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Dr Isabel Webb is Deputy Director for Technology Strategy and Security at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). She first came to CSaP in 2014 as a UKRI-funded Policy Intern, and in 2021 she returned to become a member of CSaP’s Policy Fellowship. Here she talks about her CSaP journey and how the contacts she has made have produced tangible policy outcomes.
I first came to CSaP ten years ago as an intern while I was doing a PhD in molecular microbiology at the John Innes Centre in Norwich. I had become interested in science policy and wanted to explore this more deeply, and CSaP seemed a really great place to do that. I learnt a lot and enjoyed the exposure it gave me to senior civil servants in various parts of government – including a former US official and Nobel laureate who had served as Secretary of Energy during the Obama administration.
During that time, my fellow interns persuaded me to attend a talk about working in government and that inspired me to apply for the Civil Service Fast Stream once I graduated. I worked in several different roles as a Fast Streamer but always maintained my interest in science and technology policy.
I went on to work in the Secretary of State’s Office in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and decided this was a good time to apply for the CSaP Policy Fellowship. I had maintained my connection with CSaP and knew that this would be an opportunity to build my own picture of the science and technology system and to have some interesting conversations of my own.
"Access to CSaP's network has been really valuable. The people I have met through my visits to Cambridge have provided me with names of people I can call on if ever I need to."
One thing I learnt through the Fellowship was the importance of sharing my learning and connections with my colleagues. One of the best connections I made was with Dr Lalitha Sundaram, a Senior Research Associate in the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) in Cambridge. She introduced me to new concepts, like cyber-biosecurity, and encouraged me to think about our place in biosecurity internationally. But the real value came when I introduced her to the rest of my team. I invited her to speak in BEIS to share her expertise more widely – a new voice for everyone to listen to. We then invited her to sit on the Biosecurity Leadership Council and she has since taken up a secondment in the Foreign Office – which means we are able to use her as an internal, as well as external, stakeholder.
Furthermore, several of the relationships established through CSaP have led to tangible policy outcomes. I met Dr Eoin O’Sullivan (Director of the Centre for Science, Technology & Innovation Policy at Cambridge) together with Dr Rob Doubleday (CSaP’s Executive Director), and they talked about bringing together policy and scientific thinking systematically. We discussed which technologies would make good case studies to demonstrate this. Rob and a member of Eoin’s team are now on secondment in DSIT working on a handbook to structure government thinking when a new technology emerges. We have now reciprocated this, placing a DSIT analyst in Eoin’s team on an outward secondment, pooling our resources and knowledge. This will explore systems thinking in technology which we hope will be useful to policy makers going forward.
"So many of the people I met were enthusiastic about getting involved to help with government work – I hadn’t really appreciated just how keen academics would be to help."
Attending CSaP’s Policy Workshops has also exposed me to a fascinating range of people and perspectives, and I have met lots of interesting people at CSaP’s conferences and receptions – not all of my peers on the Fast Stream had the opportunity to talk to Permanent Secretaries at an evening function, for example!
"Taking on a different lens can unlock new ways of thinking."
Among the other things I learnt was the importance of taking a break. It is often easy to forget about doing learning and development, especially as you become more senior. But the breathing space that CSaP offered gave me time to step back and think about something in a different way. I was then able to bring that new thinking back to the office. I also learnt to not always go to the obvious people; for example, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to meet with someone from the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. But my discussions in CSER, the Cambridge Judge Business School, and in the Institute for Manufacturing reminded me that lots of people are facing similar challenges and thinking about similar problems.