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| Professor William Hsieh lectures on short-term climate variability and prediction to a crowd of high school students and community members. |
It seemed only fitting amidst the torrential rainfall that enveloped Vancouver this past Saturday that 80 high school students and community members gathered at TRIUMF to listen to a lecture on short-term climate variability and prediction. Speaking on the topic was William Hsieh, Professor at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Earth and Ocean Science and the Department of Physics and Astronomy. The lecture was part of the kick-off event to the 2009/2010 Saturday Morning Lecture Series - a popular outreach and education event presented by TRIUMF, the University of British Columbia (UBC), and Simon Fraser University (SFU).
Hsieh's lecture addressed well-established modes of short-term climate variation, from the El Niño-La Niña phenomenon (which greatly affects our winters on the west coast) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, to the Arctic Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. He explained to his audience how observations of these variations can be combined with numerical models in computers to try to predict the future behavior of the earth's climate.
The morning also included a Science and Technology Career Panel featuring five scientists working in the B.C. science and technology industry. The career panel gave the students an opportunity to hear first-hand accounts of what it was like for the panelists to go through the many years of post-secondary education required for a career in the sciences, the struggles and triumphs each faced along the way, the places they'd travelled to around the world, and the many benefits and rewards they each experienced in their respective professions.
The panelists also had sage advice for their captive audience: always be curious; don't worry if you don't know exactly what you want to do right away-you'll eventually figure it out; get to know as many people as you can in your field; and don't do it for the money-do it because you love it. Participating in the panel were: Makoto Fujiwara and Connie Hoehr (TRIUMF), Lars Rose (National Research Council Institute for Fuel Cell Innovation), Susan Baldwin (UBC Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering), and Lesley Shannon (SFU School of Engineering Science).
The Saturday Morning Lecture Series began in February 2004 as a joint project between UBC and TRIUMF (SFU came on board this year) with the aim of making science accessible and engaging to high school students and the general public. This year, series organizer Stan Yen has put together a fantastic line-up of lectures on topics which focus on the Frontiers of Modern Physics and explore everything from dark matter and nuclear medicine to the Large Hadron Collider and nuclear astrophysics.
The next Saturday Morning Lecture is November 14, 2009, from 10am - 12pm with Ludo van Waerbeke (UBC) speaking on "Dark Matter and Dark Energy" and Karen Kavanagh (SFU) presenting "Making Light Go through Tiny Holes". Attending the lecture is free, but due to limited space, registration is required beforehand, so be sure to register soon. High school students as well as the general public are welcome to attend. Additional information about the series and registration are available here.
--Meghan Magee, Communications Assistant