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 Human-Computer Interaction (BSc 2015, PhD 2020), she leads co-design research activities to ensure that digital research infrastructure meets a variety of stakeholder needs across disciplines including environmental data scientists, data managers, software engineers, academic researchers, and policymakers. She is particularly interested in understanding these stakeholders' needs to support collaborative environmental science that is transparent about uncertainty and decisions, and is a Theme Lead for the 'decision-making under uncertainty' theme in CEEDS.

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.