Prism of Research’ Conference Illuminates the Multi-Faceted Nature of Academic Life at Imperial College London.
A wide spectrum of voices from across the UK academic landscape came together at Imperial College London for the second annual Good Science Project conference, aptly titled Prism of Research. The day-long event invited critical reflection on the evolving nature of research culture, from publishing and ethics to AI, inclusion, collegiality, and artistic collaboration.
Organised by Dr Stephen Webster, leader of the Good Science Project, in collaboration with the Office of the Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise), the conference served as both a celebration and an interrogation of what it means to pursue “good science” in today’s academic and political landscape.
Dr Webster welcomed attendees from across the UK, including staff and students from King’s College London, UCL, LSE, Edinburgh, Warwick and York, and explained the symbolism of the event’s title. “We chose the metaphor of a prism,” he said in his opening remarks, “because science is not one thing. It refracts into many colours: ambition, collaboration, care, creativity, and contradiction.”
Held in the Huxley Building on Imperial’s South Kensington campus, the conference featured panel discussions, parallel sessions, student perspectives, and a plenary debate — all set against the backdrop of national and global conversations about the sustainability, fairness, and values of academic life.
Setting the Scene: Research Publishing and the Culture It Builds
The opening panel, Research Publishing: Communities and Directions, offered a clear-eyed examination of the structures and cultures shaping research careers. Chaired by Professor Mary Ryan, Vice-Provost for Research and Enterprise, the panel reflected on how viewing research culture through an ethical lens could help build more positive and inclusive environments.
“What does it mean to be a good scientist?” Professor Ryan asked. “And how do our institutional structures support or hinder that aim?”
Dr Dan O’Connor, Director at the UK National Commission for UNESCO, grounded the conversation in hard truths. Despite their love of discovery, researchers often work under conditions of anxiety, precarity, and competition. Citing Wellcome’s 2020 research culture survey, he noted that while 84% of respondents felt proud to be part of the scientific community, only 29% felt secure in their careers — and nearly half reported anxiety or depression linked to their research work. “These are not peripheral issues,” he said. “They go to the heart of whether research is sustainable, humane, and just.”
Dr Magdalena Skipper, Editor-in-Chief of Nature, added an editorial perspective. She highlighted the responsibility of journals to model ethical practices, especially around authorship, diversity, and the equitable dissemination of knowledge. She gave a striking example from Nature Medicine, where editors intervened to ensure Global South collaborators were properly credited in a vaccine hesitancy study. “Publishing,” she said, “is not just dissemination. It’s a reflection of what we value.”
Professor Melanie Smallman, from UCL’s Department of Science and Technology Studies, warned against allowing science to retreat into a technocratic shell. With research increasingly politicised — especially in the United States — she called for a more publicly engaged, ethically self-aware research culture. “We need to be brave enough,” she said, “to say not just what we do, but why we do it, and for whom.”
‘Science Refractions’: A Multicoloured Tapestry of Inquiry
The conference’s central theme, science as a prism, was brought vividly to life in four parallel sessions, each tackling a different dimension of research culture.
In American Blues: Science, Politics, Funding, participants explored the increasingly precarious relationship between academic science and politics in the United States. With insights from Mr Ehsan Masood, Bureau Chief, Editorials, Africa and the Middle East, (Nature), Emeritus Professor Stephen Curry (Imperial), and Professor Melanie Smallman, Professor of Science and Technology Studies, (UCL), the session wrestled with urgent questions: Is American science really under threat? Were Enlightenment ideals — reason, truth, progress — still reliable guardians of scientific authority? Or were we entering an era where even ‘evidence’ itself became politically negotiable? Chaired by Miss Claudia Cannon, Communications and Marketing Officer (Imperial) the session offered both alarm and a resolve to protect the integrity of scientific inquiry.
Friendship, Collegiality, Collaboration shifted the focus to the often-invisible emotional infrastructure of science. What role do trust, kindness, and solidarity play in scientific progress? Is happiness part of scientific success — and should it be? How do personal relationships underpin intellectual ones?
The panellists — Professor Dame Clare Gerada (President, Royal College of General Practitioners), Professor Peter Openshaw (Proconsul and Professor of Experimental Medicine, Imperial), Professor Jonathan Mestel (Senior Consul and Professor of Applied Mathematics, Imperial), and Dr Daniella Watson (Research Associate in Climate Change and Mental Health, Institute of Global Health Innovation) each made a powerful case that scientific rigour is sustained not just through data and discipline, but also through friendship, mentoring, and professional care.
Chaired by Dr Stephen Webster, this warm and thoughtful conversation reminded attendees that the “human factor” in science is neither soft nor secondary—it is essential.
The Bench, the Bee, and the Blooming Bytes examined the rise of machine learning and its likely implications for the craft of science. With this year’s Chemistry and Physics Nobel Prizes awarded to computational scientists, the session asked: will the lab bench be replaced by the keyboard?
