Press Release
Innovative labs for talented scientists and engineers
31 March 2006
A pioneering programme for early career scientists developed by NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), will welcome its third intake of scientists and engineers at a residential lab next month.
The lab, the first of three taking place around the country over the course of the year, will be in Edinburgh, to coincide with the Edinburgh International Science Festival, which is running from the 5th-16th April.
Known as Crucible, this unique method of professional and personal development encourages the thirty participants to think creatively and reflect upon their scientific work in the context of much wider themes.
Expert speakers and mentors will be on hand to help the group develop their networking, management and communication skills. This work will be positioned under the umbrella of the first theme of Crucible 2006, Science, Culture, and Society.
Trina Dinnis, a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Engineering and Electronics at the University of Edinburgh took part in Crucible 2005. She found it especially valuable working with such a cross-disciplinary group of people:
“We are a mixture of people working in wildly different fields, from nanotechnology to zoology to occupational psychology. These are people who I would normally never meet, but I'm so glad that I did. We also discovered how much we had in common. Irrespective of the fields we work in, many of us are experiencing similar problems and frustrations in our careers and have similar aspirations and enthusiasms. Crucible has helped me see paths which might lead me to a more fulfilling career I wouldn't have thought possible before.”
Venu Dhupa, NESTA Fellowship Director, said:
“NESTA has recognised that often the really ground-breaking ideas occur when traditionally distinct disciplines collide. By providing a forum in which talented young scientists and engineers with a range of different specialities can work together, we could be facilitating the next big innovation or research collaboration.”
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