Annual CDT Festival of Science

The annual CDT Festival of Science took place on 13th June, with the theme of "Science and Media"

On June 13^th the annual CDT Festival of Science took place in the Sir Alexander Fleming Building at Imperial College. The festival organising committee was composed of students from four different CDTs; the Centre for Plastic Electronics (CPE), Controlled Quantum Dynamics (CQD), the Institute of Chemical Biology (ICB) and Theory and Simulation of Materials (TSM). The event was a great opportunity for them to join together with people from other fields of research and to experience fully managing and organising a day full of events.

This year the festival focused on “Science and Media”. Four speakers from different disciplines, Johnjoe McFadden (“Does Biology Need Quantum Mechanics?”), Philip Moriarty (“Guilty Confessions of a YouTube Scientist”), Brian Fuchs (“Citizen Science and Scientific Computing”) and Dr Lewis Dartnell ("The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch”), were invited to talk about their experience in the challenge of communicating science to the general public.

The festival also took the opportunity to take stock of the achievements and aspirations of CDT students, from the four centres, that have graduated this year. Along with this eight “CDT snacks” were presented to the 200 registrees introducing the eight CDTs that will start next year at Imperial: Advanced Materials Characterisation, Fluid Dynamics, Nuclear Energy, Non-Destructive Evaluation, High Performance Embedded and Distributed Systems, Neurotechnology for Life and Health, Mathematics of Planet Earth and Sustainable Civil Engineering.

A poster session was run in parallel with the CDT Festival, the theme being “What is it you actually do?”. The judging criteria focused on clarity in language and presentation. As an extra challenge only posters that used only the ten hundred most used words in the English language could win the top prize of £250.

We hope that this exciting and enjoying experience will be replicated every year, other information can be found on the website www.cdtfestival.co.uk.