Nitrogen: A Global Challenge
Nitrogen’s story is of the peculiar and the mundane, of water turning red and people turning blue. It is one of climate friend and pollution foe, of meaty feasts and looming famine. If your main thought of nitrogen is as a boring corner of the periodic table then it’s time to look again.
This innovative course, regardless of your background, will teach you core concepts about nitrogen and global change, allowing you to better understand the challenges and opportunities it represents. Key topics include food security, climate change, air pollution, water pollution, human health and more.
Learn through the award-winning teaching approaches of the University of Edinburgh’s faculty team. This course brings an engaging and expert approach to the global challenges of nitrogen, showing how the threats it poses for human civilization can be better integrated and tackled.
Taught by instructors with decades of experience in nitrogen and global change research, this world-first course is a collaboration between leading experts in the UK and India as part of the Newton-Bhabha Virtual Centre on Nitrogen Efficiency.
- Learn about the global nitrogen challenge, how nitrogen has helped human civilization to develop, and how its misuse now threatens us
- Discover how fundamental nitrogen is to agriculture and food security
- Understand the role of nitrogen in air pollution and its impact on human health
- Learn how nitrogen can pollute our water and the risks that then arise
- Examine the solutions to the global challenges of nitrogen and how we can better manage this precious element
Dave Reay is Professor of Carbon Management at the University of Edinburgh. Dave has worked on nitrogen and climate change for over 20 years. His research has taken him from stormy seas in the Southern Ocean to evil-smelling Scottish ditches.
He has published over 100 research articles and several popular books on nitrogen, climate change and greenhouse gas fluxes. Dave is also the creator of the award-winning Masters in Carbon Management at Edinburgh and director of the online MSc in Carbon Management.
Andi Móring studied meteorology MSc at the Eötvös Loránt Univerity, Budapest Hungary, then did a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Currently, she is a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Edinburgh. She has had a strong interest in atmospheric and environmental chemistry, with a special focus on modelling of ammonia emission from agricultural sources.
She is doing her postdoc within the framework of the NEWS India-UK Virtual Centre, of which she is the main coordinator. In 2017, she led the coordination of the conference and workshop on “Challenges and Opportunities for Agricultural Nitrogen Science in India”.
Andi is a keen science communicator. She won the Best Presentation Award in 2013 at the GeoSciences Postgraduate Research Conference, and in 2014 she was the runner-up at the university-wide final of the “Three Minute Thesis” competition at the University of Edinburgh. She also won the Best Poster Award at the Open Science Conference of the European Union ÉCLAIRE project at Budapest.
Hannah Ritchie is a researcher focused on the bridge between environmental sustainability and economic development. With a background in Environmental GeoScience (BSc) and Carbon Management (MSc) from the University of Edinburgh, her PhD work focused on bridging the gap between malnutrition and the sustainability of global and national food systems.
She is currently a researcher at the University of Oxford, with work focused on global development for the project OurWorldinData.org.
