School of Social and Political Science

Research project type

Energy Pathways

Principal investigator

Principal investigator

Overview

Description

UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) Phase 3

Edinburgh is involved in the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) Phase 3’s Energy Pathways theme, which is examining the UK’s energy transition in an uncertain world, and the synergies and trade-offs between the key drivers for this transition. The research will analyse pathways that meet current UK policy targets for reducing emissions, and will compare them to others in which other energy system drivers overwhelm low carbon policies, or the future direction of policy changes dramatically.

Further Information

The emerging field of synthetic biology promises to engineer the living world. Its proponents argue that it will deliver new fuels, medicines and materials that will drive the next industrial revolution. A field of such potentially huge significance requires informed social scientific attention. And because of synthetic biology’s bold ambitions and disruptive potential, scholars from the social sciences and humanities have become enrolled into synthetic biology research projects in a manner that is unprecedented.

The Engineering Life project will study both the engineering of biology and the role of social scientists within this. Its two objectives are:

  • to investigate the movement of ideas, practices and promises from engineering into the life sciences;
  • to examine the ways in which social scientists and other groups are being mobilised as part of this endeavour.

Further information

Research themes

  • Energy, environment and sustainability
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