Cal Science & Engineering Festival – Save the date!

Liz Boatman
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UPDATE 11/12/10: Get excited, because the festival is back on! It will be indoors on January 23, 2011 (exact location TBA).

UPDATE 10/22/10: The festival has been postponed because of the rain forecast. Since there is no indoor location big enough to hold all the excitement we have about science here at Cal, we will have to wait for a dry day to reschedule. We will update again when they choose a new date.

October has been a great month for a long time now. The Germans brought us Oktoberfest. The Celts brought us Hallowe’en (sort of). Across the US the leaves change, the apples are picked, the rains begin, and the days grow short.

And now we have one more great reason to love October: the first ever USA Science & Engineering Festival will run from October 10 through 24 and includes festivals, concerts, and celebrations of science across the country. Of course, nobody does science and engineering like we do here at Cal!

Folks, this is your official save the date, so listen up! On Saturday, October 23, from 10 am to 2 pm, hundreds of Cal students and professors will emerge from their labs to show you what makes science and engineering awesome. Join them at Spieker Plaza (next to the Haas Pavilion) for activities, demonstrations, and fun for the whole family. Plus, it’s free, for everyone!

The list of presenters and activities includes something for every type of science enthusiast. Like stargazing? The Astronomy Department is bringing their inflatable planetarium. Prefer geology? Come make mini-earthquakes with the Seismological Lab! Want a magic show? The American Chemical Society has that taken care of. Rather see something gross? UC San Francisco scientists will have real human brains that you can touch! Plus, much, much more!

So on October 23, grab your pocket protector, put on your lab goggles and your nerd face, and join the entire country in a celebration of science and engineering! Want more information? Go here.

The Cal Science & Engineering Festival is an event by Science@Cal, with sponsorship from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, the Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (E3S), the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems (COINS), the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS), the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), the Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology and Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3), The Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC).

Liz Boatman

Liz is a graduate student in Materials Science and Engineering. For research, she studies the material properties of fossil bones. Outside of graduate school, she enjoys backpacking, cycling, and soccer. Liz has been a BSR blog contributor since summer 2010.

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  1. Anna Goldstein

    Forgive the long comment, but I wanted to share some words from Larry Bock, director of the national festival:

    Dear Colleague,

    For the past year I have been organizing the USA Science & Engineering Festival — what I hope will be the country’s largest celebration of science and engineering — a FUN, entertaining, educational and FREE event geared toward reinvigorating the interest of Americans in the Sciences. I have put as much energy and imagination and effort into this as any of the companies I started. And now I need your help getting the word out. Please consider sending this to your employees, colleagues, friends, teachers etc.

    Why is this important?

    In a nutshell:
    — according to Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley, by the end of 2010 (just months from now) 90% of the world’s scientists and engineers with advanced degrees will live in Asia.
    — 80% of people being trained in the advanced physical sciences in the United States are from abroad.
    — because the opportunities are now greater abroad, we are no longer retaining them in the USA.
    — If we do not turn this trend around, we will have outsourced innovation. And once we have outsourced innovation, our country’s ability to compete will be over. My concern over this is so great that I have devoted the past year and a half (7 days a week 10 hours a day) to organizing this Science Festival.

    So why have a Science Festival?

    Society gets what it celebrates! As a culture, we celebrate movie stars, rock stars and athletes and we generate a lot of them, but we don’t celebrate science and engineering. The Festival is analogous to an art, music or literary Festival but it is focused on Science and Engineering and accomplishes its mission via hands-on demonstrations, fun demos, and presentations including art, music, comedy, film and theatre.

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