Dr Rehan Shah and his first-year undergraduate student researcher, Nicole Kirk, in conjunction with their academic collaborator Dr Anne Preston (UCL) delivered a workshop and paper presentation to engineering educators at the international bi-annual Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EESD) conference hosted at King's College London.

Their workshop entitled 'Promoting equity in engineering education for sustainable development through community-based learning and teaching' featured interactive hands-on activities where participants mapped current postgraduate engineering modules featuring community-based learning approaches to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the core competencies. The feedback from this was very positive and involved a range of reflective discussions and insights by participants motivated by their own teaching experiences.

This was followed by a presentation of their student-led conference paper titled 'Student Researchers Breaking Barriers: Exploring How STEM Can Drive Education for Sustainability in UK Higher Education' which was spearheaded by Dr Shah's undergraduate student researcher, Nicole. The presentation led to thought-provoking questions and keen interest from the audience and was also exceptionally complimented for both its cross-institutional collaboration (featuring both QMUL and UCL) and student-staff co-creation (led by two student researchers who took the lead in writing, drafting and presenting the work).

The outputs from the conference will yield valuable data insights for Dr Shah and Nicole's ongoing international research collaborative project 'Inclusive Commonwealth Learning for Interdisciplinary Development and Education for Sustainability' in partnership with UCL and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai, India) and funded by the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU).