Centric Lab is a community interest company, limited by guarantee, registered in England & Wales under company number 12829167. This means that Centric Lab is a non-profit organisation oriented around delivering on its objects in its articles of association.

In summary, the community we work for are groups of people in the United Kingdom who are experiencing poor health outcomes due to avoidable structural factors. These are communities who face direct exposure to intersecting issues such as contamination from commercial and industrial activity; poor housing and economically deprived neighbourhoods; poor access to health infrastructure; discrimination and socio-economic marginalisations such as, but not limited to, racism and classism.

We are intent on prototyping ways to use health-based scientific evidence to support justice movements, surface and socialise non-western epistemologies and create language to articulate the health injustices felt by many racialised and marginalised communities. 

We do this by supporting grassroots groups, non-profits, and organisations to advance health justice by building open-access community tools, creating justice-led narratives and framings of health, and providing organisations with expertise and insights on health, communities, and place.

Centric Lab began with the intention of better understanding how where we live influences our health and life-long outcomes. We began with a human-centred mission and built our partners along the way.

Centric Lab can be said to have informally conceptualised as a result of the first Conscious Cities conference that was a collaboration between The Cube, the Museum of Architecture, and Arup in March 2016. From incorporating in 2017, Centric Lab began as a private company working in an advisory capacity to the built environment sector. However, during the Covid-19 pandemic restructured itself to be a non-profit company and operate as a research focused organisation on health justice issues.

Centric Lab started in “stealth mode” for around a year as Araceli and Josh began to understand the intersections between science, industry and the built environment. A result of the Conscious Cities conference in 2016 was the relationship built with Prof. Hugo Spiers, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London. In 2017 they were supported by the vice dean of enterprise at UCL in applying for a MRC grant for Prof. Spiers to work on secondment with Centric Lab for 6 months on exploring the potential of neuroscience to move out of the science lab into the built environment. During this period Centric Lab were commissioned by Innovate UK’s Future Cities Catapult to summarise the learnings of this secondment into a playbook for city makers and professionals, titled Neuroscience for Cities. Relationships were formed and opportunities slowly developed.

Centric Lab has four directors and six members. Annually, the members approve the strategy designed by the directors who then aim to execute. The strategy is centred on fulfilling the objects in its articles of association. This involves building partnerships with public, private and third-sector organisations. Centric Lab principally forms long term partnerships with philanthropic organisations to prototype ways to use health-based scientific evidence to support justice movements, surface and socialise non-western epistemologies and create language to articulate the health injustices felt by many racialised and marginalised communities. This work is co-created with people who have lived experience, alongside professionals and health practitioners. The results are shared through a design digital library and actively promoted to influential organisations as a means to influence operations and policies. Centric Lab is primarily focused on using its teams skillsets to build the scientific and knowledge architecture that allows grassroots groups to advocate better. Centric Lab is not focused on owning intellectual property and running campaigns. Centric Lab believes there’s No Time for Leaders in the route towards the Healing Commons. 

As best described in this piece, neuroscience is often misconceived as the science of the brain, however, it is far more expansive. It is the study of the central nervous system, which is the inclusion of the brain and the spinal cord. At Centric, we focus on one of the systems within the nervous system, which is the Hypothalamus Pituitary Adrenal Axis (HPA-Axis). The HPA-Axis is a hormonal system that helps the body mitigate our stress response.

There are three reasons we chose to focus on this system

• Due to its mitigation of the stress response, the HPA-Axis allows us to understand the physiological relationship between people and the wider environment. 

• Specifically, it has allowed us to understand the pathway between environmental stressors and the onset of disease. 

• The study of the HPA-Axis has a decades long history and it led to the concept of allostatic load. In the 1993s scientists McEwen and Stellar theorised that chronic stress leads the body to experience a “wear and tear” (dysregulation) effect, meaning that people who were exposed to constant environmental stressors. The allostatic load theory has been the founding principle of our justice work. It allows us to ask questions such as 

  • Who is disproportionately exposed to environmental stressors? We are not the first to ask this question. Arline Geronimus, also in the 1990s began to explore how the racialised experience, specifically in African American communities, was leading to health inequities. 

  • Does the dysregulation of the HPA-Axis pass through generations? Meaning that it is the places people live in generation after generation that have an effect on health rather than genetic happenstance. This question is also not new, Dr Rachel Yehuda has been studying how cortisol dysregulation, which is one of the consequences of allostatic load, can be passed on from one generation to the next.  

  • What is the link between environmental stressors and poor health outcomes? Prof Robert Sapolsky has explored this question for decades and has been a strong advocate for ending poverty. 

Using neuroscience for the purpose of highlighting the link between systemic injustice and violence is not new, we are simply picking up the baton. We see our role as finding methodologies to use science directly on the ground, making it accessible to communities through our various tools and toolkits.

There are a few ways to partner with us.

1. If you work for a philanthropic organisation we are looking for partners to help us develop the Healing Commons. This can be done through the supporting of individual programmes, supporting scientific led enquiry in our Work Themes, or by allowing Centric Lab to grow its outreach capacity through core funding.

2. If you are an organisation looking to embed a health justice praxis into your work we can work alongside you to influence company actions.

3. If you are a small organisation that want to collaborate, we can look at funding opportunities to work together.

We don’t generally have open-employment situations or jobs to fill. Believing that there’s No Time for Leaders, no-one works for Centric Lab, they work at. This means that people working within the Centric Lab ecosystem are already working within the health justice movement and are supported by us in advancing their journeys. These are typically done through relationship building and the establishment of programmes with funding provided, almost like a bi-directional scholarship.

In 2025 Centric Lab officially became a community interest company in order to orientate decision making around a series of goals and beliefs. In doing so it also expanded the directors and members (a non-profit version of shareholders) in order to increase accountability.

Centric Lab aims to work through a mixture of partnership funding from philanthropic organisations and revenues raised from ‘consulting’. All its incomes are used for advancing its objects of articles of association.

Yes and no. Centric Lab aims to produce a body of scientific-led work on health injustices that can be used to influence policy. Centric Lab is not a think-tank designing political agendas and policies but will from time-to-time explore particular areas of the institutionalised system when it becomes apparent that a simple change can increase health justice.

Yes, however in order to safeguard our time and commit to our articles of association there are a few ways we do this.

AS ADVISORS & ACTIVISTS

Through giving workshops and talks, we say it how it is. We help organisations understand what are the key issues that need to be paid attention to in order to reduce health inequities for a just, equitable future, and principles to embody a health justice praxis within their work.

AS AUTHORS & ADVERSARIES

We work alongside an organisation, underpinned by a series of strict principles, to co-create health justice oriented solutions from the ground up. This normally manifests in producing written work or running programmes.