Nuclear energy, like many other highly technical science and engineering fields, was led in the post World War II era by men. In the decades that followed, many women entered the field. An indication of how much that presence has grown is that the Women in Nuclear (WIN) organization now lists 4,500 members, according to a press release from the Nuclear Energy Institute, which is a sponsoring organization for WIN.
The latest crowd sourced blog post here at ANS Nuclear Cafe is a series of profiles of exceptional women in the nuclear energy field. ANS asked for brief profiles for publication and we are very pleased to present them here.
These are first person stories, e.g., “How I become a nuclear professional and the importance of what I have achieved” in terms of career satisfaction, work-life balance, career ladders, technical mastery, or meeting a management challenge.
We published these profiles because we think that they tell interesting stories, and we hope you agree.
________
Susan Hoxie-Key
Nuclear Fuel Services Manager
Southern Nuclear Operating Company
Susan Hoxie-Key
I grew up following the space program and knew by the time that I got to high school that I wanted to study engineering in college. I wanted to be one of the people who knew how complicated things worked and who made complicated things work. The colleges that I was applying to required a choice of major. I literally looked down the list of engineering majors and passed judgment on each option. When I got to “nuclear” on the list, it sounded interesting and hard. I picked nuclear engineering, and have never looked back.
In college, I joined the cooperative education (co-op) program, which meant that I alternated work and school semesters to earn money and gain work experience. Co-op was also a wonderful opportunity to live away from home and school and to test myself in the real world.
In 1989, after 12 years at Savannah River Site, I joined Southern Nuclear as a core designer for the Vogtle 2 nuclear power plant. I worked in core design and fuel-related licensing until 2006, when I moved into nuclear fuel procurement. More recently my responsibilities have expanded to include characterization of burned fuel for dry cask storage, burned fuel inspection activities, and new fuel fabrication oversight—all in addition to fuel procurement.
I love seeing my ideas put into action. I love the idea that I help make electricity, which has such a profoundly positive impact on peoples’ lives.
________
Kate Jackson
Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
Westinghouse
Kate Jackson
My mother was an English teacher and my father was an engineer. They seldom agreed on politics or religion, but they always agreed on the importance of education and personal values. Growing up, family time was an opportunity to learn and practice open debate, with the most valuable lesson being that I learned to ask really good questions.
I’ve had exceptional opportunities to study and manage large, complex technological and natural systems to understand energy, environmental, and political intersections. These inextricably integrated systems require our continued stewardship and trade-off solutions by our best scientists, engineers, and social scientists.
As a parent, consumer, engineer, and global citizen, it’s important to me that we evaluate all energy options. As science and technology innovations lead us to review new trade-offs, we must continue to question and weigh options. Our social and economic stability depends on a flexible and diverse energy portfolio. Most of my career I’ve advised policy, business, and industry decision makers. And, it’s clear to me that nuclear energy is an essential component of a sustainable, emissions-free energy system.
I’m proud to be part of the Westinghouse tradition of excellence and innovation in science and technology. The AP1000® is the safest and most efficient nuclear reactor ever designed and licensed. In addition, I’m confident that our small modular reactor will offer an equally safe and efficient choice that customers can rely on in an increasingly carbon-regulated world.
I’ve never been one to plot my career path. Instead, I’ve gravitated toward work that makes a lasting contribution to the world that our children will inherit. We’ll never have all the answers, but we have an ethical responsibility to be fearless about asking all the questions.
________
Amanda Maguire
Engineer, LOCA Analysis & Methods
Westinghouse
Amanda Maguire
I arrived at Westinghouse as a new college graduate two years ago. My first days provided an impressive perspective on the level of responsibility available for young engineers in the nuclear industry. With a growing number of engineers approaching retirement age and the rapid changes around new nuclear technology, there are numerous opportunities to learn and advance. My first months at Westinghouse were spent immersing myself in learning about loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) long-term cooling analysis for the entire Westinghouse C-E reactor (Combustion Engineering) fleet of plants. The expectation was that, over time, I would amass enough knowledge to serve as the new subject matter expert.
I was initially overwhelmed by the high expectations of the nuclear industry. Getting up to speed with the volumes of knowledge was no small feat. Most knowledge transfer on older technology occurred in one-on-one information sharing sessions. I spent weeks meeting with previous experts, documenting everything they told me.
Now I feel light-years away from where I started. LOCA long-term cooling analysis is a current Nuclear Regulatory Commission focus. As a result, I’ve faced several difficult questions from the staff. I’ve learned to rely on my peers and other resources because an accurate answer is more important than an immediate answer. The biggest lesson learned, however, is to never try to do everything on your own!
This experience has been highly rewarding. I’ve recently presented in front of the NRC, traveled to several plants, and spoken with customers about my work. Although I’ve only worked in the industry for two years, I can now consider myself a subject matter expert!
________
Kathryn A. McCarthy
Deputy Associate Laboratory Director
for Nuclear Science & Technology
Idaho National Laboratory
Kathryn McCarthy
I was going to major in music. I played clarinet in the Phoenix Youth Symphony and in my high school band. I loved it. But the music programs in high schools were being cut as state budgets were reduced. I’m practical, so I considered other options. I had grown up around engineers and scientists. My father was a chemical engineer and worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for many years. I was good at math and science, and I enjoyed it. So I decided to look into engineering, which was a good combination of math, science, and practicality.
My high school physics teacher would often talk about nuclear energy. It sounded interesting, so I decided to major in nuclear engineering. I received my B.S. in nuclear engineering from the University of Arizona (where I had a wonderful mentor in Norman Hillberry, one of the designers of the first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile), and my M.S. and Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles. My area of research was fusion energy. Research in fission was limited then, and fusion energy had lots of interesting research options.
After graduate school, I worked for six months at the Kernforschungszentrum, Karlsruhe, research institution in Germany and then for a year in the Soviet Union, before coming to the Idaho National Laboratory, where I’ve worked for 20 years, first in fusion and then in fission technology.
My husband of 25 years is one of the main reasons that I’m successful. He’s an engineer with a Ph.D., and he has always been supportive of my career. We’ve raised two wonderful boys (my most important job), and I’ve been able to balance work and family most of the time.
My current role at INL is Deputy Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear Science and Technology, where I’m responsible for the execution of about $250 million worth of research and development programs.
I miss playing clarinet, but began taking piano lessons several years ago, so I still have my foot in that door, too.
________
Gail H. Marcus
Former President, American Nuclear Society
Gail Marcus
Whenever I talk to students about careers, I always tell them that careers are like snowflakes—no two are alike. Even if someone goes to the same university or takes the same first job, the landscape changes over time, and a second person can never follow the identical path.
Therefore, I tell them not to put too much emphasis on a career model. Instead, I emphasize the value of broad skills, diverse experiences, flexibility, and networking. And of how volunteering in one’s professional society can help career progression.
When I first joined ANS, I really didn’t have any expectation of getting involved in Society governance. But ANS ticked me off by issuing a pink badge, used for spouses, to my husband (really!), and then one thing led to another.
At some point, I realized that being involved in Society activities was benefiting me in many ways. Early in my career, it gave me opportunities to learn and exercise skills I later applied in my workplace. Throughout my career, it also gave me a chance to get to know many people outside my own field and my own organization.
If this sounds like an ad for ANS, so be it. The opportunities within ANS are numerous and diverse, so there is something for almost every interest. I encourage every member of ANS, but particularly the younger members, to get involved. Volunteering in ANS will not lead everyone to the same path I followed, but it will almost certainly prove a valuable experience.
As for me, I always wonder how my career would have evolved if ANS had not handed my husband a pink badge. In retrospect, I guess I’m grateful they did.
________
Kelle Barfield
Vice President, Advocacy
Entergy Corporation
Kelle Barfield
Kelle Barfield says that she became a nuclear professional through first receiving an undergrad degree in journalism from the University of Texas, a graduate degree in communications management from Syracuse University, and by working in the publishing world in Manhattan and Birmingham, Ala. But all roads led her home, back to her roots in Vicksburg, Miss., where she married an engineer who worked in nuclear at Entergy’s nearby Grand Gulf Nuclear Station.
Beginning her Entergy career 25 years ago as a technical editor at Grand Gulf, Barfield has successfully navigated the organization chart from nuclear to utility positions back to nuclear, giving her a unique breadth and competency in the nuclear sector. Leading national efforts and considered a respected, knowledgeable thought-leader, Barfield’s passion for
the nuclear industry is noteworthy.
When Toni Beck was hired by Entergy as a new corporate communications group vice president at the New Orleans headquarters, she saw the opportunity to weave Entergy’s nuclear advocacy efforts into the broader public awareness that Entergy tries to instill about all aspects of energy policy.
Barfield is now shaping a new position created at Entergy: Vice President for Advocacy Communications. With bold thinking for the corporate giant, Beck is leveraging Barfield’s management and industry expertise, moving her from the
nuclear headquarters in Jackson, Miss., to the New Orleans office overlooking the Louisiana Superdome.
Barfield commented that the shape of the Superdome reminds her of a short, fat cooling tower. “Once a nuke, always a nuke,” she remarked as she packed boxes for her new office. This nuke isn’t going too far, only up.
________
Michaele (Mikey) Brady Raap, Ph.D.
Chief Engineer, Battelle Northwest Division
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
ANS Treasurer and Chairman of the Professional Divisions Committee
Michaele Brady Raap
How does a kid (especially a girl) who attended high school in the same small Texas town that her mother grew up in end up with a PhD in nuclear engineering and an officer of an 11,000 member organization like the American Nuclear Society?
