Piotrek Gierszewski

Senior Researcher

Piotrek is passionate about using foresight as a tool for achieving social impact; exploring possible visions for the future and enabling the desirable opportunities to happen.

He has over ten years’ experience in research within academia, private and non-profit sectors.

At Nesta Challenges, he is responsible for researching social and environmental problems and identifying opportunities to tackle them. He turns insight into practice by developing challenge-driven, open-innovation competitions that support communities of solvers and incentivise solutions to these problems. Since 2017, Piotrek has worked on topics ranging from emerging innovations in whale conservation or legal services to scaling up access to surgical procedures in low resource settings.

Prior to Nesta, Piotrek had worked at a boutique science commercialisation consultancy as a technology scout and at the University of Cambridge as a life scientist specialising in epigenetics and molecular biology. He has also co-lead grassroots networks focused on translation of 'deep' and/or 'bench' science into commercial opportunities and acceleration of their market entry.

Piotrek is a fire performer specialising in ‘poi’ spinning and fire breathing (though less so since he grew a beard), loves nature and spending time outdoors.

You can follow him on Twitter @PiotrGier