About Us

We are part of a long standing justice seeking ecosystem.

Rather than lead, our role is to understand the aetiology of disease and build abolitionist healing strategies that help us all continue our health justice journeys.

Our core team consists of neuroscientists, health researchers, and urban geographers who investigate, alongside an ecosystem of like-minded researchers and community organisations, how biological inequity manifests in neighbourhoods and Peoples that have been racialised and marginalised.

  • Our focus on knowledge mobility comes from a need to create infrastructure for health justice to improve the material conditions for communities that are systemically marginalised (which is the root cause of poor health outcomes).

    Since 2016 we have been building free and accessible popular education for communities across the U.K. where they collectively explore and dream of alternatives.

    Through our various programmes we have co-production space where people and communities can connect their vision for a health justice with their ongoing organising work. This type of work of course is not new, the Black Panther Party famously centred education and knowledge mobility in their work. They saw that without knowledge, there is no imagination and without imagination there is no epistemic freedom. Meaning that we run the risk of creating practices, methods and infrastructure that replicates the marginalisation we are seeking liberation from.

    In Flint Michigan, the community purposely began educating themselves on data, ecological health, and policy infrastructure to fight against the industrialist who are polluting their water. The same has happened with communities like Clean Air for Southall and Hayes and Somos Semillas in Brixton.

    The challenge for many of these communities is that they have to start from scratch with little to no monetary funds, experience, or knowledge in advocacy work. This can make the road to health justice long, arduous, and stressful, leaving them with additional mental health issues, such as PTSD from the advocacy work itself.

    As a direct response, Centric Lab has developed a model for working and supporting the advocacy work of these communities. There are three overarching factors we consider:

    Factor One: Meet them where they are

    This means that we do not force an agenda on the communities, we spend time learning their needs and match our infrastructure to those needs. We also recruit communities to our programmes through open calls, therefore those participating are doing willingly and on their own terms.

    Factor Two: Contextualising

    Our programmes are always in small numbers to allow people to trust Centric as well as each other. This allows them to properly engage with the peer to peer part of the programme, where they learn and build on each other's expertise. This prevents starting from scratch and it allows people to contextualise the learnings to their community needs. Additionally, part of contextualisation is ensuring that the science we create is explained within the context of health justice, which makes it effortless for the communities to use to create their advocacy.

    Factor Three:Autonomy

    The communities we work with always steer their own path and we offer infrastructure at their pace. However, infrastructure without the funds to fully enact it delays their advocacy and can create frustration. Therefore, this year we inaugurated a new tools in response;

       a. Micro Healing Grants

       b. Justice Grants

    We plan to make micro-granting a permanent part of our infrastructure tool-kit, so communities can grow autonomy and health justice work without top-down interference. These micro grants will be part of every single programme, including Air is Kin.

    For those who are ready we will provide micro-granting for two years with the goal of preparing them for more structural funding. We believe that this will help create more momentum within health justice movements, allowing us to advance towards a more equitable, dignified, and healthy society at a more appropriate pace.

A short timeline of the movement.

  • Time Before

    Symbiotic living with Nature and dignity existing across the globe untouched by colonialism and supremacy cultures.

    Various Peoples of Turtle Island understood that health was communal and dependent on multiple systems of Kinship. The Nauhtle speaking Peoples created systems of health through urban infrastructure to plant based healing.

  • 1492

    Columbus and other cannibals land on Turtle Island and Abya Yala, bringing disease, inhumane social infrastructure, poorly developed healthcare, engineering, and science as well as systemic violence in the forms of genocide and slavery.

    This moment in time marks global Indigenous and Land based cultures being forcibly removed from our Lands, breaking Kinship. Creating the root our current health and planetary problems.

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We regularly give talks and join organisations for panels, and from time to time have created our own content. Here is a selection.

Our Team

  • Araceli Camargo

    LAB DIRECTOR

    Araceli is lead scientist at Centric Lab and a cognitive neuroscientist focused on how people interact with urban environments. Araceli is of Turtle Island descent and holds an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience from King’s College London.

  • Josh Artus

    URBAN STRATEGY

    Josh helped set up Centric Lab with Araceli in 2016 with a focus on spatial justice. Josh’s 16 years in the built environment means that he leads the lab’s work on urban systems, which covers topics such as urban planning, policy & business, and cartography. Josh also leads Centric Lab’s relationships with funders and structural partners.

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We are grateful to be supported by and partnered with global leaders

Centric cannot exist without being part of a strong ecosystem, which includes our team, communities, and advisors. Just like a Milpa, we plant the seeds to create a self--sustaining ecosystem that sustains and nourishes multiple beingness and imaginations.

Science Advisors

  • Professor Nick Tyler CBE FREng is the Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering at UCL.

    His research involves the study of how people and environments interact. This includes the study of interactions at a variety of scales, including the real world environment and in his life-scale environmental laboratory PEARL (Person Environment Activity Research Laboratory).

    He has been working for the last 4 years on the challenge of understanding how people with dementia see in the environment and how it might be possible to change environments (including the social and psychological environments as well as the physical on a project funded by ESRC/NIHR and in Japan.

  • Ilan Kelman is a Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, England and a Professor II at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway.

    His overall research interest is linking disasters and health, including the integration of climate change into disaster research and health research. That covers three main areas:

    (i) disaster diplomacy and health diplomacy,

    (ii) island sustainability involving safe and healthy communities in isolated locations,

    (iii) risk education for health and disasters.

  • Prof Hugo Spiers is a Reader in Neuroscience in the Department of Experimental Psychology.

    He is the group leader of the Spatial Cognition group in the UCL Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience.

    Prof Spiers has combined numerous methods to explore spatial cognition from single cells to whole brain networks.

    His research focuses on how the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex contribute to recall of the past, navigation of present and imagination of the future.

  • Gesche is working as a Senior Research Associate at the UCL Energy Institute in the newly established CREDS project.

    As part of her work she is looking at how control over the environment impacts on our thermal comfort and the energy we use.

    She linked empirically derived heating demand temperatures and duration of heating periods in domestic buildings to socio- and building-demographics to explore the scope for targeted interventions to reduce domestic energy consumption.

    She also explores the relationship between mental health and buildings and the impact of various environmental parameters on cognitive performance.

  • An ecologist and interdisciplinary PhD researcher.

    Jake’s research combines ecology and microbiomics with geospatial analyses and social research.

    He is currently investigating nature-based interventions and the relationship between the environment, the microbiome, and human health.

    He is also passionate about ecological restoration and biodiversity conservation strategies.

  • Marie is a Research Fellow in Psychiatric Epidemiology at the UCL Division of Psychiatry.

    Marie holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Psychology.

    Marie has worked with Centric Lab since 2020 supporting a wide array of scientific research for the Urban Health Council.

    Marie continues to provide advisory support for air pollution related projects at Centric Lab.