I often wonder myself, how did I get here? Most of my family (still in rural Texas) think I’m stubborn enough to do anything, but they wonder what DO I do?
In high school, I wrote a research paper on nuclear power. It was totally awe inspiring to think of the amount of energy that is released from something you couldn’t even see. After all the work (grades, testing, essay writing, etc.) associated with applying for colleges and scholarships (my only option for college), I decided I should be pursuing something that really excited me…so I checked a box that said “nuclear engineering.” I spent my first four years of college trying to figure out exactly what an engineer was!
By the time I finished my B.S., we were just getting to the good stuff. I stayed for my M.S., which included spending time at the university’s TRIGA reactor, and then for my PhD, which culminated in a three-year graduate research opportunity at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Wow, was I a long way from home!
I found a lot of support in my early involvement in ANS—both as a student and as a professional. That experience gave me confidence and provided opportunities for me to grow as a professional. ANS was also where I learned that nuclear is so much more than an academic study, a lab experiment, or electricity generation. It’s a powerful science with applications in medicine, space exploration, agriculture, food processing, etc. There are endless opportunities to support and improve current applications and to identify new uses of nuclear science and technology. For many developing countries, nuclear is the option that most effectively enables them to increase the standard of living for the masses.
After more than 25 years, I’m still jazzed by the potential of nuclear and thankful that I have the opportunity everyday to learn something new.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Profiles of Exceptional Women In Nuclear Energy
From the Energy Collective: Profiles of Exceptional Women In Nuclear Energy
Saturday, August 27, 2011
GCSEs: Michelle Obama helped me make the grade
From : GCSEs: Michelle Obama helped me make the grade
A GIRL who feared she would drop out of school has said US first lady Michelle Obama inspired her to GCSE success.
Talitha Lewis, 16, got 11 GCSEs at grade C or above, and now hopes to be a forensic scientist.
Two years ago, she could not see the point in education – until a visit by Mrs Obama to her school, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson in North London, changed her mind. Talitha, of Hackney, East London, said: “When she said, ‘You’re in charge of your life and it’s up to you what happens next’, I thought, ‘Right, I’ll stay in school, do what I can’.”
A GIRL who feared she would drop out of school has said US first lady Michelle Obama inspired her to GCSE success.
Talitha Lewis, 16, got 11 GCSEs at grade C or above, and now hopes to be a forensic scientist.
Two years ago, she could not see the point in education – until a visit by Mrs Obama to her school, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson in North London, changed her mind. Talitha, of Hackney, East London, said: “When she said, ‘You’re in charge of your life and it’s up to you what happens next’, I thought, ‘Right, I’ll stay in school, do what I can’.”
She’s a Barbie girl, living in a Barbie world (that discourages careers in science)
From Scope: She’s a Barbie girl, living in a Barbie world (that discourages careers in science)
Someone posted a counterpoint:
It’s no secret: Women scientists are a rare breed. And who better to know this firsthand than Athene Donald, a physics professor at the University of Cambridge. She’s written a thoughtful piece on how women are sadly underrepresented in scientific fields such as physics, engineering and mathematics and why social and cultural norms may be to blame:
Go online to buy a T-shirt for your daughter and you can find one with the catchy slogan “I’m too pretty to do math” blazoned across the front in fetching pink letters. The message is clear to young girls and they appear to be heeding it. Society expects them to be wafting around with long hair, long Snow White dresses adorning impossible figures, and ignorant of how to work out their credit card interest or the mpg of their nippy little car, let alone get to grips with relativity or design a bridge. What they are allowed, even encouraged, to do is to cuddle a cute kitty (hence, I would assert, the large number of female vet students and biologists), or exhibit their nurturing side in preparation for a lifetime as a nurse or childminder.
Why are we as a society so inert in accepting these gendered (and other) stereotypes that permeate the way we bring up our children? Some scientists may be geeks, but female geeks should be just as acceptable as male ones.
Some scientists may be scruffy, but if you’re pretty (or handsome, nicely gendered words there) and like clothes, it doesn’t disqualify you from being a scientist. Female scientists can have families, you’re not excluded from that either. In short, we need to celebrate the fact that scientists and engineers, collectively, are smart, interesting people with rich lives whose other attributes are just the same as the rest of the population.
Take a look online and you can see that Barbie can be lots of things: a doctor, a news anchor, a computer engineer, a pet vet, a pizza chef, or an architect. But Athene, I’m with you – where is Physics Barbie?
Someone posted a counterpoint:
In the US, women go into medicine (requiring a reasonable amount of scientific training) because there is a plausible and relatively lucrative career path. I believe that they don’t go into the hard sciences largely because there is a terrible career path. There are few tenure-track faculty positions; you probably don’t get to choose where you live; and very likely you spend most of your potential reproductive years doing low-paying, long-hours post-doc or lab work.
Women are too sensible (dare I say smart) to go into the sciences.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Penfield woman wins award in diabetes innovation contest
From BrigtonPittsford Post: Penfield woman wins award in diabetes innovation contest
Penfield, N.Y. —
Molly Johnson says she’s no scientist, but felt the effects of faulty insulin pumps firsthand when her diabetic daughter, Sarah, had her own struggle with the devices.
Sarah was diagnosed with Childhood diabetes as a toddler and went on the pump at the age of 3. The pump works to keep blood sugar low by feeding insulin to the bloodstream through a thin plastic tube. But when Johnson saw that her daughter’s blood sugar levels were going up instead of down, she was told that air bubbles in the pump tubing were keeping the insulin from getting through.
“As (parents of) a new patient, we didn’t know that,” said Johnson.
Years later, her daughter is now 14, and Johnson, a financial analyst at RIT, came up with an award-winning idea to prevent this complication from hurting others with the disease.
The idea? Make tubing which changes color based upon the contents of the tubing, clearly identifying the presence of any insulin-blocking air bubbles. While scrolling through her email one day, she saw an announcement from the organization Diabetes Mine for its international Design Challenge.
She soon decided to enter her own idea by submitting a short video. Although she’d had the idea for using colors in an insulin pump mind for a long time, she didn’t expect it to earn any recognition.
But after several months of waiting, she found out she’d won the “Most Creative” award and a $2,500 prize, beating out entries from prestigious scientific institutions including Johns Hopkins and MIT. Each entry was judged by a panel of health care professionals.
“It was a fluke because I never thought I’d win,” she said with a laugh.
While she doesn’t intend to build and market the pump itself, she is looking into a way to patent the design so a scientist in the industry can use her idea to help other families touched by diabetes.
“To see my name, it was one of the neatest things that’s ever happened to me,” she said.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Books and Authors Luncheon: Rachel Carson, 1951
From WNYC: Books and Authors Luncheon: Rachel Carson, 1951
Before achieving national acclaim for her exposé of the chemical industry, Silent Spring (1962), marine biologist and nature conservationist Rachel Carson wrote prolifically about the world of the ocean. Her sea trilogy, Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955), quickly made her a New York Times bestselling author and a literary star.
The Sea Around Us, which is the focus of the speech Carson gave for the New York Herald Tribune's Books and Authors Luncheon broadcast by WNYC on October 25, 1951, earned Carson the National Book Award in nonfiction and a Burroughs Medal in nature writing, and was even made in to a movie, which won the 1953 Academy Award for Best Documentary.
The month before The Sea Around Us was published, New Yorker editor William Shawn serialized nine condensed chapters as a "Profile" piece beginning June 2, 1951. The responses to the excerpts, paired with the wide exposure the book gained as a selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club, were so strong that Carson was immediately besieged by requests for speaking engagements and book signings. Carson refused most of these requests because, as biographer Linda Lear notes, she was "uncomfortable with the idea of appearing before large audiences." [1]
One of these requests came from Irita Van Doren, editor of the New York Herald Tribune Book Review and host of the Books and Authors Luncheon. Despite her intentions to refuse, Carson was persuaded to accept Van Doren's invitation.
At the Luncheon, likely held on October 16 and broadcast on WNYC on October 25, Carson, who, according to Lear, was "apprehensive about how to hold the interest of such a large and critical audience," made a short speech and played recordings of ocean life from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. She also briefly referenced a prevalent theme in reviews of The Sea Around Us: the unlikely truth of her gender.
Many of the reviews written, both from a literary and scientific angle, questioned the likelihood of a female scientist and drew attention to the fact, even in some cases going so far as to assume the publisher avoided printing a photograph of the author because of some unattractive physical quality. The reviewers who were able to confirm her gender reassured readers that Carson was not even "a very large and forbidding woman," as might be suspected, but that she was instead "a quietly taut, fragile-looking woman." [2, 3]
Carson addressed such comments at the luncheon in this way: "People often seem to be surprised that a woman should have written a book about the sea. This is particularly true, I find, of men. Perhaps they have been accustomed for a long time to thinking of the more exciting fields of science as exclusively masculine domains. In fact, one of my correspondents a few days ago addressed me as 'Dear Sir,' explaining that even though he knew perfectly well that I was a woman, he simply could not bring himself to acknowledge the fact." [4]
After firmly establishing herself to the assembled audience as female, Carson explained her fascination with the sea and talked about her recent adventures along the Atlantic Coast, where she had been working on a new book. There she began observing people gazing out in to the ocean. "I've been trying to analyze some of the reasons for that fascination," she said. "The sea is a place where one gets a sense of the great antiquity of the earth. It seems to link the dim beginnings of time with the present. The same sort of waves that we watch today must have rolled in from Paleozoic seas."
