Dr Laura Barter receives the Transferable Skills Development Grant from Postdoc Development Centre

Dr Laura Barter, a Royal Society University Research Fellow and the Deputy Director of the Doctoral Training Centre at the Institute of Chemical Biology, received the Postdoc Development Centre Transferable Skills Development Grant to create a creativity toolkit for early career researchers working at a multidisciplinary interface.

"Creativity sandpit events are becoming common mechanisms chosen by research councils to create, select and award large research grants for multidisciplinary high impact science. A sandpit event brings together groups of 20-30 scientists from a range of backgrounds for a residential interactive creativity workshop, typically four to five days long. Participants are expected to generate radical solutions to scientific criteria and competitively pitch for ring-fenced finances. An essential element of a sandpit is the multidisciplinary mix of participants, which drives lateral thinking and radical approaches to address research challenges and uncover innovative solutions.

During every successful academic's career it is likely that they will attend at least three to four creativity sandpit events. A group of researchers including myself, Dr Nick Brooks, Dr Marina Kuimova, Dr Oscar Ces (all from Chemistry) as well as Dr Rudiger Woscholski (Division of Cell and Molecular Biology) recognised that we should be training early stage researchers to enter the creativity sandpit environment. We saw that preparation will help to maximise success rates at future events, as Sandpits are very much a "sink or swim" experience favouring the more confident and experienced applicant. As a result of this our group has therefore designed an intensive two day course for Postdocs at Imperial, funded by the Postdoc Development Centre and the Institute of Chemical Biology. The course, based on a mini-sandpit experience, gives Postdocs their first taste of a creativity event in a safe environment, where they can gain feedback from each other as well as from tutors. The course is expected to be held in early 2011."

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