Dr Rosario Michel-Villarreal, Lecturer in Sustainability and Business at the University of Leeds, took part in the 2025 White Rose Crucible Programme. Here she reflects on how stepping outside her discipline opened up new ways of understanding food system resilience – and led to a successful seed funding application with collaborators from across the White Rose.

Can you tell us about your research and what motivates your work?

Motivation: Our food systems are broken and face immense challenges. They are increasingly disrupted by conflict and climate change, which negatively impact farmers whose livelihoods depend on them. At the same time, the way we grow food has a massive impact on ecosystems and climate systems, contributing to around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. We need to move towards a more sustainable way of growing food- one that works for both people and nature.

I am particularly interested in enabling systemic changes that lead to more sustainable, equitable, and resilient practices across diverse sectors. My research activities focus on key areas such as sustainable operations and supply chains, as well as sustainable food systems. I am especially interested in the role that Alternative Food Networks and organic production can play in improving the sustainability and resilience of food systems.

What attracted you to the White Rose Crucible Programme, and what did you hope to gain from taking part?

The challenges faced within food systems are interdisciplinary by nature, and they cannot be tackled without working across different fields. The White Rose Crucible Programme therefore provided a great opportunity to meet other early career researchers beyond my discipline with whom I could collaborate in the future. I hoped to meet like‑minded people who are open to pushing the boundaries of disciplinary research, and to learn more about how to work effectively in interdisciplinary teams.

How did the Crucible experience shape your thinking about interdisciplinary collaboration and research impact?

It was immensely helpful in broadening my understanding of what interdisciplinarity truly means, and how to develop an idea that can advance and benefit different disciplines at the same time. In my case, I learned how to investigate food‑system challenges in new and innovative ways by integrating frameworks and methods from other disciplines.

Your Crucible collaboration recently secured seed funding – can you tell us about the project and how it developed through the programme?

“The Crucible Programme gave us a rare chance to step outside our disciplines and explore ideas together.”

Very quickly, we realised that although we were all interested in resilience and change, we approached these themes from completely different angles. I brought expertise in food systems. We know that Alternative Food Networks are full of people who care deeply about food, community, and place, yet their everyday experiences often go unheard. These human stories shape how networks cope, adapt, and imagine more resilient futures. To fully understand not just what is happening in Yorkshire’s food system, but why it happens, what matters most to people, and what truly supports resilience on the ground, we need to listen to them.

Read more about the funded project “Breaking Bread: A Narrative Analysis of Resilience and Transition in Yorkshire’s Alternative Food Networks.”

What does receiving this seed funding enable you to do that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible?

It allowed us to run small pilots to trial this idea. These disciplines don’t usually converge, so we had to set the foundations for how this kind of collaboration can work in practice. This opportunity will allow us to establish a stronger collaborative (and hopefully publishing) record, which can later support us in accessing larger funding to help improve the resilience of UK farming communities.

What have you learned from working with colleagues from different disciplines or institutions through Crucible?

I have learned how different disciplines approach research challenges in distinct ways, and how much we can benefit from drawing on other fields in our own work. For instance, working with Dr Lucy Prodgers has encouraged me to consider the lived experiences of farmers – something that is not typically central to how I study resilience. Her frameworks and methods are also quite different from the ones I am used to, as she comes from more psychological or medical science backgrounds. We often become accustomed to working with the theories, frameworks, and methods of our own discipline, but perhaps transformative change requires us to challenge that and work in more innovative, cross‑disciplinary ways.

What advice would you give to researchers considering applying to the Crucible Programme?

Apply! It has been one of the most rewarding experiences for me. I had the chance to meet many lovely colleagues from across Yorkshire, and the programme’s strong focus on interdisciplinarity felt extremely relevant at a time when more and more funders are encouraging and supporting this kind of collaboration. It also allowed me to sharpen my skills in communicating my research interests to colleagues from very different disciplines, and to identify potential points where our seemingly unrelated research agendas could converge.

Beyond that, the three workshops in the Yorkshire countryside offered a real respite from the fast‑paced rhythm of day‑to‑day work. The White Rose staff were incredibly supportive, and all the speakers contributed to making the experience rich, enjoyable, and genuinely inspiring.