"Most of all, I think, the sea is a place of mystery. One by one, the mysteries of yesterday have been solved. But often the very solution seems to bring with it another and perhaps a deeper mystery. I doubt that the last ultimate mysteries of the sea will ever be resolved. In fact, I rather cherish the hope that they will not be."
Carson concluded her presentation by playing for the audience a collection of oceanic field recordings. "We used to think of the deep sea as a place of silence," she said. "The idea that there could be sound underwater had never entered most people's minds." But, during World War II, Navy technicians were able to capture the "voices" of whales and porpoises by putting their hydrophones underwater, intending to listen for submarines. The recordings of shrimp, fish, and whales she presents were recorded in many locations by lowering a hydrophone in to the ocean.
[1] Linda Lear's biography, "Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature," published in 1977. Quoted throughout.
[2] Jonathan Norton Leonard's review of The Sea Around Us, "--And His Wonders in the Deep," published in Time, July, 1951. Quoted from Lear.
[3] Unnamed review published in Pathfinder Magazine. Quoted from Lear.
[4] This quote comes from WNYC's recording of the event. Lear's research includes Carson's prepared remarks, which conclude in this way: "Then even if they accept my sex, some people are further surprised to find that I am not a tall, oversize, Amazon-type female. I can offer no defense for not being what people expect, but perhaps I might say a few words about why a woman, and only an average-size one at that, should have become a biographer of the sea."
Before achieving national acclaim for her exposé of the chemical industry, Silent Spring (1962), marine biologist and nature conservationist Rachel Carson wrote prolifically about the world of the ocean. Her sea trilogy, Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955), quickly made her a New York Times bestselling author and a literary star.
The Sea Around Us, which is the focus of the speech Carson gave for the New York Herald Tribune's Books and Authors Luncheon broadcast by WNYC on October 25, 1951, earned Carson the National Book Award in nonfiction and a Burroughs Medal in nature writing, and was even made in to a movie, which won the 1953 Academy Award for Best Documentary.
The month before The Sea Around Us was published, New Yorker editor William Shawn serialized nine condensed chapters as a "Profile" piece beginning June 2, 1951. The responses to the excerpts, paired with the wide exposure the book gained as a selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club, were so strong that Carson was immediately besieged by requests for speaking engagements and book signings. Carson refused most of these requests because, as biographer Linda Lear notes, she was "uncomfortable with the idea of appearing before large audiences." [1]
One of these requests came from Irita Van Doren, editor of the New York Herald Tribune Book Review and host of the Books and Authors Luncheon. Despite her intentions to refuse, Carson was persuaded to accept Van Doren's invitation.
At the Luncheon, likely held on October 16 and broadcast on WNYC on October 25, Carson, who, according to Lear, was "apprehensive about how to hold the interest of such a large and critical audience," made a short speech and played recordings of ocean life from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. She also briefly referenced a prevalent theme in reviews of The Sea Around Us: the unlikely truth of her gender.
Many of the reviews written, both from a literary and scientific angle, questioned the likelihood of a female scientist and drew attention to the fact, even in some cases going so far as to assume the publisher avoided printing a photograph of the author because of some unattractive physical quality. The reviewers who were able to confirm her gender reassured readers that Carson was not even "a very large and forbidding woman," as might be suspected, but that she was instead "a quietly taut, fragile-looking woman." [2, 3]
Carson addressed such comments at the luncheon in this way: "People often seem to be surprised that a woman should have written a book about the sea. This is particularly true, I find, of men. Perhaps they have been accustomed for a long time to thinking of the more exciting fields of science as exclusively masculine domains. In fact, one of my correspondents a few days ago addressed me as 'Dear Sir,' explaining that even though he knew perfectly well that I was a woman, he simply could not bring himself to acknowledge the fact." [4]
After firmly establishing herself to the assembled audience as female, Carson explained her fascination with the sea and talked about her recent adventures along the Atlantic Coast, where she had been working on a new book. There she began observing people gazing out in to the ocean. "I've been trying to analyze some of the reasons for that fascination," she said. "The sea is a place where one gets a sense of the great antiquity of the earth. It seems to link the dim beginnings of time with the present. The same sort of waves that we watch today must have rolled in from Paleozoic seas."
"Most of all, I think, the sea is a place of mystery. One by one, the mysteries of yesterday have been solved. But often the very solution seems to bring with it another and perhaps a deeper mystery. I doubt that the last ultimate mysteries of the sea will ever be resolved. In fact, I rather cherish the hope that they will not be."
Carson concluded her presentation by playing for the audience a collection of oceanic field recordings. "We used to think of the deep sea as a place of silence," she said. "The idea that there could be sound underwater had never entered most people's minds." But, during World War II, Navy technicians were able to capture the "voices" of whales and porpoises by putting their hydrophones underwater, intending to listen for submarines. The recordings of shrimp, fish, and whales she presents were recorded in many locations by lowering a hydrophone in to the ocean.
[1] Linda Lear's biography, "Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature," published in 1977. Quoted throughout.
[2] Jonathan Norton Leonard's review of The Sea Around Us, "--And His Wonders in the Deep," published in Time, July, 1951. Quoted from Lear.
[3] Unnamed review published in Pathfinder Magazine. Quoted from Lear.
[4] This quote comes from WNYC's recording of the event. Lear's research includes Carson's prepared remarks, which conclude in this way: "Then even if they accept my sex, some people are further surprised to find that I am not a tall, oversize, Amazon-type female. I can offer no defense for not being what people expect, but perhaps I might say a few words about why a woman, and only an average-size one at that, should have become a biographer of the sea."
Pineview victim was a dedicated swimmer, scientist
A sad story: Pineview victim was a dedicated swimmer, scientist
Esther Fujimoto often headed out for a swim at Pineview Reservoir after her workday at University Hospital’s neurobiology and anatomy lab.
"She swam every day ... so long as the temperature was doable," said assistant professor Josh Bonkowsky. "She was only limited physically, not by her mental desire."
Fujimoto, whose hip dysplasia led to a double hip replacement, was an accomplished scientist who worked on a gene that leads to breast cancer and was researching nervous system development and cerebral palsy at the time her death, Bonkowsky said Monday.
She was nearly as dedicated a swimmer as she was a scientist, he said.
Fujimoto, 49, of Ogden, was struck and killed by a motorboat at Pineview Reservoir Sunday evening, police said.
She was with her sister at Spring Creek Cove, a quiet spot where she often swam, when they became separated, said Weber County Sheriff’s Sgt. Dave Creager.
A neighbor heard her scream about 8 p.m. He paddled a rowboat out to her and called 911, but was only able to hold Fujimoto’s head above water so she could breathe, he said.
"He was alone in the boat, talking to the dispatcher, and he was not physically able to pull her out of the water without dumping his boat," Creager said.
The motor boat’s propeller apparently tore into her torso and lower abdomen, causing critical injuries.
When rescuers arrived, they pulled Fujimoto from the water and performed CPR, Creager said, but Fujimoto died before rescuers could reach land.
She was about 300 feet from shore when she was hit. The boat never stopped.
Sheriff’s deputies are searching for the craft, and want to speak with three males who were seen in the area in a blue and white boat.
"There’s a high probability they may have seen or heard or have information," about the collision, said Lt. Mark Lowther.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen of Fujimoto’s co-workers gathered Monday to mourn.
"She taught me everything I know," Brooke Gaynes said through tears, her eyes rimmed in red. Gaynes, a lab technician who saw Fujimoto every day, said she’d been out of town before her co-worker’s death.
Along with her science skills, Fujimoto was a good friend, Gaynes said, the kind who always remembered specific details about others’ lives
"She just really cared about people," Gaynes said.
Fujimoto’s work on the breast cancer gene was especially important because she’d had her own brush with the disease several years ago, Bonkowsky said.
Fujimoto, a senior lab specialist who had worked at the hospital since 2003, had "not only the technical skills, but the art of being a scientist, [the ability] to take a small piece of DNA and do what needed to be done," Bonkowsky said.
It’s not the only tragedy to affect University Hospital workers this summer. In June, 24-year-old nurse Brynn Barton was struck and killed while riding her bicycle on 700 East.
Esther Fujimoto often headed out for a swim at Pineview Reservoir after her workday at University Hospital’s neurobiology and anatomy lab.
"She swam every day ... so long as the temperature was doable," said assistant professor Josh Bonkowsky. "She was only limited physically, not by her mental desire."
Fujimoto, whose hip dysplasia led to a double hip replacement, was an accomplished scientist who worked on a gene that leads to breast cancer and was researching nervous system development and cerebral palsy at the time her death, Bonkowsky said Monday.
She was nearly as dedicated a swimmer as she was a scientist, he said.
Fujimoto, 49, of Ogden, was struck and killed by a motorboat at Pineview Reservoir Sunday evening, police said.
She was with her sister at Spring Creek Cove, a quiet spot where she often swam, when they became separated, said Weber County Sheriff’s Sgt. Dave Creager.
A neighbor heard her scream about 8 p.m. He paddled a rowboat out to her and called 911, but was only able to hold Fujimoto’s head above water so she could breathe, he said.
"He was alone in the boat, talking to the dispatcher, and he was not physically able to pull her out of the water without dumping his boat," Creager said.
The motor boat’s propeller apparently tore into her torso and lower abdomen, causing critical injuries.
When rescuers arrived, they pulled Fujimoto from the water and performed CPR, Creager said, but Fujimoto died before rescuers could reach land.
She was about 300 feet from shore when she was hit. The boat never stopped.
Sheriff’s deputies are searching for the craft, and want to speak with three males who were seen in the area in a blue and white boat.
