The Centre for Sustainable Futures and Innovation (CSFI) in partnership with the Doctoral College and industry sponsors, Kirby Group Engineering and Bidvest Noonan, is launching the UL Student Sustainability Challenge 2024-25. This initiative encourages UL students to develop sustainability-focused projects aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It’s a great opportunity for UL students to work in interdisciplinary teams, collaborate with mentors, and gain real-world experience in developing solutions to sustainability issues.
The challenge aims to give UL students the opportunity to build skills in developing compelling project proposals, project management, recruiting a team, working with expert mentors and end-users, and building a network. We’ll be looking for projects around themes such as climate action, waste reduction, biodiversity, social sustainability, circular economy, responsible consumption and production. UL student teams may select their own topic or look to a bank of suggested topics from industry sponsors for inspiration.
Up to five projects will be shortlisted and will receive mentoring from UL faculty or industry partners and up to €5,000 to prepare and deliver a pilot or demonstration of their proposal. The Challenge culminates in a final pitch event to an expert panel during UL’s Research Week in April 2025 where a winning project will be selected.