Nicole Kennard

Nicole Kennard is a current PhD student based in the Department of Chemistry and School of Biosciences. She is also a Grantham Scholar. Her supervisors are Anthony Ryan, Duncan Cameron, and Jill Edmondson. Nicole's research is interdisciplinary and focuses on the sustainability and resiliency of urban and local food systems. She is working with vegetable farmers in the U.S. and UK to gather information about material and resource use on farms, which she is then using within lifecycle assessments. This will allow her to compare environmental impacts between small and large farms; urban, peri-urban, and rural farms; and organic and conventional farms, as she hopes to uncover how scale, management practices, and locality play a role in farm sustainability. Nicole also volunteers for Foodhall, a community food café and social eating space in Sheffield city centre. She developed a research project with Foodhall to investigate the intertwined issues of food access and mental health during COVID-19. Nicole is also a member of Social Pickle, a social fermenting group based out of Foodhall, which aims to reduce food waste and share in food knowledge by preserving the season's gluts. Finally, she is also interested in science policy, and has recently completed a 2021 summer fellowship with the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST).