Habs welcomes Professor David Read

On the 2 March, the School was delighted to host Professor David Read, a Professorial Fellow in Chemical Education from the University of Southampton. A compelling, confident, and extremely intelligent speaker, I was captivated throughout the presentation and took regular notes throughout. Combining modern social issues with scientific evidence and reasoning helped convey critical information to an audience with interests ranging from environmental science to pure chemistry.

Professor Read discussed and portrayed a wide range of key modern issues and especially their environmental consequences, focusing on their relationship with scientific innovation and ideas of eco-friendly science. Ranging from questions of decreasing oil supplies to the acceleration of global warming in recent years, Professor Read repeatedly emphasized the immense importance of sustainability and how scientific developments were facilitating cleaner technologies and would continue to do so in a likely exponential rate in the future.

Additionally, Professor Read spent significant amounts of time highlighting the sheer significance of the scientific approach and methodology, demonstrating just how innate scientific reasoning is to the solutions to many pressing problems within the modern day.

One of my personal favourite aspects of the presentation was the sheer level of interactivity; by regularly establishing polls and asking questions, he ensured the audience remained not only engaged but actively excited and inspired, with a peak of 38 voters out of 56 total participants.

Resultantly, those in attendance left the talk empowered, with a sense of increased understanding regarding modern social issues and scientific involvement alongside a feeling of newly developed, encouraged passions for environmental sciences.

Written by Lucas (L6H1), Science Society Committee