Ig Nobel Face-to-Face Event at the MIT Museum

We invite you to join us at a new event — Ig Nobel Face-to-Face. This is a companion to the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony that happened in September. Most of the new Ig Nobel Prize winners will be there. They will ask each other questions about their work. And you will get a chance to talk with them.

This will happen at the new MIT Museum building. It’s a sort of joyous reunion for us — the very first Ig Nobel Prize ceremony happened in the old MIT Museum building in 1991.

Featuring Marc Abrahams (founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony) and:

  • 2023 Literature Prize winners Chris Moulin and Akira O’Connor (studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times)
  • 2023 Mechanical Engineering Prize winners Te Faye YapZhen LiuAnoop RajappanTrevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston (re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools)
  • 2023 Public Health Prize winner Seung-min Park (inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies — including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal-print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link — to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete)
  • 2023 Communication Prize winner Adolfo García (studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward)
  • 2023 Medicine Prize winners Christine Pham and Natasha Mesinkovska (using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils)
  • 2023 Nutrition Prize winner Homei Miyashita (experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food)
  • 2023 Education Prize winners Katy Tam and Christian Chan (methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students)
  • 2023 Physics Prize winners Bieito Fernández Castro and Miguel Gilcoto (measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies)
  • Conversants Dany Adams, Karen Hopkin, and Eric Maskin

WHAT: Ig Nobel Face-to-Face

WHERE: The (new!) MIT Museum building, 314 Main Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (right next to the Kendall T station)

WHEN: Saturday, November 11, 2023, 7-9 pm.

TICKETS are now on sale at the MIT Museum web site. The space is intimate, the number of tickets is limited.

[NOTE: This event will not be livestreamed. It will be video-recorded for eventual broadcast.]