Tossing t-shirts into a crowd is not in the job description for Principal of McGill but that didn’t faze Suzanne Fortier who on Wednesday, spent her lunchtime at the Soup and Science event, listening to presenters and launching the occasional shirt to attentive audience members who successfully answered skill-testing questions.
Now in it’s sixteenth edition, Soup and Science is held for one week at the start of each fall and winter term. Each day at lunch, undergraduate science students are invited to watch short presentations given by researchers from across the University. The series was launched in Jan. 2006 to showcase professors and a wide variety of research topics as a means of helping science undergrads get involved in research. Designed to be as audience-friendly as possible, each presentation is a rapid-fire, high-energy, three-minute summation of professors’ research interests.
Each session concluded with Faculty of Science Dean Martin Grant quizzing the students on the material they just heard while Fortier delivered T-shirts to those who answer correctly. As always, lunch was served, giving the chance for students to mingle with the professors and delve a little deeper into research opportunities that may have piqued their interest.