As many spend big this Valentine’s Day on roses, chocolates and novelty balloons – $791.4 million is expected to be spent nationally – we think that love is all you need. Over the past few months, we’ve had a summer romance-of-sorts with some of Australia’s brightest young minds. We’re talking about our vacation scholarship program, where about 200 undergraduate students spend their summer working on research projects across the country, from searching for black holes with our Parkes radio telescope to helping develop CO2 absorbent polymers.

This week, a group of our summer students got together for our annual Big Day In at the University of New South Wales, where they presented about their summer research. The student who took out the top presentation prize, Fletcher Talbot, worked on a gesture recognition system for the Museum Robot, or “M-Bot”, which roams the galleries of the National Museum of Australia. Fletcher created 40 custom hand gestures the M-Bot can detect.

The students also took the opportunity to declare their love for science. “I love Science because it’s a way of understanding the world,” and “I love Science because it’s really innovative, it’s always changing and it’s really dynamic.” Check out the video below.

Video transcript available here.

Why do you love science? Let us know in the comments.

And happy Valentine’s Day.

Here’s more information on our scholarship programs and careers with us.