Hi Tom, thanks for being this month’s Staff Spotlight!
As a new member of DICE, what is your role and what made you want to join the team?
I recently joined DICE as a Research Fellow in the E3 Sharing Space for Nature initiative. It’s an exciting time to join the team for lots of reasons!
The E3 Sharing Space for Nature project focuses on some really critical issues, such as how landscapes and seascapes governed by local communities and other non-state actors can contribute to global conservation goals. This topic is closely aligned with my research interests, but there is also a lot of scope for carving out new research directions. Moreover, DICE has great connections with partners worldwide, making it an ideal place for impactful, action-oriented research.
DICE has a reputation for being collaborative and friendly. During my first few weeks here, I’ve seen this reputation is totally accurate! The opportunities to work with a diverse group of colleagues are even greater now, given that a bunch of research and innovation fellows and lecturers are joining DICE as part of the Sharing Space for Nature initiative.
What are your research interests?
My research interests can be summed up as trying to help advance the science of scaling conservation for nature and human health. This focus combines two strands of my previous work.
My interest in human health started when I was working as a research assistant at the National University of Singapore, where I was involved in some cool projects, like looking at the impacts of forest loss on child health outcomes in Cambodia. I wanted to continue this direction during my PhD at Oxford University, focusing on mental health. Existing evidence linking nature and mental health largely overlooks how nature sustains the economic and material dimensions of people’s lives that support their mental health, especially in the rural Global South. Working with colleagues in Uganda, we developed a new framework exploring these indirect links, like how forests support food security and incomes, potentially mitigating depression risk among residents living near Budongo forest. In parallel, having worked in conservation practice, I was also really interested in the mental health of conservation professionals themselves. So, we ran the Life in Conservation project, which explored working conditions and experiences of psychological distress among several thousand conservationists worldwide, including with partners in India, Cambodia, and South Africa.
After my PhD, I joined the Catalyzing Conservation group led by Morena Mills at Imperial College as a Research Associate. This research was very different to what I was doing during my PhD, but it was fascinating. My colleagues and I were interested in why some conservation projects get widely adopted while others don’t and what we could learn from these examples to help scale conservation actions. This included, for instance, looking at patterns of engagement in forest restoration among over 200,000 farmers in the Atlantic Forest in Brazil and a large expert elicitation on “scaling bottlenecks” to community conservation in Southern Africa.
At DICE, I want to draw these strands together, focusing on ‘other effective area-based conservation measures’ (OECMs), a new designation for areas that deliver long-term in-situ biodiversity conservation outside of protected areas. These areas could make vital contributions to conservation. However, there remain many important unanswered questions, like how much potential they have to contribute to global goals or what strategies could support their scaling, socio-ecological benefits, and durability. These are some of the questions I really want to help answer at DICE.
What’s a fun fact about you?
A hyena once stole my pants.
Read more about Thomas’ research and work on his staff profile.