Researcher Spotlight – Saher Hasnain

This month we would like to introduce Saher Hasnain. Saher worked on a 15-month sprint that ended in September 2023, to investigate the opportunities for nutrient recovery from waste products for agricultural fertilisers. Saher is a postdoctoral researcher with a wealth of experience and knowledge in the fields of geography, environment, and health. Her academic journey has taken her from Pakistan to the United States and now, the UK.

In my capacity as a Postdoctoral Researcher, my role in this Sprint focused on the stakeholder collaboration element of understanding the current material flows and the potential pathways for increasing circularity in the food system. Working on the Agile Sprint has been an incredible learning experience, not only in terms of crafting an interdisciplinary and policy-responsive project, but also for the subject and methodology specific elements shared by team members. Discussing the various definitions, methods, and data needs was a challenge, but an open, flexible, and a friendly framework for communication helped overcome them. It is always useful to reflect on the boundaries and approaches of how different disciplines approach problems and I can see that the outcomes of this project will be more powerful given the diversity of people, disciplines, and approaches working together on it.

In my experience, having a learning and collaborating mindset has helped with speaking to people from different fields and always treating interactions with curiosity and a sense of gratefulness for learning in such a supportive environment. I would advise any researchers taking part in any future Sprints to spend dedicated time agreeing on terms and definitions, to have a good management and communication plan, to come with a mindset for learning and being brave enough to step out of familiar disciplinary boundaries and ways of working.

The frequent meetings, the rapid pace of the project, and trying to make the milestones work with the differing timescales of stakeholders was the biggest difference when comparing working on the Sprint to my previous research experiences. It was a challenge to prepare academic outputs alongside the project deliverables and the requirements of other projects. Key learnings have been around the importance of onboarding and development times for fast-paced projects and prioritising actions while trading off longer-term needs of project members and participants.