Dr. Kelly Widdicks

Kelly's research interests focus on the responsible design and development of digital research infrastructure for environmental science, taking a systems thinking approach that considers the wider societal and environmental impacts that digital technology can create. 

With her background in Computer Science and sustainable Human-Computer Interaction (BSc 2015, PhD 2020), she leads large projects involving co-design research activities to ensure that digital research infrastructure meets a variety of stakeholder needs across disciplines and enables systemic science insights. She is particularly interested in how to support trustworthy decision-making in environmental science and enhance equality, diversity and inclusion in digital research infrastructure and co-design approaches. These aspects are central to the digital integration work package she co-leads for the National Capability for UK (NC-UK) Challenges programme.

A core part of her research leadership involves investigating opportunities to reduce the environmental impacts of digital research infrastructure, building on her prior work with colleagues on the climate impacts of digital technologies. She is Principal Investigator for an EPSRC project exploring sustainable digital research infrastructure for environmental science, and leads research on sustainable digital research infrastructure for UKCEH's Digital Strategy. She was also a co-investigator on the EPSRC PARIS-DE project that focused on developing a framework for the sustainable and responsible innovation of digital technology, and is currently a co-investigator on a NetDRIVE-funded project exploring 'sufficiency' for the sustainability of digital research infrastructure used in soil monitoring.

Alongside her research, Kelly leads the Digital Innovation team within the Digital Research group at UKCEH.