Dr Sam Cooper (Associate Professor in Machine Learning for Materials Design, Imperial), Professor Richard Wingate (Professor of Developmental Neurobiology, King’s College London), and Dr Anthea Lacchia (science writer and founder of Nature Tales and Trails) brought differing disciplinary lenses to the conversation—engineering, biology, and geology—while Miss Gemma Ralton (Data Science Institute) guided the discussion. What emerged was a shared sense that AI does not diminish the human element of science, but instead calls for new kinds of literacy, intuition, and care.
Memory, Art, Documentary: A Prism of Research placed science in cultural conversation with museums, art, and film. Professor Ken Arnold (Director, Medical Museion and Creative Director, Wellcome Trust), Mr Chris Riley (Chris Riley, Creative Director, Attic Room, and Miss Ella Miodownik (Artist in Residence at the Good Science Project, Imperial College London) each explored how creative practices not only communicate science, but also interrogate it, reflect it, and reimagine it.
Chaired by Dr Leigh J. Wilson (Public Engagement Lead, Centre for Developmental Neurobiology), the session proposed that the research process is a deeply human act—one that benefits from being documented, questioned, and occasionally even made into art.
Plenary Session: Rays of Light, Pools of Shade
The final plenary session, chaired by Dr Felicity Mellor (Director, Science Communication Unit), brought together reflections from the four Science Refraction sessions. It offered space for open dialogue, as panellists and audience members explored tensions within research culture and environment, discussed future directions, and examined the role institutions play in fostering inclusive and sustainable environments for science.
In introducing the session Rays of Light, Pools of Shade, Dr Mellor extended the conference’s optical metaphor. She encouraged participants to consider not only refraction, introduced earlier by Professor Stephen Webster, but also diffraction — “the bending of light as it hits an obstacle or goes through an aperture.” This invited reflection on how research can find new paths when encountering barriers or openings. Speakers emphasised that people, culture, and environment are not add-ons, but essential foundations of good science.
Professor Mary Ryan reflected on how collaboration in research both includes and extends collegiality, describing it as a form of diffraction — a concept from wave physics where overlapping waves amplify one another, symbolising the productive interaction of ideas, disciplines, and people. Effective collaboration, she argued, requires more than cooperation between individuals. It demands sustained engagement across sectors, clarity of purpose, and ethical responsibility embedded at the institutional level.
She emphasised that this kind of work often unfolds in complex, interdisciplinary environments, particularly when involving external partners, community groups or volunteers. Acknowledging that current systems are not always designed to support such efforts, Professor Ryan called for a rethinking of how institutions define and value collaboration. She urged greater flexibility and recognition of work that does not fit neatly into conventional categories of academic output.
Dr Catriona Firth, Associate Director for People, Culture and Environment at Research England, provided an update on the upcoming REF 2029. She emphasised the importance of the People, Culture and Environment element within the assessment. While acknowledging the challenge of measuring cultural factors, she stressed that understanding impact in context — how it is generated, supported and sustained — remains a priority for funders.
The question of REF featured prominently in the discussion, not just as an administrative exercise but as a signal of what institutions choose to value. Professor Stephen Curry, Emeritus Professor of Structural Biology, noted that while REF is often seen as a driver of pressure, it can also be a tool to reflect and reinforce healthier research cultures — provided institutions interpret and implement it responsibly. “If we want a research culture rooted in integrity and inclusion,” he said, “we need to ask what behaviours we’re incentivising, and why.”
Audience questions included a call to consider how constraints might also enable creativity by shaping time and space in ways that support focus, interaction and community. Another asked whether anxieties around REF were more about the broader research environment than the assessment itself. In response, Dr Firth emphasised that REF was not the only lever available to shape research culture, and that Research England was committed to supporting culture through a variety of funding and engagement initiatives.
The discussion returned often to the need to balance structural policy with the everyday realities of research life, examining the relationship between the needs of institutions and the needs of individual researchers. As Professor Ryan put it, “Culture isn’t something you write down — it’s what happens in the corridors, in the decisions we make every day.”
Closing Reflections and Collaborative Art
The session closed with a reminder from Dr Webster that although the day was ending, its conversations should continue. The conference ended with a reception on the roof terrace of the Blackett Laboratory, and delegates also made a short visit to The Tapestry of Science — a collaborative artwork exploring research culture, created through workshops led by artist-in-residence Ella Miodownik. Now on permanent display at the Abdus Salam Library, the tapestry brings together the voices, textures, and questions at the heart of the Good Science Project.
Bringing the day to a close, Dr Webster encouraged attendees not to let the conversations end with the conference. “Research culture isn’t something external to science — it is the science, and it is what we do each day,” he said. “Like light through a prism, research culture refracts into all the practices, pressures and possibilities that shape our work. We need to keep looking at it, and keep talking.”