"There’s a high probability they may have seen or heard or have information," about the collision, said Lt. Mark Lowther.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen of Fujimoto’s co-workers gathered Monday to mourn.
"She taught me everything I know," Brooke Gaynes said through tears, her eyes rimmed in red. Gaynes, a lab technician who saw Fujimoto every day, said she’d been out of town before her co-worker’s death.
Along with her science skills, Fujimoto was a good friend, Gaynes said, the kind who always remembered specific details about others’ lives
"She just really cared about people," Gaynes said.
Fujimoto’s work on the breast cancer gene was especially important because she’d had her own brush with the disease several years ago, Bonkowsky said.
Fujimoto, a senior lab specialist who had worked at the hospital since 2003, had "not only the technical skills, but the art of being a scientist, [the ability] to take a small piece of DNA and do what needed to be done," Bonkowsky said.
It’s not the only tragedy to affect University Hospital workers this summer. In June, 24-year-old nurse Brynn Barton was struck and killed while riding her bicycle on 700 East.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
70 African women scientists awarded
From Africa News: 70 African women scientists awarded
As discussions of drought and famine in the Horn of Africa continue to dominate global headlines, it is clear that ensuring the continent's food security will require mobilizing the best minds from every discipline, including women agricultural researchers.
African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD) is committed to building the capacity of African women scientists who are conducting pro-poor agricultural research. AWARD has announced the 70 winners of its 2011 AWARD Fellowships. These outstanding researchers were selected from among an impressive cadre of 785 applicants from 11 African countries, bringing the total number of women in the program to 250.
“These talented women are conducting critical agricultural research that is desperately needed to feed Africa’s people and help mitigate crises like we are seeing in East Africa right now,” said Vicki Wilde, AWARD Director. “We are recognizing and supporting these women today with an AWARD Fellowship.”
The fellowship will help these top scientists strengthen their research and leadership skills, and enhance their contributions to poverty alleviation and food security across the continent. While the women come from diverse agricultural disciplines, they share a common passion to help smallholder farmers.
“My parents paid for my primary education by selling a cow or a goat, so I know from experience that livestock is the cornerstone of people’s livelihoods in rural Africa,” said Dr. Lillian Wambua, a molecular geneticist at the University of Nairobi’s School of Biological Sciences and one of this year’s AWARD winners. “Diseases are the greatest challenges to livestock farmers. As an AWARD Fellow and upcoming researcher, my goal is to use my scientific skills to engage with like-minded researchers in finding lasting solutions to secure healthy herds.”
Wambua is one of 2,200 female scientists from 450 institutions to have applied for one of the 250 available fellowships since AWARD began in 2008. AWARD Fellows benefit from a two-year career-development program focused on mentoring partnerships, science skills, and leadership development. The fellowships are awarded on the basis of intellectual merit, leadership capacity, and the potential of the scientist’s research to improve the daily lives of smallholder farmers, especially women.
“USAID is pleased to support African women scientists via AWARD, as an integral component of the U.S. government’s commitment to reducing gender inequality and recognizing the contribution of women to achieving food security,” said Kurt Low, Office Director for the Regional Economic Growth and Integration Program at USAID/East Africa. “By drawing on some of the best minds in agricultural research, AWARD provides a shining example of the contributions that women can make to poverty alleviation and food security in sub-Saharan Africa.”
AWARD addresses many of the barriers, including a lack of role models and mentors, which prevent African women from playing a more active role in agricultural research and from considering a career in agricultural science.
Recent research conducted in 15 African countries by AWARD and Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI) shows that between 2000 and 2008, the number of African women professionals employed in the agricultural sciences grew by 8 percent per year, while the number of African male professionals grew by 2 percent per year. However, women still represent less than one quarter of Africa’s scientists holding positions in institutions of agricultural research, and less than one in seven (14 percent) leadership positions is held by a woman.
Evelyn Asante-Yeboah is one of seven Ghanaians to win the prestigious fellowship. Asante-Yeboah, an assistant manager at the Ghana Forestry Commission’s Resource Management Support Centre, expects that the skills she gains through AWARD will help advance her research into climate change. “Agriculture accounts for almost half of Ghana’s GDP and export earnings, but we don’t always see trees as being valuable agricultural products that need protection,” said Asante-Yeboah. “I’m researching on-farm tree management and its contribution to climate change. Being an AWARD Fellow will help me increase my contribution to fighting hunger and poverty in Africa.”
As discussions of drought and famine in the Horn of Africa continue to dominate global headlines, it is clear that ensuring the continent's food security will require mobilizing the best minds from every discipline, including women agricultural researchers.
African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD) is committed to building the capacity of African women scientists who are conducting pro-poor agricultural research. AWARD has announced the 70 winners of its 2011 AWARD Fellowships. These outstanding researchers were selected from among an impressive cadre of 785 applicants from 11 African countries, bringing the total number of women in the program to 250.
“These talented women are conducting critical agricultural research that is desperately needed to feed Africa’s people and help mitigate crises like we are seeing in East Africa right now,” said Vicki Wilde, AWARD Director. “We are recognizing and supporting these women today with an AWARD Fellowship.”
The fellowship will help these top scientists strengthen their research and leadership skills, and enhance their contributions to poverty alleviation and food security across the continent. While the women come from diverse agricultural disciplines, they share a common passion to help smallholder farmers.
“My parents paid for my primary education by selling a cow or a goat, so I know from experience that livestock is the cornerstone of people’s livelihoods in rural Africa,” said Dr. Lillian Wambua, a molecular geneticist at the University of Nairobi’s School of Biological Sciences and one of this year’s AWARD winners. “Diseases are the greatest challenges to livestock farmers. As an AWARD Fellow and upcoming researcher, my goal is to use my scientific skills to engage with like-minded researchers in finding lasting solutions to secure healthy herds.”
Wambua is one of 2,200 female scientists from 450 institutions to have applied for one of the 250 available fellowships since AWARD began in 2008. AWARD Fellows benefit from a two-year career-development program focused on mentoring partnerships, science skills, and leadership development. The fellowships are awarded on the basis of intellectual merit, leadership capacity, and the potential of the scientist’s research to improve the daily lives of smallholder farmers, especially women.
“USAID is pleased to support African women scientists via AWARD, as an integral component of the U.S. government’s commitment to reducing gender inequality and recognizing the contribution of women to achieving food security,” said Kurt Low, Office Director for the Regional Economic Growth and Integration Program at USAID/East Africa. “By drawing on some of the best minds in agricultural research, AWARD provides a shining example of the contributions that women can make to poverty alleviation and food security in sub-Saharan Africa.”
AWARD addresses many of the barriers, including a lack of role models and mentors, which prevent African women from playing a more active role in agricultural research and from considering a career in agricultural science.
Recent research conducted in 15 African countries by AWARD and Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI) shows that between 2000 and 2008, the number of African women professionals employed in the agricultural sciences grew by 8 percent per year, while the number of African male professionals grew by 2 percent per year. However, women still represent less than one quarter of Africa’s scientists holding positions in institutions of agricultural research, and less than one in seven (14 percent) leadership positions is held by a woman.
Evelyn Asante-Yeboah is one of seven Ghanaians to win the prestigious fellowship. Asante-Yeboah, an assistant manager at the Ghana Forestry Commission’s Resource Management Support Centre, expects that the skills she gains through AWARD will help advance her research into climate change. “Agriculture accounts for almost half of Ghana’s GDP and export earnings, but we don’t always see trees as being valuable agricultural products that need protection,” said Asante-Yeboah. “I’m researching on-farm tree management and its contribution to climate change. Being an AWARD Fellow will help me increase my contribution to fighting hunger and poverty in Africa.”
When two tribes meet: collaborations between artists and scientists
From The Guardian.co.uk: When two tribes meet: collaborations between artists and scientists
Yes, Leonardo da Vinci was both artist and inventor. True, Brian Cox was in that band before he gave it all up for the Large Hadron Collider. But in general, art and science seem to eye each other uncomprehendingly. Medical research charity the Wellcome Trust has long tried to make artists and scientists work fruitfully together by funding collaborations. Can the divide ever be breached? I talked to four scientists and four artists who have worked together to find out.
The artist and the geneticist
Just before 9/11, Marc Quinn did a portrait of Sir John Sulston, one of the genetic scientists who decoded the human genome. "At the moment this divisive attack happened, John's work and this portrait were suggesting that we are all connected – in fact that everything living is connected to everything else," Quinn says.
It was a radical departure for portraiture. Certainly few sitters contribute, as Sulston did, a sample of DNA from his sperm. That sample was cut into segments and treated so they could be replicated in bacteria. The bacteria was spread on agar jelly and placed under glass, forming a portrait about A4 size. "Some say it's an abstract portrait, but I say it's the most realistic portrait in the National Portrait Gallery," says Quinn. "It carries the instructions that led to John and shows his ancestry back to the beginning of the universe."
"Well, yes," says Sulston, "but DNA gives the instructions for making a baby, not an adult. There's a lot more to me than DNA."
A decade after their collaboration, Quinn and Sulston are meeting in the artist's east London studio. Did the collaboration change each man's attitudes towards the other's discipline? "I still think science is looking for answers and art is looking for questions," says Quinn.
"Science simply means finding out about stuff, but in that process science is the greatest driver of culture," says Sulston. "When you do something like decode the human genome, it changes your whole perspective. In terms of genetic manipulation we're not just looking for answers but modifying what's there."
