Harvard hosted its first ever “Top Chef” competition, as part of Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Condensed Matter, now in its sixth year as a highly popular undergraduate course at Harvard. Created and taught by Michael Brenner and David Weitz, the course enrolls several hundred undergraduates each fall, and is also offered as a free online course through the EdX portal. The top 4 teams from the course competed to win top honors by presenting their projects to a panel of celebrity chefs from the popular Bravo TV series Top Chef – Tom Colicchio, Gail Simmons, and Mei Lin. The winning team, “Microwave Baking” which produced a perfectly chewy chocolate chip cookie, was comprised of Cynthia Guo, an applied math and computer science concentrator, Raya Koreh, a history concentrator and Emily Choi, a first year who has not yet matriculated.
