DrStephen Webster

I am director of The Good Science Project, a College-wide exploration of research culture, and a collaboration between the Science Communication Unit and the Office of the Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise). The Project - now in its fourth year of funding by Research England - organises events and programmes that give researchers the opportunity to discuss together the challenges of 'the life scientific' and to share perspectives. A key element of our work is a series of lunchtime in-person discussions, called The Friday Forums, open to all College members. Each forurm examines a particular theme, for example the ethical issues of security science on an academic campus.

Our first research culture conference, in September 2023, considered the way science is centred on uncertainty, and was called The Day of Doubt.

Our second conference, 'The Prism of Research,'held  in April 2025, was a kaleidoscopic survey of contemporary research culture, and included sessions on the American funding situation; the impact of AI on the 'craft of science'; the concept of friendship as a research asset; and how museums and art can integrate with our science.

The most recent of our conferences, held in April 2026 was co-convened with Magdalena Skipper, editor-in-chief of Nature, and examined the role of failure in science. An editorial in Nature, following the conference, enjoined STEM institutions to think harder about how failure, as a central aspect of scientific progress, can be supported within an institutional setting.

Currently we are running the Writing Science Workshop, where a cohort of 40 Imperial researchers are meeting once a month to explore the world of science writing, try their hand, and put together a series of contributions for the upcoming book we are producing, The Good Science Book.

I was director of the Science Communication Unit from 2008 to 2021, teaching the philosophy of science, and ethics. As well as running the Good Science Project I am currently preparing a new edition of my biography of Charles Darwin. 

My undergraduate degree was in zoology, my postgraduate training in the philosophy of science. My PhD was on art-science collaborations, viewed particularly as a way for scientists to enrich their epistemology and their ethical reasoning. I didn’t go into higher education straightaway, but was a school science teacher for 13 years in various London schools, including being head of biology at Quintin Kynaston School (at that time part of the ILEA). When I was a school teacher, in the 1980s and 90s, school science had a much more questioning and critical curriculum than it does now - a feature of the ILEA system of teaching science - and it was this experience which led me into science communication.

Before coming to Imperial College I was involved in many sorts of science writing, including radio plays for the BBC, children’s books of various sorts, introductory texts to the philosophy of science, and contributing to the Guardian's weather column 'Weatherwatch'. I became co-director of the Birkbeck diploma in science communication in 1995, while teaching part-time at the King Alfred School in Hampstead. In 1999 I was appointed to a curriculum development post at Imperial College, working in many different departments, before concentrating on the work of the Science Communication Unit and the science communication Masters' courses.