Points of Intersection: Science and Poetry

Sam Illingworth is a poet and Professor at Edinburgh Napier University whose work and research focuses on using poetry as a medium through which to develop dialogues between different publics.

What happens when scientists pick up pens instead of pipettes? When researchers trade data for dactyls? This anthology offers one answer.

These poems emerged from the third cohort of Science Communication Through Poetry, an online course I ran through Edinburgh Napier University in Autumn 2025. Seventy-nine participants from across the world joined us: biologists and physicists, nurses and engineers, poets and professors, students and seasoned practitioners. All united by a shared conviction that science and poetry belong together.

And why shouldn’t they? Both disciplines demand precision. Both require us to observe carefully, to question assumptions, to find patterns in apparent chaos. The scientist and the poet share a fundamental impulse: to make sense of the world and communicate that understanding to others.

The poems gathered here demonstrate this kinship beautifully. You’ll find caddisflies and cancer cells, microbiomes and mass extinctions, Northern lights and nuclear isotopes. Each piece represents a writer grappling with how to translate complex ideas into accessible, affecting language, how to make readers feel what they might otherwise only understand.

My enormous thanks to Courtney Williams, Lucía Ballesteros Santana, and Ale Garin-Fernandez for assembling this collection, and to every participant who trusted the process and shared their work.

Read these poems. Let them surprise you.