That is very much the focus of Quinn's recent work. Last year, his White Cube show featured a sculpture called Catman, depicting Dennis Avner, who has been tattooed to look like a cat, and another of Allanah Starr, a transsexual woman who, according to the blurb, "has changed her body into the idealisation of femininity even though she also has a penis". Quinn says: "They're about the fantasy of being someone else – you can be a man or a woman, anything. We've always had those fantasies and now science is making them possible."
Quinn says Sulston's portrait was important to his later work. He shows us his painting of a human iris in the studio. "I've made a lot of work since, to do with eyes and fingerprints, because we are controlled so much more by scans of abstract data about ourselves." As for Sulston, since he finished working on the human genome, he has become concerned with ethical questions to do with the application of his work to police DNA databases and civil liberties.
The collaboration came about when Quinn was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, with the support of the Wellcome Trust, to do Sulston's portrait. "John did all the work," says Quinn. The artist, at least, decided on the portrait's frame. "People can see themselves in the reflective surround, which highlights that we're all connected – one of the great messages of the Human Genome Project.
"Because it's true, isn't it, that our DNA is 90% the same as bananas'?" asks Quinn. "Well, no, actually it's more like 50%," clarifies Sulston, who won the Nobel prize in 2002. "Our DNA is about 90% the same as other mammals." Our material connection with everything else, not just our world but in the universe, clearly appeals to Quinn: no wonder that his Iris painting from 2009 is subtitled We Share Our Chemistry with the Stars.
In Quinn's most famous work, Self (1991), he made a sculpture from a cast of his head filled with nine pints of his own deep-frozen blood. It is carefully maintained in a refrigeration unit, reminding us of the fragility of existence. Every five years since 1991, he has replaced what he calls a "frozen moment" on life support, with a new transfusion of his own blood. He calls it an ongoing project, while the portrait of Sulston is suspended in time for ever; once the Nobel laureate dies, there is something of him preserved in this picture, a code from which, perhaps, he could be cloned.
The poet and the speech scientist
"I once overheard someone say, 'Its mother was a crab,'" says Valerie Hazan, professor of speech sciences at University College London. "Can you think of a situation in which that would be used? I often ask my students this."
Hazan's point is that hearers often work imaginatively to supply a context to a discombobulating utterance, to annex incomprehensible or uncanny speech into the more soothing realm of the understood. But there's another point, too: "Certain utterances stick in your mind: a contorted use of language not planned in any way is often most memorable."
This resonates for poet Lavinia Greenlaw. "Those are the things I'm trying to recreate in my work," she says. "I'm trying to get at that unconscious manipulation of language. I've become more and more interested in particular voices at the edge – especially overheard, fragmentary voices."
For her latest project, Greenlaw spent two years eavesdropping on passengers at railway stations. She even has a Twitter feed to record gnomic utterances, such as her recent favourite: "trifle for grownups". She wrote monologues based on these eavesdroppings, got actors to voice them, and – with the help of a sound designer – cut them into little snippets. But the results weren't just what she heard. "I started with the overheard and then I moved into interior voices, which clearly I imagined. So I started with something very real and then it became about heightening it."
The result is called Audio Obscura. The project started at Manchester's Piccadilly station and will next month appear on the concourse of London's St Pancras station. Visitors put on headphones and, alone, engage in what she calls "dark listening" to voices in the crowd – fragments of narratives, glimpses of interior worlds.
For Hazan, this project bears comparison with her own research interests. "In my work, I'm realising more and more that you can't take things out of context and that if there isn't an obvious one, hearers supply it." Recently, Hazan recorded 40 speakers in 12 pairs trying to exchange information about a "spot the difference" picture. "In one of them, one talker heard the other via a three-channel noise vocoder. But even with minimal pitch and acoustics, that kind of very degraded speech can be given a context by the hearer."
What of that mysterious crab sentence utterance we started with? "I heard it in an airport," says Hazan. "The wheels of a trolley were splayed out, and it couldn't move forwards and back. It was odd to overhear that, but what it shows is how we try desperately to make sense with semantically anomalous sentences."
Is there any parallel between the two women's disciplines? Hazan says: "As a scientist you have to be creative to really think what is the question. I didn't think a poet had to be methodical."
Greenlaw says: "Poets are often thought of as vague and wishy-washy, but, like scientists, they can't be. A poem can be about vagueness, but it has to be in precise relationship to vagueness if it's any good. I'm ridiculously analytical. Poetry, though, is an unsettlement – unlike you, Valerie, I'm not drawing connections."
"But we're both manipulating reality to understand it," says Hazan. "What makes a good scientist is someone who can see beyond the obvious."
The photographer and the physiologist
When Margaret Morrell and Catherine Yass collaborated on a project called Waking Dream, each hoped to unravel what, if anything, essentially happens in the transition from sleep to wakefulness. Physiologist Morrell, now professor of sleep and respiratory physiology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, wanted to give a scientific account of that transition.
Turner-shortlisted artist Yass says she came to the collaboration with a lot of "what ifs". "What if we could be said at some moments to be both asleep and awake? What if we were both dreaming and in reality at the same time?"
The collaboration started after Morrell received an email from Yass asking if she could photograph and film patients at the sleep unit to capture this transition. "I thought it sounded impossible, but agreed to let her try."
In the corridor outside Morrell's office at the sleep and breathing unit of London's Royal Brompton Hospital is a lightbox photograph of one of Yass's subjects, Selina, depicted as she came from rapid eye movement (REM) sleep to wakefulness. It's one of a series Yass took during the collaboration. Each image invites the viewer to decide whether she is asleep or not.
"I was interested in the limitations of my instruments and the impossibility of representing something," says Yass. "I enjoy that in photography – how it can point to a failure?"
"Initially, I didn't get that at all," laughs Morrell. "Failure pleasurable?" Morrell was also blindsided by the idea that the two women were going to be funded to collaborate on a project that had no obvious outcome.
"Essentially, once we got funding for the project from the Wellcome Trust, we were allowed to find nothing, which to me was incredible." Maybe that freedom, Morrell wonders, can give artist and scientist alike the chance to think outside the box.
Morrell shows me one of the results, hanging on the wall of the Royal Brompton's sleep unit. It's a lightbox in which a furl of lurid pink seems to unroll from the mouth of a black-and-white MRI scanner. "I love this because it looks like that Rolling Stones tongue," says Morrell. Yass says she was trying to highlight the discrepancy between a medium associated with truth, and images which are illusions.
"What came out of the project for me was how you look dictates the answer you get," says Morrell. "You can measures sleep with electrodes, MRI scans, measuring respiratory patterns and whichever way you choose changes your result."
Both women say working on Waking Dream broadened their horizons. "Catherine challenged my preconditioned ideas," says Morrell. After the collaboration, she took a photography course. Some photographs from mountaineering jaunts hang on the walls of her office.
"I was inspired by your attitude," says Yass. "I came with a tentative idea and you would say, 'This is how you can do it.'" Could Yass imagine having been a scientist? "I used to think about being a brain surgeon, but I wouldn't trust myself in a million years. In terms of science, I've always been daunted by the amount of knowledge a scientist needs, but I love the idea that there's a lot of knowledge and someone like Mary has it."
"I'm not sure I do," says Morrell.
The theatre director and the neuroscientist
"If you hear a recording of someone whispering in your ear," says theatre director David Rosenberg, "you can convince yourself you felt their breath."
"Expectation is everything," agrees Professor David McAlpine, director of London University's Ear Institute. "Your brain fills in so much it's not funny. You've got a very narrow bandwidth by the time you get to your ears and your eyes. The rest is artificial, filled in by that expectations machine – your brain."
For his latest theatre piece, Electric Hotel, Rosenberg wanted to play with some of these auditory ideas, to tease his audience with sound illusions. So he approached neuroscientist McAlpine, whose research work into brain mechanisms for spatial hearing and detecting sounds in noisy environments proved key to the effects Rosenberg wanted to achieve. "We were trying to create a very intimate experience for an audience in a show which they see from a distance and also through glass," says Rosenberg.
Electric Hotel initially took place in a decommissioned gasworks behind London's King's Cross station. As darkness fell, audience members were given special headphones and asked to sit before a four-storey set with glass-fronted chambers representing hotel rooms in which dancers played the parts of hotel guests, couriers and cleaners.
Those headphones supplied binaural recordings to each spectator's ears. Rosenberg, along with sound designers and composers Max and Ben Ringham, made a complete score made up not just of music but of everyday sounds. Soft noises were heard thrillingly close to audience members' ears: a woman pulling on a robe after a swim, the plumping of a pillow. The illusory effect was that the individual spectator, far from being in a crowd of other audience members, was in the room with them. While these noises sounded as though they were taking place on stage, in fact they were part of a pre-recorded soundtrack to which the dancers' choreographed moves were fitted.
What does binaural mean? "It's two-eared hearing, and involves extracting information you couldn't have from one ear," says McAlpine. "There are binaural recordings using two microphones at an appropriate distance apart used within a dummy head to try to reproduce effects of your normal hearing," says Rosenberg.
McAlpine recalls the most sophisticated binaural illusion he ever heard. "I was at Dolby's headquarters in San Francisco. They made me put on headphones, close my eyes and then you hear you're in an aeroplane and you crash into the ocean. I really felt a sense of the whoosh of water and the sense of going up on to a sandy beach. Those sensations were my brain filling in the experience from what it heard."
Rosenberg says a key moment of Electric Hotel was another illusion. "The sound moved out into the audience, and the audience became confused as to whether what they're hearing was part of the performance or the actual audience surrounding them."
