“How does your research change the world?” With her response to this question, our nominee Neelakshi Joshi convinced the judging panel to select her as one of 5 winners of the 2022 BioOne Ambassador Award. We warmly congratulate her on this achievement!
Joshi’s award-winning response is based on her article published last year in MRD, which takes stock of risk knowledge among formal and informal actors involved in urban development in Uttarakhand, India. Her results show that urban development is largely driven by informal building professionals without access to risk reduction knowledge. She calls for recognition of informal building professionals and practices, and outlines how they could be supported with training and education. In her lay summary for the BioOne Ambassador Award, she recounts how a workshop with Almora residents, building professionals, municipal employees, and academics based on her results made it to the local press and helped expand the conversation on addressing urban risks in Almora’s development.
The BioOne Ambassador Award recognizes early-career authors in publications hosted on the BioOne Complete platform—such as MRD—and inspires creative approaches to communicating specialized research to the general public. This is directly in line with MRD’s mission to widely share and promote knowledge that fosters sustainable development in mountains. By encouraging communication to a broad audience beyond academia, the Award helps build the bridges between science, policy, and society that are so urgently needed to bring this knowledge into action.
Read Neelakshi Joshi’s award-winning text and find out more about her work
Read the underlying scientific article published in MRD Vol 41, No 1
Read more about the work of our publishing partner BioOne, including the Award
… and keep an eye out for the upcoming article by Neelakshi Joshi that will be published in the second half of May in Vol 42, No 2 of MRD!
Photo: Neelakshi Joshi interviews masons as they construct a house in Almora, India (by Neelakshi Joshi)
