Representing the team for this award are Lorena Gordillo-Dagallier, Sebastian Horstmann and Peter Pihlmann Pedersen.

Lorena, Sebastian and Peter spearhead the open-seneca initiative, which is developing educational tools for building air quality monitoring networks around the globe. The team, consisting of six postgraduate students who founded the initiative out of a University project, aim to raise awareness on the topic of air pollution while involving regular citizens in finding solutions.

In-persons workshops in Nairobi (2020) allowed the local community to build 20 mobile air pollution monitoring devices. The combination of awareness-raising and education empowered local champions to tackle air pollution. The resulting data was fed back to the initiative and their analysis and resulting pollution map of Nairobi can now be used to drive policy change locally. The team have been passionately working on a scale-able train-the-trainers framework that local stakeholders can identify with, accelerating knowledge transfer by empowering the local champions to teach about air pollution themselves.

The project has recently gained traction across Europe through the Women for Climate C40 challenge and the team have become role models for educational outreach at the University of Cambridge.

Lorena, Sebastian and Peter would also like to acknowledge their fellow open-seneca members Christoph Franck, Charles Christensen and Raphael Jacquat for their outstanding contributions to this initiative.

In 2020-21, Lorena was in the third year of her PhD in the Department of Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology at St Catharine's College, Sebastian was in the final year of his PhD within the Institute for Manufacturing and the Department of Engineering, at Hughes Hall, and Peter was in the third year of his PhD in Astrophysics in the Department of Physics at Corpus Christi College.