We are delighted to share that Avadhoot Potdar has been named in The Irish Times’s ‘50 People to Watch in 2024’. The list features activists and artists from film and music with inspiring projects and stories.
Avadhoot was selected as he is currently leading UCD Innovation Academy’s most recent Human Capital Initiative project (Convene) funded project: UCD Greenacre Sustainability Hub. UCD Greenacre combines several Convene pilot projects successfully launched at UCD Innovation Academy over the last three years.
UCD Greenacre is UCD’s new experiential sustainability hub, located on an acre of UCD’s woodland campus in Belfield. A first of its kind in Ireland, UCD Greenacre will make immersive, hands-on sustainability experiences accessible to the UCD community and those who partner with us to explore, experiment and learn how to take meaningful actions for a sustainable planet.
The vision for UCD Greenacre is that it might serve as a catalyst for collaborative innovation in sustainability and be a safe space in which to try, test, fail and iterate to solve humanity’s greatest challenges.
“UCD Greenacre is a small area of the UCD campus where students will be able to get their hands dirty, farming mushrooms with used coffee grounds, recycling plastic into usable products and growing their own food. ”
Avadhoot has also led the development and design of a new undergraduate sustainability-focused module at UCD for the Spring 2024 Trimester: Design a Sustainable Future (IA20140)
This module will empower students to create sustainable business models that address real-world sustainability challenges through the lens of a Circular Economy. During this module, students will have the opportunity to engage in various sustainability initiatives at UCD Greenacre, including growing mushrooms from coffee grounds, gaining hands-on experience with plastic recycling, and actively participating in the development of a community garden. Our UCD living labs are delivering key skills to students to prepare them to tackle the climate crisis.
If you would like to connect or collaborate with us on UCD Greenacre Sustainability Hub, please contact our Sustainability Solutions Manager Avadhoot Potdar at Avadhoot.Potdar@ucd.ie
The Human Capital Initiative Pillar 3 (HCI Pillar 3), is a €300m (do we use 208m?) programme of 24 projects across Ireland’s Higher Education (HE) institutions, using innovation & agility to increase capacity in higher education to provide skills-focused programmes. All 24 projects are collaborative between HE and Enterprise partners, and funded by the National Training Fund (NTF) to meet existing and future industry skills needs. For more information visit our website.