After half a decade of hard work, just weeks before her PhD thesis defence, Lilou Jiang’s world was turned upside down. With the COVID-19 pandemic necessitating social isolation, in a matter of days she faced the possibility that her defence would be indefinitely postponed. Through exceptional thoughtfulness, determination and creativity, the Faculty of Law’s Graduate Studies in Law Office managed, in short order, to arrange an entirely virtual defence – the first ever entirely virtual thesis defence for a PhD in Law at the University of Ottawa – perhaps among the first such defences anywhere.
