LENScience

LENScience facilitates connections between schools, science organisations and health professionals, to support education-led strategies that empower young people as agents of positive change.

LENScience is a knowledge translation research group within the Liggins Institute. The work of LENScience is focused on the importance of adolescence as a life phase that offers opportunities for improved health and wellbeing of current and future generations. Through school-science-health partnerships, LENScience assists schools to facilitate locally relevant learning programmes that support adolescents to become critically engaged citizens. This means young people who have the capabilities required to seek out and make sense of evidence from within and beyond their communities to understand societal issues, and who are motivated and empowered to act on this learning.

LENScience provides professional development for education and health professionals working with adolescents and develops resources that enable teenagers to explore research evidence associated with Developmental Origins of Health and Disease. Learning programmes examine issues that impact the current and future health and wellbeing of adolescents and their potential future children.

Find out more by visiting the LENScience website.

History of LENScience

Established in 2006 by Liggins Institute founding director, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, LENScience programmes have reached into schools and families throughout New Zealand. The concept and resources have been adapted by the University of Southampton, enabling the development of LifeLab Southampton, serving schools throughout the Hampshire region in the United Kingdom. Imperial College London adapted the concept to create the Wohl Reach Out Lab.

The programmes have been culturally adapted to support strategic health and educational development goals in Tonga and the Cook Islands.

For enquiries from schools, scientists, or prospective postgraduate students please contact LENScience Programme Director Dr Jacquie Bay.

Investigators