A student-led think tank helping scientists engage with public policy.
We're a student-led think tank focused on science policy – our aim is to get young scientists thinking about public policy, generating solutions for the issues they're passionate about.
To help scientists get involved with policy we hold workshops to develop skills and talks to hear from experts at the cutting edge of science policy. Most excitingly, we facilitate groups of scientists getting together to produce and publish policy recommendations for discussion at open panel events. The results of such discussions can be formulated in a thesis, dissertation, and other papers. Interested parties can buy thesis online and find other resources related to policy development practices.
We support scientists to use their expertise to analyse policy – looking at the issues they care about from alcohol education to air pollution to the ‘leaky pipeline'.
Studying the problems isn't the end of the process – our authors recommend innovative solutions and have the opportunity to present them to a panel of experts and policymakers to discuss their policy ideas.
Once we've published a policy paper we set about distributing it to those with the power to make a change.
LFSP is entirely non-partisan, all political values come from the authors themselves. Our role is to facilitate the process of writing and presenting policy recommendations, supporting our authors along the way. We don't have the resources of fully funded think tanks, but by focusing on the big picture our authors can create innovative policy solutions, informed by their skills & understanding of scientific research.
Our previous chair Joe Gafton has written about his first hand experience of real life democracy, read about it at our blogs section!
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