Outreach and Public Education

We welcome high school groups, UBC colleagues, government officials, and industry professionals to visit Blusson QMI. To schedule your tour, please email Alex Anees at alex.anees@ubc.ca.

Dr. Kirsty Gardner, a Blusson QMI postdoctoral fellow, talked to students in grades 10 and 11 about her work at QMI and how it relates to the cool science of space. She walked students through building their own DIY gravitational wave detector.

Learn more about Future Science Leaders.

On November 4th, 2023, our principal investigator Alannah Hallas participated as a mentor at the Girls In STEAM Summit hosted by Science World.

Learn about Girls in STEAM.

Unboxing Quantum is a public seminar series that breaks down the science to simple concepts in light, fun and interactive sessions. Everyone is welcome to attend. Stay tuned fore more talks!

Check out recorded talks here.

Science Rendezvous is an annual free festival open to public held across Canada showcasing the Art in Science. The festival features science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) research and innovation.

Join friends and peers as you race across UBC to complete our Science Chase! From the Old Barn Community Centre to the Department of Chemistry, visitors will race across campus and experience the power of STEAM. Ride on a hovercraft, discover micro-organisms in the pond, explore quantum physics, and learn how fire, ash, and magma made the Earth we walk on today. There will be explosions, workshops, and hands-on experiments.

The event, which has takes place across UBC’s Vancouver campus, is free for everyone. Join us on to win cool prizes, tour UBC, and of course, learn about all the amazing feats of science and engineering happening right here at home!

Every year, elementary school students in Grades 4-7 from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside participate in Experience Science Day at UBC to engage in science-related activities. Launched in 2010, this ongoing program, provides a fun and interesting introduction to a multitude of science topics.

Since 2017 Blusson QMI has been part of this initiative. Our volunteer graduate students and our staff have supported this important outreach activity by educating our young visitors about quantum physics and, more specifically, about the work we do at Blusson QMI.

The goal of our Emerging Indigenous Scholars Summer Camps is to increase indigenous student participation in mathematics and other sciences and in order to foster a passion for science and encourage their future science studies. Indigenous students participate in real-life work experience with faculty and staff at UBC while working in a field of their choice.

Every year Blusson QMI graduate students and staff involved in research and outreach participate in this initiative by either preparing a week of experiments in the laboratory environments or lectures.

Working with the Verna J. Kirkness Science and Engineering Education Program, Grade 11 high school students from Western Canada visited our Blusson QMI. The goals of this initiative are to help students become familiar with a university environment and inspire them to study science.

In 2017, we welcomed Grade 11 Indigenous students from Alberta who shadowed Ph.D. students during their work in laboratories. Our trainees prepared experiments so that the students, who had limited laboratory experience, were able to observe and participate.

Additional activities during their visit included a tour of Science World at Telus World of Science and interacted with other Indigenous communities at UBC.

In April 2018, thanks in part to funding from WWEST and eng*cite, we launched a one-week outreach program for high-achieving female Indigenous students. Working closely with the Vancouver School District and the North Vancouver School District to select the participating students, our innovative initiative, QuIWI, was created to inspire a new generation of scientists.

The students worked closely with several of our scientific groups by engaging directly in laboratory work. The visitors also enjoyed tours of Science World at Telus World of Science, TRIUMF (Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics) and the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, which is renowned for its displays of world arts and cultures, with a distinct emphasis on First Nations peoples and other cultural communities of British Columbia.

On April 9, 2018, we hosted a panel titled “Bridging Indigenous Ways of Knowing with Western Ways of Doing Research.” Organized by Natalia Bussard, Manager, Programs and Careers, the event took place at Science World at Telus World of Science. The event was open to the public and attended by K-12 sector representatives, secondary and postsecondary teachers, students of all levels and government representatives.

The panel aspired to fulfill the ambitious goals of (1) inspiring aspiring young scientists to pursue careers in science or engineering, and (2) bridging Indigenous Ways of Knowing with Western Ways of doing research.

The moderator was Dr. Sam Rocha (UBC Faculty of Education), panelists included Dr. Vanessa Andreotti and Dr. Michael Marker (in memoriam), both indigenous scholars (UBC Faculty of Education), Chas Desjarlais (District Principal of Indigenous Education at Vancouver School Board), Cease Wyss a Skwxwú7mesh, Stó:lō, Kanaka Maoli, Irish-Métis, ethnobotanist, independent curator, educator, and activist based in Vancouver, and Blusson QMI’s Andrea Damascelli. Panelists engaged in the lively discussion about how it is possible to integrate indigenous science and we western ways of doing research in the new BC curriculum, misconceptions about Indigenous ways of knowing and challenges teachers face when introducing Indigenous themes into education and progress we have made as a society in the past ten years.