Lucie Germain: 20Q20 interview

Lucie Germain, PhD

Professor, Department of Surgery, Faculty of Medicine, and Vice Dean of Research and Graduate Studies at Laval University

20 questions with Lucie Germain

1. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Deschambault. It is a beautiful village, midway between Québec City and Trois-Rivières, situated along the St. Lawrence River, in the province of Québec. My father had a dairy farm, and my mother was a teacher.

2. Where did you go to school?
I did my primary school in Deschambault and my secondary school in the nearby community of Saint-Marc-des-Carrières. I then attended a private school for my last year of high school and my CEGEP (post-secondary education pre-university, collegiate general and technical college offered in Quebec’s education system), called College Notre-Dame-de-Foy, which is in Saint-Augustin-deDesmaures, just outside of Québec City.

I chose the general science pathway in CEGEP which includes the pure sciences and the health sciences because I wanted to ensure I had many doors open for me in university. I did a BA in physics at the Université Laval in Québec City. At that time, I wanted to work in radiotherapy or in the application of lasers in medicine. After my first year of my Bachelor’s degree, I had the opportunity to work in two laboratories over the summer. The first one was in CO2 lasers, in a physics lab. I realized at that time that I would be spending hours and hours aligning the lasers to do the experiments. It was not that exciting for me. Of course, today, it is much easier to work with lasers, but back then it was a long process.

Read the full interview here.

Published September 2021.