By Shakiba Ghasemi
The first Tampere Café Scientifique, founded by professor Howy Jacobs and Kaarina Ojasti (with her IB students) was held in the Finlayson area on 19th September in 2008. The speaker was Dr Christopher Flynn with “Dark matter, dark energy.”
The Finlayson cafés continued for four years, but in the end, it was quite hard to run them with volunteers and no money. Professor Markku Kulomaa from Tampere University/Lumate came to the rescue. Together with the Finnish-British Society, Kaarina Ojasti cooperated with Lumate for several years, bringing in many lecturers from the UK (and they all visited Rellu).
Lumate then turned into Juniversity, and the emphasis of the cafés changed into Tampere University events. Also, the language of the University cafés was Finnish.
This led Sari Kiiski and Kaarina Ojasti to simultaneously come up with the idea of relaunching the original Café Scientifique. Howy Jacobs agreed to act as a figurehead and Sheela Kiiskilä promised to give the first talk.
The first “new” Café Scientifique was held on 4th of November in 2021. Sheela Kiiskilä talked about virtual and augmented reality under the title “Ready student one?”
Howy Jacobs and Kaarina Ojasti were interviewed by Shakiba Ghasemi. They discussed the early days of the science cafés, and the way these events offered a method to give people of all ages an insight into science. Howy Jacobs told us that he moved to Tampere after his studies at Cambridge and further research in California and Glasgow. Tampere offered good facilities for research on mitochondria. Howy even half promised to give a talk on “Mitochondria - not as cool as you think.”
A big thank you to both Howy Jacobs and Kaarina Ojasti for their time and memories of the early days of Café Scientifique.
The next Café Scientifique will be held on 14th of December.
Photo: Howy Jacobs and Kaarina Ojasti being interviewed by student Shakiba Ghasemi at Tampereen Lyseon Lukio
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