Podcasts!

Dr. Gerry Poulton is a retired Chemistry professor from the University of Victoria, whose decades of mentorship and leadership have helped shape science fairs in th the Greater Victoria Regional Science Fair. From guiding countless students to national and international competitions, to championing the transformative power of inquiry-based learning, Dr. Poulton’s contributions have left a lasting mark on the science fair community, so much so that he’s being awarded a legacy award this year. 

Gerry has made such difference in this province for education, science fair, and science in general. He’s such an inspiration, and shows for me, just how science fairs which even in my life, is something that you could say is off the side of my desk from my main job, but is so richly rewarding. If you want to make a difference for some of these amazing youth head on over to our website sciencefair.ca/mentorship, you can sign up to be one, and participate in our monthly open office hours meeting called Science Club. It’s an online meetup where youth, parents, and teachers come to ask questions and be inspired.

Here at the Science Fair Foundation we mostly are focussed and supporting a variety of initiatives around science fairs, which is not surprising. You have school fairs, local fairs, regional fairs, and the youth innovation showcase. All amazing opportunities for youth to delve into their curiosity and express themselves with their ideas, and projects. Over the past couple of years i’ve gotten to know someone, that did get involved with all of those initiatives, but took it one step further. He wrote, and published not one, but two books about the universe. Cosmic Wonder: Our Place in the Epic Story of the Universe The Language of the Stars: The Scientific Story of a Few Billion Years in a Few Hundred Pages

As Science Fair season starts to wrap up with the culmination of the 2025 Canada Wide Science, Michael Unger chats with an alumni that competed at four straight Canada Wide Science Fairs from 2013-2016. Meaghan MacKenzie is now a Environmental Engineer-In-Training with Tetra Tech Canada Inc., and she shares her insights into what skills she really took away from competing in science fairs, and how they have helped her in career today.

Continuing our celebration of these inspirational young scientists, in this episode our host Michael Unger gets into it with our 2024 YIS winners Jora Singh Nahal & Inbal Tzafrir.

Join them as they discuss why they felt compelled to develop apps that help to navigate the struggles which disabled individuals face, what skills they have taken away from YIS, and what is that special something that keeps bringing them back to science fairs.

It’s the end of 2024, and for us here at the Foundation, it’s also the end of the Youth Innovation Showcase. So for the next few episodes, we are going to recap an amazing showcase. In this episode i brought in two of the judges from the Youth Innovation Showcase to hear their thoughts their conversations with all of the amazing youth this year, but also their perspective on mentorship and the benefits they get out it. First up we have Clare Yip a biomedical engineer, that is now working as a private tutor, and has served on the committee for the Greater Vancouver Science Fair and Ivelina Daiss, an engineer by trade who holds the role of a Technology R&D Specialist in the Partnerships and Innovation Team at Rogers Communications.

Marco is an accessibility consultant who has battled through a lot of adversity to get to where he is as now a leading thinker and inspirational speaker in this space. We talked about so many things including imposter syndrome, anxiety, and techniques that Marco has developed into teachable tools. He even did a full one hour Zoom workshop Energy, Empathy, and Diversity which you can watch here back in 2021, so we’re re-releasing this episode from Season 1!

When Marco lost his job in 2017, it turned out to be the biggest blessing in disguise. He is an advocate for people with disabilities in the workplace and founder of the CUBE Principle for networking. Hear how he got advice on branding from Gene Simmons and his tips for networking virtually during Covid!