Hello!

My name is Willow Neal (They/Them) and I am an Associate Lecturer at The Open University. This site covers a bit about me, my research, and my student supervision.

I completed my undergraduate degree in Environmental Science in 2019 at the OU and my MSc in Conservation Ecology at Oxford Brookes in 2020. I finished my PhD in 2025, which looked at urban woodland butterfly conservation supervised by Dr. Phil Wheeler and Yoseph Araya.

I am currently an Associate Lecturer at The Open University, teaching on three modules; Environment: Responding to Change, Terrestrial Ecosystems, and the Project (Dissertation) module.

My main research interests are in conservation ecology, where insects and woodlands are my passion. I also have an affinity for urban nature as well, and am interesting in wider scale conservation management for plants and pollinators. I am also interested in citizen science, working with Dr. Kaustubh Adhikari on the OSC project "Butterfly Wing Diversification & Evolution with Citizen Science" [link]. You can read a more detail blog post about this here.

I also have a great interest in equality and inclusion and scholarship research. I'm leading a SoTL project about a potential LGBTQ+ degree awarding gap in STEM degrees titled: Evaluating an LGBTQ+ awarding gap and supporting our queer student community: An intersectional perspective [link].

I am also the Project Officer for the Weston OpenLiving Labs [link].