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Month: March 2018

Ep 3 – The billion dollar question: science as a tool for wealth creation

Hollywood tends to do two things with science. Let the imagination (and the CGI) run wild, or else focus in on one of the biggest clichés in the business: the lone genius battling against odds on a breakthrough that will change (or save) the world.

Sadly, this isn’t how scientific breakthroughs tend to happen…

There’s nothing we love more on ‘Stories from Science’ than a hoary old stereotype that we can bust apart, and this one is particularly dangerous and pernicious. Because whilst there are individuals who slave away in a lab, science breakthroughs that can be moved successfully from research environment into business – science commercialisation – are long, complicated, expensive and often heartbreaking journeys.

Many entrepreneurs think it’s all about the idea. In reality, it’s about everything but, from people and politics, to finance and legal wrangles. Above all it’s not for the faint-hearted.

No-one knows this better than Stephen Bennington, founder and director of science spin-out consultancy Krino Partners. His science journey took him from one of the world’s biggest research facilities (the ISIS neutron source at Harwell), to helping spin-out science and technology companies at universities including Sussex University and University College London (where he was visiting professor for Nanotechnology).

In 2011 he founded his own science spin-out – hydrogen storage company Cella Energy. His experience of the highs and lows on the cutting edge of science commercialisation forms the core of our interview.

As well as being a primer on hydrogen storage and the future of 3D printing, we cover teamwork, transferable skills and the often harsh reality of venture capital. And we get to the core of why science and technology start-ups can fail, and the changes you can do to allow them to succeed. It’s about creating an environment where scientists and engineers can work together in harmony…

Ep 2 – How to win friends and STEMfluence people

During 2015, anyone driving down Faringdon Road in Abingdon would have seen an impressive building taking shape on the edge of the campus of Abingdon School. But as the bulk of the work on its new £14 million Science Centre progressed, behind the scenes the school was wrestling with a problem.


Tensions between public and private education are well-known and raise strong feelings on both sides. From the outset the school was committed to providing significant public access – and thus benefit – to the science centre, but just opening up the labs, even with the help of skilled technicians, wasn’t much of an option. Aside from practical safety considerations, the big challenge was to translate the needs and requirements of science users in the wider community into co-ordinated activities – and leverage resources available through wider STEM programmes across the UK.

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The solution was to recruit a specialist science teacher and have that teacher spend 50% of his or her time co-ordinating activities, partnerships and connections to schools organisations in the local community and around the UK. The result was the Abingdon Science Partnership – and the results have been both impressive and significant.

On March 6, we travelled across Abingdon to meet with Megan Milarski and Jeremy Thomas at the Partnership (or ASP as it’s known to those in the know). Now three years old, it’s an almost unique science outreach organisation, but its success is offering up a template which might be replicable in other parts of the UK.

The sheer range of activities, clubs, services and partner organisations sometimes makes it difficult to neatly summarise the ASP, and so our interview was an ideal opportunity to dig down and understand the ambitions underlying the partnership. In doing so, we explore how the ASP works with local primary and secondary schools, scouting organisations, and partner organisations such as the Institute for Research in Schools (IRIS), the Young Scientists Journal, Polar Explorers Programme, the Ogden Trust, CREST and many more.

Along the way we took a detour to the Southern Ocean, found a neat way of combining STEM and exercise – and explored the critical concept of ‘Science Capital’ in society.

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(Update 1: two weeks after we conducted the interview, on Sunday March 18, over 500 people – mostly Abingdon-based families – attended the free Family Science Fair hosted by the Abingdon Science Partnership as part of the annual ATOM Festival and Science and Technology. It was a fitting example of the potential – and power – of the partnership, around which ATOM volunteers, University outreach groups, local schools, and science engagement organisations such as Curiosity Box and Bright Sparks Science coalesced to produce a stunning hands-on science event. You can see images from that event here.)

(Update 2: In April 2018, the Abingdon Science Partnership were shortlisted in the ‘Contribution to local community’ category for the #tesFEawards TES FE Awards 2018. This is a significant recognition of their work and activities, and wish them the best of luck when the awards are announced later this year)

Ep 1 – A day out to the hottest place in the solar system

An iconic building in the Oxfordshire countryside – obscured by trees!

On Feb 20, we took a short trip southeast from Abingdon to the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) otherwise known as JET (the Joint European Torus). Basically, it’s the world’s foremost (biggest, most advanced, most successful) research facility for fusion energy.

It also means that temperatures at the core of the giant torus (or doughnut) regularly reach in excess of 100 million degrees centigrade.

We were there to chat to two members of JET’s Tritium Engineering Team – Sarah Medley and Zoltan Kollo – and if you want to know what tritium is, how crucial it is to the physics of fusion, and what fusion scientists and engineers do all day, then you’ll really enjoy this episode.

We conducted the interview in the Control Room – and felt incredibly privileged to do so.

It was a wonderful – and constantly surprising – interview. We discussed what it’s like to work in fusion, how you get to work in the field, and the challenges of working on the very frontiers of science.

We discuss the power of diversity in teams, there’s some great wisdom and advice to anyone wondering what subjects to study at school – and we bust a few stereotypes about scientists and engineers along the way…