Design Engineering undergraduate student, Nicole Kirk (second-year) has been successful in securing the Student Enhanced Engagement and Development (SEED) Award from the Queen Mary Academy for jer significant contributions as a student research assistant on the scholarship research project “Student Researchers Breaking Barriers: Exploring How STEM and SHAPE Can Drive Education for Sustainability supervised by Dr Rehan Shah.

Nicole joined a cross-institutional global research initiative dedicated to exploring the use of inclusive pedagogy to enhance higher education (HE) educators’ understanding of education for sustainable development (ESD) in interdisciplinary learning curricula. This project was funded by the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) and was a collaboration between QMUL (Dr Rehan Shah), University College London (UCL) (Prod Anne Preston) and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) (Dr Neha Christie and Dr Praveen Kumar) in India featuring 4 project leads and 4 student researchers. The project was aimed at developing a joint toolkit based on practice-based research to evaluate the role and quality of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in postgraduate modules across both STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy) disciplines.

As part of her role, Nicole led a comprehensive literature review on ESD pedagogies and approaches to interdisciplinary learning in HE and examined how sustainability education can be enhanced through experiential, inquiry-based learning and systems thinking, and how these pedagogical frameworks can motivate students to connect engineering principles with social and environmental impact. In conjunction with the other student researchers, she also undertook a detailed mapping of the SDGs present within 108 Level 7 engineering modules across QMUL and UCL.

She was able to successfully disseminate her findings with great finesse through presentations at the project launch webinar in May 2025, the QMUL Festival of Education in June 2025 and a workshop (conference paper) and presentation (conference paper) at the global Engineering Education for Sustainable Development Conference (EESD) held at Kings College London in June 2025, for which she also co-authored 2 proceedings papers, that have now been published.

The panel were exceedingly impressed by her work stating: "This is a fabulous application that meets all the required criteria for the SEED award. The applicant provided a very detailed reflection on how this project on Education for Sustainable Development enriched not only her experience, but also those of her peers, as well as those of the lecturers and other researchers involved. The application included a number of detailed and specific recommendations, as well as examples of dissemination of the results, and influence on those who learned about the project in the different conferences and paper presentations."

Dr Shah is extremely proud of her work and noted how Nicole's work for this project has had a significant impact on the area of ESD curricular innovation in both STEM and SHAPE disciplines by ensuring that a student view and voice has been incorporated at the heart of the work around supporting academics in adopting this form of pedagogical learning.