Chemical Kitchen began in 2019 as an original, transdisciplinary practical course that introduced chemistry students to the mindset and fundamental skills of laboratory work through the non-threatening parallel of cooking. It was created as a collaboration between Professor Roger Kneebone, Professor Alan Spivey and chef Jozef Youssef (Kitchen Theory), with seed funding from Imperial's Pedagogy Transformation Project.
Today it is a family of courses and activities built on the same idea: that the kitchen is a powerful, inclusive place to learn how professionals actually work.
Why gastronomy?
Professional cooking combines procedural rigour: consistency, reproducibility and tight deadlines with creativity, craftsmanship and the ability to improvise. Those are precisely the attributes of working scientists, clinicians and engineers. By rehearsing them in the kitchen rather than the laboratory, students can identify and practise essential transferable skills without the cognitive load of disciplinary content, and with the freedom to make mistakes and reflect on them.
For educators, the parallel is a flexible teaching instrument. It lets tutors communicate complex ideas in a simplified, but not simplistic, and assessable way, and it surfaces the often-omitted, non-disciplinary aspects of practice: how we plan, record, collaborate and carry ourselves as practitioners.
Evidence and impact
Chemical Kitchen is developed as evidence-based practice, with each intervention evaluated and the findings fed back into its design. Published research shows that the first-year Chemical Kitchen course "levels the playing field," rebalancing students' laboratory self-efficacy so that those arriving with least confidence gain the most, while differences between groups even out by the end. Related studies show the Medical Kitchen supports clinical skills development in ways distinct from conventional preparation, and the Biomedical Kitchen produces comparable effects on self-efficacy and transition.
The programme's work has been recognised with the Royal Society of Chemistry's 2022 Team Prize for Excellence in Higher Education and as a Falling Walls 2022 Science Breakthrough of the Year finalist, and the related Lab-in-a-Box project was selected for the Science Museum's permanent collection. You can read more on our publications, media and awards page.
