Dr Jonathan Dolley
Dr Jonathan Dolley is a Research Fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) exploring the links between urban development policy, peri-urban food systems and sustainable urbanisation in rapidly urbanising countries.
Jonathan's story
During his postdoctoral research with the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme (SSRP), Jonathan expanded his research interests through a collaborative interdisciplinary experience.
Research with the SSRP
During his PhD at SPRU, Jonathan had an idea about using machine learning technology to map different kinds of agricultural land-use in Wuhan, China, where he lived at the time. But it wasn’t until he heard of SSRP that he found the opportunity to bring it to life.
The openness and flexibility of the SSRP call gave us a lot of freedom. The funding was about trying out new collaborations and it encouraged us to explore new and potentially risky ideas.”
After his PhD, Jonathan worked as a junior researcher with Prof Fiona Marshall on a programme about ecosystem services for poverty alleviation. It was through Fiona that Jonathan first heard of SSRP. Together with other colleagues, Jonathan proposed his idea to SSRP and received funding for the project ‘Understanding trade-offs between SDGs in urbanising contexts’ to develop a web-app and a method to visualise urban development, food security and poverty trade-offs and synergies.
This research culminated in a more ambitious project, with funding from the British Academy. Learning from the methodological approach piloted in the SSRP project, the same Sussex team explored the possibilities of green infrastructures for urban wellbeing in partnership with academics in China and India.
Interdisciplinary networks
Through the SSRP project, Jonathan established a strong interdisciplinary collaboration with scholars from the Informatics department. This challenging collaboration was key to explore ways of integrating AI and deep learning techniques with social sciences research. To promote interdisciplinarity, the SSRP often organises cross-school networking events. These can be a source of inspiration and support for early career researchers.
Attending the events organised by SSRP was very helpful to meet people with similar interests but working on different disciplines, and to get different perspectives on my research.”
Jonathan has directly helped improve the opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration across our schools, by developing the SSRP-funded Sussex Sustainability Search Database. Whilst most people started baking sourdough bread during the pandemic lockdown, Jonathan was busy learning programming languages. In collaboration with Prof Fiona Marshall and SSRP, he wrote a programme to mine text on data from abstracts and profiles of researchers within the Elements database.
After working with the SSRP
After finishing his SSRP project, Jonathan received a Marie Curie fellowship based on a proposal that followed on his interests in food systems and cooperatives. Now living in South Korea, Jonathan came across the organic cooperative Hansalim, which encompasses producer’s and consumer’s cooperatives into a federation of 750,000 members. He is currently exploring the functioning of this successful model and how it compares to other cooperatives in the West. Jonathan plans to turn his work into a book, to be published online in an innovative way: by sharing the draft chapters as they are finished, and encouraging other peers to give feedback and input to the book.