Alumni spotlights

When Jackie Forrest (BSc’96) graduated from chemical engineering 30 years ago and started working in engineering software, she couldn’t have imagined she would become an influential podcaster talking about the global energy business. In fact, she couldn’t have imagined podcasts.

“I would've loved it. I probably would've had a university podcast,” says Forrest, executive director of the ARC Energy Research Institute and managing director of ARC Financial Corp. Every week on the ARC Energy Ideas Podcast, Forrest and her co-host and ARC colleague Peter Tertzakian dive into geopolitics, policies and other factors that influence the energy industry. 

“We started the podcast in 2018 because we were writing a weekly article for the Globe and Mail and others. The podcast is a lot easier, and we could cover way more topics in a half hour than the hours it took to write something,” she says. While the podcast is a must-listen for people in the industry, it has plenty of laymen listeners wanting an inside look on the energy transition.