Science Café: Science on the Menu

Penn Arts & Sciences is collaborating with Philabundance for a special Science Café focused on food science and food insecurity.

Join us at Xfinity Live during the Camp Out for Hunger to hear Assistant Professor of Physics Arnold Mathijssen describe recent scientific advances in the context of the culinary arts. The program’s menu will include the physics of drinks and cocktails, a series of main courses, and finish with the science of coffee and desserts. We’ll discuss how science can improve gastronomy and how food can enhance science by making research more inclusive and accessible. As always, there will be time for questions and answers, as well as a dinner reception before and after the talk.

Fox Leadership Program student Sam Cheever, C'24, will moderate the evening and describe Fox Leadership's work to alleviate food insecurity.

 We encourage attendees to bring a can for the Camp Out for Hunger food drive.

Speaker Bio

Arnold Mathijssen, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, explores the physics of life, combining experimental and theoretical techniques across the disciplines of physics and biology. He was named a “30 under 30” researcher by Scientific American. He was awarded the Sir Sam Edwards Ph.D. Thesis Prize at the University Oxford and presented with the American Physical Society’s Charles Kittel Award for his work at Stanford, which was supported by a Human Frontier Science Program cross-disciplinary fellowship. He is the organizer of the 2024 Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics. To make science more equitable and accessible, he and his lab started a series of outreach events about “Kitchen Science” for students from underrepresented backgrounds in Philadelphia.

Register Here

The Penn Science Café is generously funded by the Adolf and Felicia Leon Fund., which supports Penn Arts & Sciences programming and lecture series.