Dr Gail Austen

Dr Gail Austen is the Leverhulme Space for Nature Doctoral Scholars Support Officer.

She held a five-year post-doctoral research assistant position with Prof Zoe Davies on the RELATE project, Environmental Spaces and the Feel-Good Factor: Relating Subjective Wellbeing to Biodiversity. This European Research Council-funded project aims to understand which components of nature and biodiversity play a role in human wellbeing.

Dr Austen started at DICE in 2013 as a PhD student researching accuracy, error and bias in species identification. Gail was also a Graduate Teaching Assistant and completed her PGCHE at the same time. She is involved with biological recording in Kent and is an active participant in the Kent Reptile and Amphibian Group.

Dr Gail Austen is a member of the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology.

Gail has recently been working on a project funded by Natural England looking at deer management, and joined the E3 Sharing Space for Nature project in April 2026.

How biodiversity affects wellbeing in human-nature interactions; understanding the mechanisms of accurate species identification with methods widely used in face recognition research.  

Fellow of the Linnean Society