Inside Nature’s Giants won the category for Best Factual at the BAFTAs! You can catch up with series producer David Dugan and presenter Simon Watt at our event:
Inside Nature’s Giants, Wednesday 9 June (tickets still available)

At 4:30 PM 5th June, the 10 NESTA FameLab finalists took to the stage in front of a huge audience and judges Kathy Sykes, Mark Lythgoe, Leanne Klein and Mark Henderson in the Main Arena at the Cheltenham Science Festival. In the two hours that followed, the audience were treated to a range of captivating, fascinating and humorous talks that took them from malaria to autism, hip replacements to pheromones via a spot of quantum physics, and, for the first time in the history of FameLab, a three minute rhyming poem about bacteria and food poisoning! The atmosphere was tense as the judges stepped out to make their decision and the audience votes were counted.

And the results? In third place winning £750 and a spot on Channel 4 was Simon Foster, a real life rocket scientist turned teacher, who impressed the judges with his talk about finding life on other planets. In second place bagging £5,000 and time on Channel 4 was Alistair Linsell, a second year Chemistry student from Durham University, who left the audience and judges laughing with his enthusiastic talk on fluorescent monkeys.

In first place was Tom Whyntie(pictured), Imperial PhD student working at CERN, who captivated everyone by explaining how the Large Hadron Collider finding… nothing …could be a scientific revolution. Tom came away with the giant cheque for £10,000 and two appearances on Channel 4. Chair of the judges Festival Director Kathy Sykes said of the 2009 winner:

“We were really impressed by all the finalists as the standard was incredibly high, but Tom really stood out, as he gave a stunning presentation and was able to communicate a complex concept to the general public with humour and ease. We want to congratulate him and wish them the best of luck in his future career. We hope that he will go on to great things and inspire a whole new generation of scientists”.

The winner of the audience vote on the night was teacher Matt Parker whose talk about maths impressed the audience the most. Matt then took to the Main Arena stage again the next night in front of 550 people as part of Cheltenham’s Not Rocket Science comedy science panel show. And cosmologist Andrew Pontzen was the winner of the NESTA FameLab MasterClass award having impressed the trainers and experts the most on the training weekend.

Congratulations to Tom and to all of our fantastic contestants this year! In our International FameLab competition, Serbian Mirko Djordjevic, final year molecular biology student from the University of Belgrade, won the title with his talk about the science of sexual attraction in mammals.

Missed the competition? Keep your eye on the FameLab YouTube Channel; and you can keep up with all the news on our winners on the NESTA FameLab website.

Photography by Conor Cahill.