Our First British High Commission Science Salon with Special Guest: Dr. David Strangway!

One week ago today we had our inaugural Science Salon event!  What is a Science Salon you ask?  Well imagine trying to channel Bohemian France, with it’s parlours and poets and artists, into a science themed event, and there you have it – A Science Salon! The goal of these events is to bring people in scientific fields across academia, government, and industry – as well as those who just have an interest in science – to discuss interesting scientific topics in an informal and collegial atmosphere.

For our first event, we were honoured to host a presentation by the champion for African Research Chairs himself, Dr. David Strangway! Dr. Strangway, as many of you know, has had a very distinguished career.  He grew up in Angola, where his parents were medical missionaries, has held positions at MIT and NASA, has been the President of several universities (University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, Quest University), the President and CEO of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. Most importantly, he is also an excellent gentleman to chat with!

 Dr. Strangway spoke to the audience about the African Research Chairs initiative that he is championing, which aims to fund 1000 positions for senior researchers in African Universities.  This initiative, if realised, would help build capacity  necessary for African countries to meet the Millennium Development Goals.

The African Research Chairs proposal has been patterned after the highly successful Canada Research Chairs program, and follows the successful pilot program initiated by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) – International Research Chairs Initiative.

After the presentation, there was time to chat with Dr. Strangway (and the other interesting folks who came out to hear Dr. Strangway speak), before he flew out that evening to continue his discussions internationally.

While I could go on at length about this, I’d much rather allow Dr. Strangway to speak for himself!  Here we’ve put together a brief video blog with Dr. Strangway discussing his work on this project, but you can also see an almost full length version (limited by time allowances) in the video at the bottom.

 Shorter Video Blog (~2min):