General Operations

Supporting the IWRS helps us maintain critical resources - the world’s first guidelines for protecting and promoting insects and decapods in research, our seminar series, our research library, and our collaborations with other academic organizations like the Royal Entomological Society - and grow our membership of insect welfare researchers through networking and outreach. The IWRS runs largely on volunteer effort but does need funding to maintain our current full-time staff member. If the IWRS is able to achieve the funding to sustainably hire this staff member through 2028, we can build out a new program that seeks to incorporate evidence on insect welfare into insect farming and research policy in the UK.

Student Awards

The IWRS Student Research Awards are among our key initiatives; they support a new generation of academics investigating insect welfare and provide crucial insights into the welfare and sentience of neglected invertebrates. These awards encourage graduate student scholars who are engaging in evidence-based, theoretically-grounded research on any aspect of insect or understudied invertebrate sentience or welfare. They are given to graduate students whose research has great potential to make a substantive contribution to our understanding of sentience or welfare in these taxonomic groups.

Each of our two annual student awards is $2,000. One recent recipient is Urja Thakrar (Royal Veterinary College, London, UK) for her project, “Farming Shrimp in Mangrove Forests: Does It Improve Their Welfare?” IWRS funds allowed Urja to visit Indian mangrove forests and collect data on environmental, health, nutritional, and behavioral indicators of welfare. Urja wouldn’t have been able to complete critical parts of this project without the award: by supporting her work, the IWRS was able to advance important, underfunded research and support Urja’s career advancement as an invertebrate welfare scientist.

Our student awards are supported by donors like you. Please consider making a donation to our Student Research Award Fund, ensuring that we’re able to continue providing needed resources to new scholars.

Small Meeting Support

The small meeting support program provides up to $2,000 USD to scholars hosting events that will bring together stakeholders interested in empirical information on insect welfare. This year, for instance, we supported an in-person conference on insects as food and feed, held by the Royal Entomological Society. This meeting engaged producers and the UK Edible Insect Association with a keynote by welfare scientist Dr. Andrew Crump and a symposium dedicated to insect welfare on farms. 

Additionally, we provided resources for a symposium on non-lethal study methods in conservation biology at the 7th European Congress of Conservation Biology and a workshop on farmed invertebrate welfare at the Royal Veterinary College. Both these meetings were attended by practitioners (e.g., conservation scientists or farmers), academics, and policymakers or other stakeholders, encouraging dialogues to inform policy and practice.

Funds provided through our support program can be used to cover items such as: travel reimbursements, tech support, registration fee waivers, food, child care assistance, etc. We give priority to proposals that use some or all of the funds to improve the accessibility of their meeting and encourage equitable attendance from the global research and stakeholder community.

Support for these events depends on donors like you. Please consider making a donation to our Small Meeting Support Fund, ensuring that we’re able to continue building a thriving, equitable, and impactful field.