Lorena
Gordillo Dagallier

Lorena Gordillo Dagallier's "open-seneca" was chosen as the winning project by officials in both Stockholm and Lisbon in the international Women4Climate Tech Challenge 2020 competition. 

Open-seneca deploys mobile air quality sensor networks driven by citizen science. The initiative aims to raise awareness among citizens about personal exposure to particulate pollution, to drive behavioural change and build high spatial and temporal resolution pollution maps that inform policy and urban development. 

Lorena Gordillo Dagallier is a multidisciplinary engineer passionate about the power of open-science, citizen science and community-driven spaces to find solutions to today’s world problems. After completing a general engineering degree at the Technical University of Madrid, she is now doing her PhD at the University of Cambridge as part of a doctoral training programme in Sensor Technologies for a Healthy and Sustainable Future. She is the co-founder of the open-seneca initiative, which emerged from a team challenge with her cohort colleagues in 2018. The initiative aims to turn air quality monitoring into a global social movement with the help of citizen science. Open-seneca deploys low-cost, open-source, mobile sensor networks and provides an educational platform based on gamification for community engagement. Since then, she has developed strong leadership skills, collaborating with makerspaces and policy makers around the world and helping build local capacity.

Fernando Medina, Mayor of Lisbon said: “The W4C Tech Challenge competition was fierce, with a lot of very high-level applicants. However, open-seneca combines two of Lisbon’s core values: citizenship engagement and sustainability. By collecting and sharing data on their own exposure to air pollution, we will empower citizens to think about air quality and what each one of us can do to improve it. We’re excited to have the opportunity to pilot this technology so we can in the near future, use this data for better-informed decisions.“

Anna König Jerlmyr, Mayor of Stockholm said: “By gamifying air quality measurement and pairing it to bike commuting, we are confident that open-seneca has the potential to increase the well-being of our citizens. We strongly believe that involving citizens can help raise awareness on the impact of air quality and the need to rethink the design and mobility modes in our cities.”