Scholarship winner for the Science Communications 2014 Program at Banff Centre

Announcing our scholarship winner for the Science Communications 2014 Program at Banff Centre, Tanya Roussy, who actually grew up right next door to Banff. Tanya has a degree in Engineering Physics and she will be starting the Science Communications program at the end of July. Congratulations, Tanya! We look forward to hear about your experience in the program!

Tanya grew up right next door to Banff, in Canmore, AB. She spent her youth developing a deep appreciation for the natural world, both as a lover of nature and as a person who was always curious about how, exactly, the world worked. After finishing high school, she spent many years exploring the mountains on her snowboard. In the meantime, she finished a Sommelier Diploma with the International Sommelier Guild. As she was exploring the mountains, she noticed more and more the negative impact we are having on our earth. This prompted her to finally give in to her love of the sciences and engineering, since she wouldn’t be able to fix anything without some good tools to work with. So, at age 24, she enrolled in UBC’s Engineering Physics program with the intent of applying her education to research and develop alternative energy solutions. While at UBC, Tanya worked in a Scanning Tunneling Microscopy laboratory, studying charge transfer dynamics and morphology in single molecule systems. This type of research will contribute to a fundamental, `bottom‐ up’ understanding of photovoltaics, with the ultimate hope of enabling us to engineer the very molecules we use to make power, and thus drastically improve photovoltaic technology. She graduated from Engineering Physics this May, and plans to return to UBC in January to pursue a Masters in Applied Physics.

Photo caption: Tanya is sitting in front of a scanning tunneling microscope!