It sounds like the aural application of a Brechtian alienation technique. Is it? "Totally. It was very important in a show which is essentially you alone with the performers, and then suddenly you have a moment when you recognise the audience around you."
Rosenberg's next theatre project will put his audience in the dark. "The show will enfold you when the lights go out. The audience will wear headphones, and their imaginative experience will involve creating environments they can feel they're a part of without the distraction of vision."
"Your eyes are in charge but not always," says McAlpine. "If it's dark, then you have to do imaginative work. People think of visual scenes, and there are gestalt [psychological] principles for understanding how that is put together. But there's also an auditory scene which is less robust than the visual scene, and how it's put together is still not very clear." Perhaps, then, Rosenberg's next play could be a rare case of art helping scientific enquiry.
Yes, Leonardo da Vinci was both artist and inventor. True, Brian Cox was in that band before he gave it all up for the Large Hadron Collider. But in general, art and science seem to eye each other uncomprehendingly. Medical research charity the Wellcome Trust has long tried to make artists and scientists work fruitfully together by funding collaborations. Can the divide ever be breached? I talked to four scientists and four artists who have worked together to find out.
The artist and the geneticist
Just before 9/11, Marc Quinn did a portrait of Sir John Sulston, one of the genetic scientists who decoded the human genome. "At the moment this divisive attack happened, John's work and this portrait were suggesting that we are all connected – in fact that everything living is connected to everything else," Quinn says.
It was a radical departure for portraiture. Certainly few sitters contribute, as Sulston did, a sample of DNA from his sperm. That sample was cut into segments and treated so they could be replicated in bacteria. The bacteria was spread on agar jelly and placed under glass, forming a portrait about A4 size. "Some say it's an abstract portrait, but I say it's the most realistic portrait in the National Portrait Gallery," says Quinn. "It carries the instructions that led to John and shows his ancestry back to the beginning of the universe."
"Well, yes," says Sulston, "but DNA gives the instructions for making a baby, not an adult. There's a lot more to me than DNA."
A decade after their collaboration, Quinn and Sulston are meeting in the artist's east London studio. Did the collaboration change each man's attitudes towards the other's discipline? "I still think science is looking for answers and art is looking for questions," says Quinn.
"Science simply means finding out about stuff, but in that process science is the greatest driver of culture," says Sulston. "When you do something like decode the human genome, it changes your whole perspective. In terms of genetic manipulation we're not just looking for answers but modifying what's there."
That is very much the focus of Quinn's recent work. Last year, his White Cube show featured a sculpture called Catman, depicting Dennis Avner, who has been tattooed to look like a cat, and another of Allanah Starr, a transsexual woman who, according to the blurb, "has changed her body into the idealisation of femininity even though she also has a penis". Quinn says: "They're about the fantasy of being someone else – you can be a man or a woman, anything. We've always had those fantasies and now science is making them possible."
Quinn says Sulston's portrait was important to his later work. He shows us his painting of a human iris in the studio. "I've made a lot of work since, to do with eyes and fingerprints, because we are controlled so much more by scans of abstract data about ourselves." As for Sulston, since he finished working on the human genome, he has become concerned with ethical questions to do with the application of his work to police DNA databases and civil liberties.
The collaboration came about when Quinn was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, with the support of the Wellcome Trust, to do Sulston's portrait. "John did all the work," says Quinn. The artist, at least, decided on the portrait's frame. "People can see themselves in the reflective surround, which highlights that we're all connected – one of the great messages of the Human Genome Project.
"Because it's true, isn't it, that our DNA is 90% the same as bananas'?" asks Quinn. "Well, no, actually it's more like 50%," clarifies Sulston, who won the Nobel prize in 2002. "Our DNA is about 90% the same as other mammals." Our material connection with everything else, not just our world but in the universe, clearly appeals to Quinn: no wonder that his Iris painting from 2009 is subtitled We Share Our Chemistry with the Stars.
In Quinn's most famous work, Self (1991), he made a sculpture from a cast of his head filled with nine pints of his own deep-frozen blood. It is carefully maintained in a refrigeration unit, reminding us of the fragility of existence. Every five years since 1991, he has replaced what he calls a "frozen moment" on life support, with a new transfusion of his own blood. He calls it an ongoing project, while the portrait of Sulston is suspended in time for ever; once the Nobel laureate dies, there is something of him preserved in this picture, a code from which, perhaps, he could be cloned.
The poet and the speech scientist
"I once overheard someone say, 'Its mother was a crab,'" says Valerie Hazan, professor of speech sciences at University College London. "Can you think of a situation in which that would be used? I often ask my students this."
Hazan's point is that hearers often work imaginatively to supply a context to a discombobulating utterance, to annex incomprehensible or uncanny speech into the more soothing realm of the understood. But there's another point, too: "Certain utterances stick in your mind: a contorted use of language not planned in any way is often most memorable."
This resonates for poet Lavinia Greenlaw. "Those are the things I'm trying to recreate in my work," she says. "I'm trying to get at that unconscious manipulation of language. I've become more and more interested in particular voices at the edge – especially overheard, fragmentary voices."
For her latest project, Greenlaw spent two years eavesdropping on passengers at railway stations. She even has a Twitter feed to record gnomic utterances, such as her recent favourite: "trifle for grownups". She wrote monologues based on these eavesdroppings, got actors to voice them, and – with the help of a sound designer – cut them into little snippets. But the results weren't just what she heard. "I started with the overheard and then I moved into interior voices, which clearly I imagined. So I started with something very real and then it became about heightening it."
The result is called Audio Obscura. The project started at Manchester's Piccadilly station and will next month appear on the concourse of London's St Pancras station. Visitors put on headphones and, alone, engage in what she calls "dark listening" to voices in the crowd – fragments of narratives, glimpses of interior worlds.
For Hazan, this project bears comparison with her own research interests. "In my work, I'm realising more and more that you can't take things out of context and that if there isn't an obvious one, hearers supply it." Recently, Hazan recorded 40 speakers in 12 pairs trying to exchange information about a "spot the difference" picture. "In one of them, one talker heard the other via a three-channel noise vocoder. But even with minimal pitch and acoustics, that kind of very degraded speech can be given a context by the hearer."
What of that mysterious crab sentence utterance we started with? "I heard it in an airport," says Hazan. "The wheels of a trolley were splayed out, and it couldn't move forwards and back. It was odd to overhear that, but what it shows is how we try desperately to make sense with semantically anomalous sentences."
Is there any parallel between the two women's disciplines? Hazan says: "As a scientist you have to be creative to really think what is the question. I didn't think a poet had to be methodical."
Greenlaw says: "Poets are often thought of as vague and wishy-washy, but, like scientists, they can't be. A poem can be about vagueness, but it has to be in precise relationship to vagueness if it's any good. I'm ridiculously analytical. Poetry, though, is an unsettlement – unlike you, Valerie, I'm not drawing connections."
"But we're both manipulating reality to understand it," says Hazan. "What makes a good scientist is someone who can see beyond the obvious."
The photographer and the physiologist
When Margaret Morrell and Catherine Yass collaborated on a project called Waking Dream, each hoped to unravel what, if anything, essentially happens in the transition from sleep to wakefulness. Physiologist Morrell, now professor of sleep and respiratory physiology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, wanted to give a scientific account of that transition.
Turner-shortlisted artist Yass says she came to the collaboration with a lot of "what ifs". "What if we could be said at some moments to be both asleep and awake? What if we were both dreaming and in reality at the same time?"
The collaboration started after Morrell received an email from Yass asking if she could photograph and film patients at the sleep unit to capture this transition. "I thought it sounded impossible, but agreed to let her try."
In the corridor outside Morrell's office at the sleep and breathing unit of London's Royal Brompton Hospital is a lightbox photograph of one of Yass's subjects, Selina, depicted as she came from rapid eye movement (REM) sleep to wakefulness. It's one of a series Yass took during the collaboration. Each image invites the viewer to decide whether she is asleep or not.
"I was interested in the limitations of my instruments and the impossibility of representing something," says Yass. "I enjoy that in photography – how it can point to a failure?"
"Initially, I didn't get that at all," laughs Morrell. "Failure pleasurable?" Morrell was also blindsided by the idea that the two women were going to be funded to collaborate on a project that had no obvious outcome.
"Essentially, once we got funding for the project from the Wellcome Trust, we were allowed to find nothing, which to me was incredible." Maybe that freedom, Morrell wonders, can give artist and scientist alike the chance to think outside the box.
Morrell shows me one of the results, hanging on the wall of the Royal Brompton's sleep unit. It's a lightbox in which a furl of lurid pink seems to unroll from the mouth of a black-and-white MRI scanner. "I love this because it looks like that Rolling Stones tongue," says Morrell. Yass says she was trying to highlight the discrepancy between a medium associated with truth, and images which are illusions.
"What came out of the project for me was how you look dictates the answer you get," says Morrell. "You can measures sleep with electrodes, MRI scans, measuring respiratory patterns and whichever way you choose changes your result."
Both women say working on Waking Dream broadened their horizons. "Catherine challenged my preconditioned ideas," says Morrell. After the collaboration, she took a photography course. Some photographs from mountaineering jaunts hang on the walls of her office.
"I was inspired by your attitude," says Yass. "I came with a tentative idea and you would say, 'This is how you can do it.'" Could Yass imagine having been a scientist? "I used to think about being a brain surgeon, but I wouldn't trust myself in a million years. In terms of science, I've always been daunted by the amount of knowledge a scientist needs, but I love the idea that there's a lot of knowledge and someone like Mary has it."
"I'm not sure I do," says Morrell.
