals are not necessarily hard; they can become so when deformed. This phenomenon, strain hardening, was first explained by G. I. Taylor in 1934. Ninety years on from this pioneering work on dislocation theory, we explore the deformation of metals when dislocations do not exist, that is when the metals are non-crystalline. These amorphous metals have record-breaking combinations of properties. They behave very differently from the metals that Taylor studied, but we do find phenomena for which his work (in a dramatically different context) is directly relevant.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, U.K. policy-makers claimed to be "following the science". Many commentators objected that the government did not live up to this aim. Others worried that policy-makers ought not blindly "follow" science, because this involves an abdication of responsibility. In this talk, I consider a third, even more fundamental concern: that there is no such thing as "the" science. Drawing on the case of adolescent vaccination against Covid-19, I argue that the best that any scientific advisory group can do is to offer a partial perspective on reality. In turn, this has important implications for how we think about science and politics.
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