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The IDRM hosts its first Institute Away Day
The Institute of Developmental and Regenerative Medicine hosted its first ‘away day’ retreat on September 29th at Milton Hill House Hotel. With 90 attendees, the day included a town hall meeting, presentations, workshops, team-building activities, and a gala dinner.
The day began with an overview of the achievements of the institute in the previous year from IDRM Director Prof. Paul Riley. Following his presentation, IDRM management held a Town Hall meeting, where delegates were invited to ask questions regarding the organisation of the institute.
The Away Day programme included three key non-scientific sessions on career development, sustainability, and public engagement with science.
The Career Development Session was led by Associate Professor and IDRM group leader Sarah De Val along with Dr Claudio Cortes Rodriguez, postdoctoral research fellow in the Riley group. Their talk featured mentions of valuable resources that could help researchers advance their professional development.
The second session of the day was a Sustainability talk and workshop led by Deputy Facility Manager Andrew Brogden and Charlotte Houghton, Carbon Reduction Manager at the Environmental Sustainability team. The session included an interactive exercise, in which delegates were asked to sort different materials and grades of plastic into recyclable and non-recyclable categories.
The third interactive session of the away day was led by Group Leaders A. Prof. Carlo Rinaldi and Prof. Shankar Srinivas who talked about their experiences with public engagement with research and the activities and initiatives, Muscle Switch and Shaping Destiny, they developed as a result.
After the public engagement presentations, the delegates were split into ten groups and tasked to develop a public engagement activity based on one of three fictional research scenarios. Each of the groups presented an elevator pitch for their initiative. The workshop concluded with an audience vote for the best idea.
The away day activities continued into the late afternoon with a walking tour of the Milton Hill House hotel, various outdoor games, and board games.
At the end of the day, the IDRM delegates attended a celebratory gala dinner. Dr Claudio Cortes presented the answers of the ‘Group Leader Trivia’ game, organised by the administration team. The results of the vote for the most popular scientific image of IDRM were also announced at the dinner.
Dr David Grainger and his image won the contest with 24 votes out of 71 in total.
