Dr Shona Koren Paterson
Senior Lecturer

Research area(s)

Shona is the Research Challenge Area Lead for Creative Secure Connected Communities and Director of the Centre for Global Lives at Brunel. As a climate social scientist, her research focuses on the co-design and co-implementation of equitable pathways to sustainability with decision-makers and local communities. With a special focus on just resilience and equity, recent projects include work on transformative adaptation and adaptive capacity as well as local context governance.

Shona’s transdisciplinary work aims to facilitates open discourse around risk and complexity by embracing plural ways of knowing. This includes art-science collaborations to catalyse community-led change by cross-pollinating challenge-led processes and outcomes. Examples of transdisciplinary projects include Catching a Wave and the co-curation of immersive installations on Long COVID and Bodies:Transdisciplinarity as Power in partnership with artists and scientitsts through the New York Gallery/Forum Relational Space. 

Shona is a partner in the UKRI Maximizing Climate Adaptation Hub led by Kings College London and the PATH project that addresses climate mobilities and precariously housed populations in four case studies around the world. She is an active member of the London Climate Ready Partnership and a member of the ACCESS Task Force on Adaptation and Resilience and co-author of Putting people at the centre of UK climate adaptation and resilience. 

Grants