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Get Involved!
The SDG Impact Lab provides a rare opportunity for students to learn and collaborate across disciplines, harnessing diversity as a strength to deliver solutions to complex environmental and social challenges.
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Get Involved!
The SDG Impact Lab provides a rare opportunity for students to learn and collaborate across disciplines, harnessing diversity as a strength to deliver solutions to complex environmental and social challenges.
-
Get Involved!
The SDG Impact Lab provides a rare opportunity for students to learn and collaborate across disciplines, harnessing diversity as a strength to deliver solutions to complex environmental and social challenges.
The Oxford SDG Impact Lab Fellowships offer graduate students the chance to tackle real-world challenges aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Fellows complete an eight-week Masterclass Series and selected Fellows then join the Partner Project Programme, collaborating with businesses and community partners, potentially through a 2-6 week summer placement with a stipend. For more information, visit our FAQs.
2025 Fellowship applications have closed, download the programme information for guidance purposes. Get ready for 2026!
The Oxford Laidlaw Scholars Programme is an 18-month programme offering first-year undergraduates hands-on project experience, leadership workshops, and collaboration on impactful local and global initiatives, with a stipend provided. Scholars join an Oxford group leadership retreat in Year 1, and in Year 2, attend the Laidlaw International Scholars Conference and complete a global Leadership in Action project.
2025-27 Scholars applications have closed, visit the Laidlaw Application Guidance for guidance purposes. Get ready for 2026-28!
The SDG Impact Lab Masterclass Series in an eight-week course focused on how to make progress towards the SDGs. It is underpinned by three core curriculum areas:
Ethics- How do we know what is right?
We offer training in responsible leadership, underpinned by values, purpose and character.
Evidence- How do we know what works?
We provide students with applied research skills relevant to business, policy, and community engagement.
Engagement- How do we deliver impactful change?
We deliver training in project management, organisational change, and effective communication and presentation skills.
Each session will focus on one or more of the SDGs with expert input from Oxford faculty, business, and community leaders. There will be a group and peer learning component as well as case studies of projects delivered by previous Lab Fellows.
For further information about the sessions take a look at the full programme and read student testimonials.
Our unique and interactive programmes aim to provide students with the transferrable skills needed to work with business and non-academic partners to deliver real-world change.
This includes a research project at a partner-specific Field Lab at the start of the Summer vacation. Students work in teams, engaging with stakeholders and applying research methods to develop project proposals.
The result of the Field Lab is an implementable and evidence-based proposal relating to one or more of the SDGs.
Our student Fellows are drawn from across the University reflecting our commitment to interdisciplinary learning.
Lab Fellows
Our global network includes students and alumni from over 72 countries, each bringing a rich mix of experience from Olympic sport to founding social enterprises, and from shaping policy in governments and NGOs to launching start-ups and working across industries including finance, healthcare, and energy. One Fellow even balances their impact work with life as a part-time professional opera singer.
Their academic backgrounds are just as diverse. Lab Fellows are pursuing master’s and doctoral degrees across multiple departments at the University of Oxford, including Engineering Science, Public Policy, Global Governance, Migration Studies, and Environmental Change. Others are advancing research in fields such as Clinical Neurosciences, Oncology, Development Studies, Experimental Psychology, Economics, Inorganic Chemistry, Cognitive Anthropology, and Law.
From Energy Systems and Artificial Intelligence to Biodiversity Conservation, Social Intervention, and History of Medicine, their programmes reflect the complexity of today’s global challenges, and the ambition to solve them. This interdisciplinary foundation equips our Fellows with the insight, adaptability, and technical expertise needed to deliver sustainable impact and lead real-world innovation.
United by a shared commitment, our Fellows are driven to take meaningful action in support of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to create lasting change in communities around the world.
“The chance to present our team's energy efficiency initiative to the senior leadership team at BMW's MINI Plant was an unparalleled experience. In that boardroom, I felt the weight and significance of our achievements. I realized that the project we had nurtured was no longer an academic exercise confined to research papers and simulation models; it was a viable, impactful solution deserving boardroom-level attention.“