The theatre director and the neuroscientist
"If you hear a recording of someone whispering in your ear," says theatre director David Rosenberg, "you can convince yourself you felt their breath."
"Expectation is everything," agrees Professor David McAlpine, director of London University's Ear Institute. "Your brain fills in so much it's not funny. You've got a very narrow bandwidth by the time you get to your ears and your eyes. The rest is artificial, filled in by that expectations machine – your brain."
For his latest theatre piece, Electric Hotel, Rosenberg wanted to play with some of these auditory ideas, to tease his audience with sound illusions. So he approached neuroscientist McAlpine, whose research work into brain mechanisms for spatial hearing and detecting sounds in noisy environments proved key to the effects Rosenberg wanted to achieve. "We were trying to create a very intimate experience for an audience in a show which they see from a distance and also through glass," says Rosenberg.
Electric Hotel initially took place in a decommissioned gasworks behind London's King's Cross station. As darkness fell, audience members were given special headphones and asked to sit before a four-storey set with glass-fronted chambers representing hotel rooms in which dancers played the parts of hotel guests, couriers and cleaners.
Those headphones supplied binaural recordings to each spectator's ears. Rosenberg, along with sound designers and composers Max and Ben Ringham, made a complete score made up not just of music but of everyday sounds. Soft noises were heard thrillingly close to audience members' ears: a woman pulling on a robe after a swim, the plumping of a pillow. The illusory effect was that the individual spectator, far from being in a crowd of other audience members, was in the room with them. While these noises sounded as though they were taking place on stage, in fact they were part of a pre-recorded soundtrack to which the dancers' choreographed moves were fitted.
What does binaural mean? "It's two-eared hearing, and involves extracting information you couldn't have from one ear," says McAlpine. "There are binaural recordings using two microphones at an appropriate distance apart used within a dummy head to try to reproduce effects of your normal hearing," says Rosenberg.
McAlpine recalls the most sophisticated binaural illusion he ever heard. "I was at Dolby's headquarters in San Francisco. They made me put on headphones, close my eyes and then you hear you're in an aeroplane and you crash into the ocean. I really felt a sense of the whoosh of water and the sense of going up on to a sandy beach. Those sensations were my brain filling in the experience from what it heard."
Rosenberg says a key moment of Electric Hotel was another illusion. "The sound moved out into the audience, and the audience became confused as to whether what they're hearing was part of the performance or the actual audience surrounding them."
It sounds like the aural application of a Brechtian alienation technique. Is it? "Totally. It was very important in a show which is essentially you alone with the performers, and then suddenly you have a moment when you recognise the audience around you."
Rosenberg's next theatre project will put his audience in the dark. "The show will enfold you when the lights go out. The audience will wear headphones, and their imaginative experience will involve creating environments they can feel they're a part of without the distraction of vision."
"Your eyes are in charge but not always," says McAlpine. "If it's dark, then you have to do imaginative work. People think of visual scenes, and there are gestalt [psychological] principles for understanding how that is put together. But there's also an auditory scene which is less robust than the visual scene, and how it's put together is still not very clear." Perhaps, then, Rosenberg's next play could be a rare case of art helping scientific enquiry.
Monday, August 22, 2011
The Girl Scientist Club: Year Two
Emily Shimako walked down the aisles of Walmart, placing various school supplies in her cart. It was just a couple of days before school.
Emily gazed at the notebooks disconsolately. No covers with scuba divers on them, or whales or dolphins or sharks or anything. Yeah, there were ones that had Captain America on them, or the Hulk or Spiderman...oh...there was one with Wonder Woman...
As she added each item to her cart, Emily ticked it off on the list that she carried. When she was done, she looked at her watch. Her mom and grandmother were in the store, too, going through the grocery aisles. She was to meet them at the very first checkout counter.
Emily stationed herself there, and then leaned on the cart and lost herself in thought.
It had been a fun summer. She, Trelane and Amber had spent a lot of time together. Their parents had taken them to the aquarium in Denver a couple of times, to the observatory, and to several dinosaur museums.
Then Amber had gone off for a week to a dinosaur camp, and Trelane had spent the same week at an oceanographer's camp.
There was an astronaut camp that she could have gone to, but her parents couldn't afford to send her. They'd had to sell their car to buy a van with a wheelchair lift, since her grandmother was now confined to a wheel chair.
Emily looked idly at her school supplies. If she was going to go to college, she'd definitely have to get a scholarship, she thought. Which meant she'd have to continue to get straight As.
Of course, she could always go into the Air Force, like her dad. If she spent four years in the service, she would be able to get the GI bill, which would help her pay for college. (She knew this because her parents had talked about it. She had already approached them about going to college, and they had made it clear that they'd help her all they could - they did have some money put by for her college fund - but with her grandmother's illness, money was going to be a bit tight for a while.)
Well, she'd be able to get a job when she was sixteen, and start saving. And as long as her grades remained good...which they would!...she should be able to get a scholarship. And if she did join the Air Force...heck...she could be a pilot....
Emily nodded to herself. Maybe joining the Air Force would be the way to go!
Emily gazed at the notebooks disconsolately. No covers with scuba divers on them, or whales or dolphins or sharks or anything. Yeah, there were ones that had Captain America on them, or the Hulk or Spiderman...oh...there was one with Wonder Woman...
As she added each item to her cart, Emily ticked it off on the list that she carried. When she was done, she looked at her watch. Her mom and grandmother were in the store, too, going through the grocery aisles. She was to meet them at the very first checkout counter.
Emily stationed herself there, and then leaned on the cart and lost herself in thought.
It had been a fun summer. She, Trelane and Amber had spent a lot of time together. Their parents had taken them to the aquarium in Denver a couple of times, to the observatory, and to several dinosaur museums.
Then Amber had gone off for a week to a dinosaur camp, and Trelane had spent the same week at an oceanographer's camp.
There was an astronaut camp that she could have gone to, but her parents couldn't afford to send her. They'd had to sell their car to buy a van with a wheelchair lift, since her grandmother was now confined to a wheel chair.
Emily looked idly at her school supplies. If she was going to go to college, she'd definitely have to get a scholarship, she thought. Which meant she'd have to continue to get straight As.
Of course, she could always go into the Air Force, like her dad. If she spent four years in the service, she would be able to get the GI bill, which would help her pay for college. (She knew this because her parents had talked about it. She had already approached them about going to college, and they had made it clear that they'd help her all they could - they did have some money put by for her college fund - but with her grandmother's illness, money was going to be a bit tight for a while.)
Well, she'd be able to get a job when she was sixteen, and start saving. And as long as her grades remained good...which they would!...she should be able to get a scholarship. And if she did join the Air Force...heck...she could be a pilot....
Emily nodded to herself. Maybe joining the Air Force would be the way to go!
Cokie and Steven Roberts: U.S. needs girls to solve its scientist shortage
From the Billings Gazette: Cokie and Steven Roberts: U.S. needs girls to solve its scientist shortage
It’s already back-to-school time for many kids. As they again stuff their hefty backpacks, here’s what won’t be in enough of them: science, technology, engineering and math books. Girls, especially, will not be weighted down by those texts, and that’s a problem for those girls and for the country.
To compete in the world economy and preserve the lifestyle Americans expect, the nation needs innovative and scientifically savvy workers. And if girls want their paychecks to come close to those of the boys in their classrooms, they need to study those so-called STEM subjects.
Early this month, the Commerce Department issued a report showing that women who work in fields such as computer science and engineering have more employment security and higher incomes — 33 percent higher — than women in other jobs. In STEM jobs, the gender pay gap shrinks markedly; women make almost as much as men do. But, even though a majority of college graduates are women and they’re almost half of the workforce, women hold only about a quarter of the positions in these lucrative fields. That number has stayed steady over the last 10 years, even as educated women have marched into the workplace in greater numbers.
It’s not just that women aren’t in the jobs — they aren’t taking the courses that lead to the jobs. According to the Commerce Department: “Women hold a disproportionately low share of STEM undergraduate degrees, particularly in engineering.” That helps explain why this country is facing a critical shortage of engineering graduates, especially when compared to the numbers that universities in China and India are turning out.
‘’This education disparity,” Intel CEO Paul Otellini recently wrote, “threatens to slow our economic recovery, stunts our long-term competitiveness and leaves technology firms in a skills crisis.”
Intel is working with other corporations and the Obama administration to try to boost the number of teachers in STEM fields. Upward of a quarter of a million more will be needed by 2015 in secondary schools alone, and they need to be teachers who can find ways to engage girls. Too often girls, who enjoy science and math in elementary school in equal numbers to boys, are turned off in middle school and have checked out by high school, where five times as many boys as girls say they want to major in engineering.
Some extracurricular organizations are trying to fill in where the schools fail. The Girl Scouts, for example, don’t just train cookie entrepreneurs. The scouts also participate in scientific fun, from Lego Leagues to programs sponsored by Lockheed Martin and NASA aimed at inspiring girls to study STEM subjects.
That’s something astronaut and physicist Sally Ride has also been trying to do through her camps for kids and science academies for teachers. Ride is fighting what she says is the message sent by society: “Girls think science and engineering are not for them, and, of course, we know that’s not the case.”
Sally Ride is the product of the nation’s last great scientific push: the space program. It took the Cold War and the 1957 Soviet Sputnik launch to energize action then. The next year, Congress ponied up a billion dollars — a whole lot of money in 1958 — for science and math teaching at all levels of education. And when TV cameras started showing men in cool space suits rocketing into orbit, kids signed up for science courses.
