Empowering urban communities to shape our research, strategic development and ongoing activities at the Mohn Centre.

Public and community involvement is where members of the community are actively involved in the ongoing activities at research organisations. At the Mohn Centre, we actively engage with urban communities and have formed close links with community groups and schools in the White City area. Together, we are creating a centre of excellence.

We commit to having a proactive approach to public engagement across all our research themes, ensuring our work is transparent and important to the people we work with. Communities will have an active voice in Mohn Centre activities and will continuously impact the development of our objectives. A central objective of centre is to develop a centre of expertise in the College for children and young person focused public and community involvement, engagement and participation (PCIEP).

We work in collaboration with partners across Imperial, including the White City Community Engagement team, who have been working with the West London community for the past five years, forming long-term trusted relationships with the community. We have been working with the WellHome study, a community-based research project in West London and part of our built environment and infrastructure theme, to explore indoor and outdoor air pollution and its impact on asthma. WellHome has been co-designed with the local community in White City, establishing a strong online community and research hub of passionate members.

Alongside this engagement, our work at the Mohn Centre will expand beyond this dialogue and create meaningful opportunities for children and young people in the local community and beyond. For example, the most recent phase of SCAMP (Study of Cognition, Adolescents and Mobile Phones) is giving sixth form students the opportunity to learn new skills in research, project management and data collection while working alongside researchers at Imperial. This phase named the ‘SCAMP Research Challenge’ is designed to be led and managed by sixth form students, who are providing fresh insights into how adolescents perceive mobile phone usage and the possible impacts of this.