What are Cake Meetings?
Cake Meetings are monthly gatherings bringing together academics, PhD students and researchers from across WPE: an hour for knowledge sharing, interdisciplinary discussion and community building, with cake in the room.
While particularly valuable for Early Career Researchers (ECRs), these meetings are open to all department members regardless of career stage. The informal atmosphere encourages open dialogue and creates opportunities for unexpected collaborations across our research groups.
Meeting Types
Rainbow Sessions
Interdisciplinary discussions where researchers from different groups share perspectives on common challenges, encouraging cross-pollination of ideas.
Career Tips & Tricks
Professional development sessions focused on skills like grant writing, publishing strategies, and career advancement in academic and industry settings.
Your Story
Personal journeys and experiences shared by department members, highlighting diverse career paths and the human side of academic research.
Research Presentations
Technical sessions where researchers present their latest findings, methodologies, and results, sparking detailed discussions on specific research topics.
The new series
Monthly, from Tuesday 3 November, 12:00 to 13:00. One hour, hard stop, cake in the room. Room to be confirmed.
Why the last series stopped
It drifted into being organised by whoever had the goodwill that month, mostly our PDRAs and PGRs, with no mandate and no recognition. That is a structural problem, not a motivation one, and more reminders would not have fixed it.
How it works now
Every session has a named academic host and a named PGR or PDRA co-host, agreed in advance and published. The host is accountable for the slot happening. The co-host runs it.
What we are asking
Claim one date between now and June. That is the whole commitment: one hour, plus a conversation with your co-host beforehand.
The dates are fixed. Everything else is yours. There are suggested topics against each date, but they are a menu rather than an allocation, and nobody has been paired up. Choose your own co-host, or leave it blank and we will match you. If you would rather talk about something else entirely, write over the suggestion. A session someone chose will always beat a session someone was given.
Claim a date on the sign-up sheet — link to follow.
| Date | Academic host | PGR / PDRA co-host |
|---|---|---|
| Tuesday 3 November 2026 | Open | Open |
| Tuesday 1 December 2026 | Open | Open |
| Tuesday 5 January 2027 | Open | Open |
| Tuesday 2 February 2027 | Open | Open |
| Tuesday 2 March 2027 | Open | Open |
| Tuesday 6 April 2027 | Open | Open |
| Tuesday 4 May 2027 | Open | Open |
| Tuesday 1 June 2027 | Open | Open |