Dr Duncan Casey reports on a creativity workshop he attended in June.

Dr Duncan Casey is a postdoc working on the Proxomics project in the Department of Chemistry, developing the tools needed to probe cells at a microscopic level, in order to identify the changes that they undergo during ageing and in diseases like cancer. He reports on a creativity workshop he attended in June.

“The course was held at Cumberland Lodge – a fantastic old venue in the shadow of Windsor Castle – and funded through a grant awarded to Dr Laura Barter (Chemistry) by the Postdoc Development Centre and the Institute of Chemical Biology at Imperial. It developed from the ‘sandpit’ events that the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has established, in which you’re thrown into a five-day, £10 million competition with around 30 total strangers to put together a proposal to work on a strategic, multidisciplinary target. It’s certainly an intense, high- adrenaline way to plan your next project.

The best, but also the hardest, thing about the idea is that you’re working with people with wildly different skill-sets and experience. I helped develop a synthetic biology proposal with a plastic electronics designer and an economist, amongst others. Fortunately, the event came equipped with a group of facilitators and trainers from EPSRC and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and talks included one from an ex-editor at Nature, who spent a day helping cram some showmanship and theatricality into dry scientific presentations. It was great to hear that EPSRC would like postdocs to start appearing at the full sandpit events, and I’m very keen to get stuck into one.”