The Institute’s strength will continue to lie in the people gathered at our dinners and events: curious, generous with their expertise, and open-minded enough to consider new perspectives.
This year’s dinners covered an extraordinary range of topics, including:
- The physics of extreme states of matter and plasma systems
- High-intensity lasers
- Energy transfer
- Spacecraft propulsion
- Semiconductors
- Quantum dots, spin qubits, and the experimental infrastructure that makes quantum information science possible
- Health technologies and biological physics
- Complex climate systems
- Applied mathematics
- Astrophysics and the engineering challenges of operating beyond our own atmosphere
- Sensing and autonomous systems
DIRDI’s termly dinners bring together our Members & Fellows for serious, cross-disciplinary conversation at the interface of science, technology, strategy, and public purpose. These dinners are designed to create an environment in which they can exchange perspectives in a trusted and collegiate setting. This breadth and trust matter as it is very often at the edges between fields that the most interesting ideas emerge.
We are grateful to all who attended, engaged, and contributed to the dinners hosted across Cambridge, Oxford, Durham, and London. DIRDI exists to help strengthen the United Kingdom’s capacity for research, development, invention, and industrialisation in areas of national importance. Our dinners are a small but essential part of that mission.
These conversations help inform some of the UK’s leading scientists with wider geostrategic context, while also helping senior leaders across government, industry, defence, and policy better understand the scientific and technological foundations of future national capability. In doing so, the UK can continue to provide a healthy and prosperous environment for universities to thrive, and in return, benefit from economic growth, technological leadership, and greater national security, driven by some of the best scientists in the UK.
DIRDI now has over 700 Members and Fellows drawn from across research intensive UK Universities and Industry. We look forward to welcoming more of you to dinners next year.
We always welcome hearing from our Members and Fellows about their experience at the dinners and please do keep us informed of any developments, news or initiatives that emerge as a result of the evenings. If you have an interesting research topic or theme that you would like to explore with our Members and Fellows, we would also be delighted to hear from you about the possibility of speaking at one of our forthcoming dinners. Please get in touch with the team to share your news or discuss speaking opportunities.
Background
DIRDI was established as an interdisciplinary, independent scientific research institute, inspired by Durham University and Durham Cathedral. Today it is a cross-Faculty institute, across science, engineering, and the social sciences, with the goal of encouraging, nurturing, and supporting undergraduates, postgraduates and senior academics alike.
We understand the need for geostrategic, social and economic policy makers to have scientific, engineering and technological understanding. Likewise senior members of UK Science need to undertake their work in far greater geostrategic, theological, social and economic context. DIRDI Dinners are an essential part of fulfilling this aim.
The 5 aims of DIRDI are to combine “Newtonian Discovery” and “Edisonian Commercialisation” research, alongside the identification of the UK’s “Next Newton” and future UK Nobel Prize winners, and to help nurture and develop both within DIRDI. The 5th aim is to undertake research via ideas, inventions and innovations to generate economic hope for the bottom 20% of UK Society in modern poverty. Over the last couple of years, we have added emphasis to help realise the scientific, engineering and technological ambitions of the very senior scientific Fellows who have given so much to UK Academia by their teaching, supervision and research.
DIRDI is uniquely positioned to help release the abundant potential of UK Academia and UK Industry.