Gabriela Gilmour

Gabriela Gilmour

For McGill students, Midnight Kitchen is usually the best bet for snagging a free lunch on campus. But for one week at the beginning of each semester, Soup and Science edges out the vegan cooperative, offering free soup, sandwiches, and lectures by some of McGill’s brightest young professors.

The idea behind Soup and Science, said Faculty of Science Dean Martin Grant, originated several years ago when McGill was in the midst of a hiring boom.

“We hired so well and so fast that we lost track of who everybody was,” Grant said.

As the university hired dozens of new professors each year, various departments held mixers in which scientists would briefly explain their research over wine and cheese or, less traditionally, cookies and beer. About five years ago, those informal discussions grew into Soup and Science, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last week.

Every day for a week, four or five recently hired McGill professors address a packed house of undergraduates—and a few graduate students—in the Redpath Museum’s auditorium. Each professor has three minutes to explain his or her research, after which professors and students line up for soup and sandwiches in the museum’s lobby.

Fitting several years’ worth of research into three minutes is a tremendous feat of concision, which each scientist approached it differently at last week’s event.

Christopher Barrett, a charismatic chemist who researches new ways to mimic organic phenomena, spoke rapidly, giving several examples of the kind of natural phenomena from that inspires scientists—everything from seashells to spiders.

“You want to see the world’s best solar cell?” he asked. “Go take a walk in the woods.”

Barrett is currently working on mimicking one of nature’s least appealing substances: mucous. Human bodies, he said in his brief lecture, often reject artificial organ transplants because of the devices’ unfamiliar metal surfaces. His lab is working to create a synthetic mucous with which doctors can coat such organs.

After the presentations, Grant asked students in the audience technical questions about the information the scientists had just breathlessly spewed. When a student got an answer right, Grant lobbed a rolled-up Soup and Science t-shirt to the lucky undergraduate.

As they slurped soup after the presentations, many undergraduates stood in small semicircles around the professors who had spoken, asking questions about their research.

Getting more undergraduates involved in research is a major goal of Soup and Science, said Victor Chisholm, the Faculty of Science’s undergraduate research coordinator, who has run Soup and Science since its inception. Because most of the scientists who speak are fairly new to McGill, they are also more likely to need help in their labs.

Undergraduate interest in research has picked up since the event began, Chisholm said. “In the last year or two, I’ve got more questions from students about research, even [those] in U0,” he said.

Many students who attended were enthusiastic about spending their lunch hour listening to the scientists’ presentations.

“It’s been absolutely wonderful—probably just one notch below Frosh,” said Alex Geller, a U1 microbiology and immunology student who went twice last week.

Geller, who works in Donald Sheppard’s microbiology lab on campus, said Soup and Science can help undergraduates feel comfortable approaching their professors.

“This sort of bridges the gap between being a student and doing research,” he said.

Students aren’t the only ones who hold Soup and Science in high regard, though. At the end of his presentation, Barrett grinned.

“I learn a lot from these things, too,” he said with a laugh.