It took a while for women to horn in on the act. More than 20 years elapsed between Alan Shepard blasting into space as the first American and Sally Ride stepping into the shuttle as the first U.S. woman to soar above us. But women occupy a different place in America today. Not only are more than half our college graduates female, close to two-thirds of our graduate students are women.
We can’t prosper as a country if those students have heard “science and engineering are not for them.” And if you question whether they still hear that message in the 21st century, you just have to remember that Larry Summers, when he was president of Harvard, glibly declared in 2005 that “issues of intrinsic aptitude” separated men and women in the hard sciences.
If Intel and other technology companies want more American engineers, they’re going to have to tackle that blatant bias. It harms not only the women who are missing out on the higher pay and greater job security they would find in scientific and technological fields. It also harms America.
It’s already back-to-school time for many kids. As they again stuff their hefty backpacks, here’s what won’t be in enough of them: science, technology, engineering and math books. Girls, especially, will not be weighted down by those texts, and that’s a problem for those girls and for the country.
To compete in the world economy and preserve the lifestyle Americans expect, the nation needs innovative and scientifically savvy workers. And if girls want their paychecks to come close to those of the boys in their classrooms, they need to study those so-called STEM subjects.
Early this month, the Commerce Department issued a report showing that women who work in fields such as computer science and engineering have more employment security and higher incomes — 33 percent higher — than women in other jobs. In STEM jobs, the gender pay gap shrinks markedly; women make almost as much as men do. But, even though a majority of college graduates are women and they’re almost half of the workforce, women hold only about a quarter of the positions in these lucrative fields. That number has stayed steady over the last 10 years, even as educated women have marched into the workplace in greater numbers.
It’s not just that women aren’t in the jobs — they aren’t taking the courses that lead to the jobs. According to the Commerce Department: “Women hold a disproportionately low share of STEM undergraduate degrees, particularly in engineering.” That helps explain why this country is facing a critical shortage of engineering graduates, especially when compared to the numbers that universities in China and India are turning out.
‘’This education disparity,” Intel CEO Paul Otellini recently wrote, “threatens to slow our economic recovery, stunts our long-term competitiveness and leaves technology firms in a skills crisis.”
Intel is working with other corporations and the Obama administration to try to boost the number of teachers in STEM fields. Upward of a quarter of a million more will be needed by 2015 in secondary schools alone, and they need to be teachers who can find ways to engage girls. Too often girls, who enjoy science and math in elementary school in equal numbers to boys, are turned off in middle school and have checked out by high school, where five times as many boys as girls say they want to major in engineering.
Some extracurricular organizations are trying to fill in where the schools fail. The Girl Scouts, for example, don’t just train cookie entrepreneurs. The scouts also participate in scientific fun, from Lego Leagues to programs sponsored by Lockheed Martin and NASA aimed at inspiring girls to study STEM subjects.
That’s something astronaut and physicist Sally Ride has also been trying to do through her camps for kids and science academies for teachers. Ride is fighting what she says is the message sent by society: “Girls think science and engineering are not for them, and, of course, we know that’s not the case.”
Sally Ride is the product of the nation’s last great scientific push: the space program. It took the Cold War and the 1957 Soviet Sputnik launch to energize action then. The next year, Congress ponied up a billion dollars — a whole lot of money in 1958 — for science and math teaching at all levels of education. And when TV cameras started showing men in cool space suits rocketing into orbit, kids signed up for science courses.
It took a while for women to horn in on the act. More than 20 years elapsed between Alan Shepard blasting into space as the first American and Sally Ride stepping into the shuttle as the first U.S. woman to soar above us. But women occupy a different place in America today. Not only are more than half our college graduates female, close to two-thirds of our graduate students are women.
We can’t prosper as a country if those students have heard “science and engineering are not for them.” And if you question whether they still hear that message in the 21st century, you just have to remember that Larry Summers, when he was president of Harvard, glibly declared in 2005 that “issues of intrinsic aptitude” separated men and women in the hard sciences.
If Intel and other technology companies want more American engineers, they’re going to have to tackle that blatant bias. It harms not only the women who are missing out on the higher pay and greater job security they would find in scientific and technological fields. It also harms America.
Friday, August 19, 2011
List of Female Scientists Before the 21th Century
From Wikipedia
Note: this is a historical list, intended to deal with the time period when women working in science were rare. For this reason, this list ends with the 20th century.
Antiquity
Agamede (12th century BCE), (possibly mythical) physician in Ancient Greece
Aglaonike (2nd century BCE), the first woman astronomer in Ancient Greece
Agnodike (4th century BCE), the first woman physician to practice legally in Athens
Arete of Cyrene (5th-4th centuries BCE), natural and moral philosopher, North Africa
Artemisia of Caria (c. 300 BCE), botanist[citation needed]
Aspasia of Miletus (4th century BCE), philosopher and scientist
Cleopatra the Alchemist - identity is unclear, but her book, The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, is first recorded as existing in the 2nd century A.D./C.E. in Alexandria.
Diotima of Mantinea (4th century BCE), philosopher and scientist, ancient Greece (sources vary as to her historicity; possibly a fictionalized character based on Aspasia of Miletus)
Enheduanna (c. 2285-2250 BCE), Sumerian/Akkadian astronomer and poet
Hypatia of Alexandria (370-415), mathematician and astronomer, Egypt
Lastheneia of Mantinea, (5th century BCE), one of Plato's only female students
Mary the Jewess (1st or 2nd century CE), alchemist
Merit Ptah (c.2700 BCE), Egyptian physician
Pythias of Assos (4th century BCE), marine zoologist[citation needed]
Tapputi-Belatekallim first mentioned in a clay tablet dating to 2000 BCE), Babylonian perfumer, the first person in history recorded as using a chemical process
Theano (6th century BCE), philosopher, mathematician and physician
Middle Ages
Abella (14th century), Italian physician
Bettina d'Andrea (d. 1335), Italian lawyer and philosopher
Novella d'Andrea (d. 1333), Italian lawyer
Hildegard von Bingen (1099–1179), German natural philosopher
Dorotea Bocchi (fl. 1390), Italian professor of medicine
Constance Calenda (15th century), Italian surgeon specialising in diseases of the eye
Constanza, Italian physician
Calrice di Durisio (15th century), Italian physician
Jacobina Félicie (fl. 1322), Italian physician
Alessandra Giliani (fl. 1318), Italian anatomist
Rebecca de Guarna (14th century), Italian physician[2][3]
Heloise (12th century), French mathematician and physician
Herrad of Landsberg (c.1130-1195), German/French author of the encyclopedia and technological compendium Garden of Delight
Maria Incarnata, Italian surgeon[3]
Margarita (14th century), Italian physician[3]
Thomasia de Mattio, Italian physician[3]
Mercuriade (14th century), Italian physician and surgeon[2]
Empress Theodora (500-545), Byzantine philosopher and mathematician
Trotula of Salerno (c. 1090), Italian physician
Walborg and Karin Jota (c. 1350), Swedish officials of the court
15th to 17th centuries
Anna Åkerhjelm (1647–1693), Swedish traveller and amateur archeologist.
Aphra Behn (1640–1689), British astronomer
Juliana (fl. 1460), British natural historian
Celia Grillo Borromeo (1684–1777), Italian natural philosopher
Sophia Brahe (1556–1643), Danish astronomer and chemist
Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), natural philosopher
Laura Cereta (1469–1499), humanist
Isabella Cortese, (fl. 1561), Italian alchemist
Maria Cunitz (1610–1664), Silesian astronomer
Jeanne Dumée (fl. 1680), French astronomer
Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine (1618–1680), German natural philosopher
Beatriz Galindo (1465–1534), Spanish physician
Elisabetha Koopman Hevelius (c.1646), astronomer, wife of Johannes Hevelius
Hedvig Eleonora Klingenstierna, (17th century) Swedish lecturer in Latin at Linköping University
Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), naturalist
Tarquinia Molza (1542–1617), Italian natural philosopher
Elena Cornaro Piscopia (1646–1684), Italian mathematician and the first female PhD
Jane Sharp (fl. 1671), British midwife
18th Century
Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799), Italian mathematician
Maria Ardinghelli (1728–1825), Italian mathematician and physicist
Anna Atkins (1799–1871), British botanist
Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola (c. 1702-1740), natural philosopher, translator
Laura Bassi (1711–1778), Italian physicist
Margaret Bryan (c. 1760-1815), British natural philosopher
Maria Christina Bruhn (1732–1802), Swedish inventor
Elsa Beata Bunge (1734–1819), Swedish botanist
Maria Medina Coeli (1764-1846), Italian physician.
Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749), French mathematician and physicist
Jane Colden (1724–1766), American biologist
Maria Dalle Donne (1778–1842), Italian physician
Eva Ekeblad (1724–1786), Swedish agronomist
Nicole-Reine Lepaute (1723–1792), French astronomer.
Dorothea Leporin Erxleben (1715–1762), German physician
Elizabeth Fulhame (fl. 1794), British chemist
Sophie Germain (1776–1831), elasticity theory, number theory
Lucia Galeazzi Galvani (1743–1788), Italian physician
Catherine Littlefield Greene (1755–1814), American inventor
Caroline Herschel (1750–1848), German-British astronomer
Josephine Kablick (1787-1863), Botanist
Maria Margarethe Kirch, (1670–1720), German astronomer
Marie Paulze Lavoisier (1758–1836), French chemist and illustrator
Anna Morandi Manzolini (1716–1774), Italian physician and anatomist
Maria Pettracini (1759-1791), Italian anatomist and physician
Louise du Pierry (1746- fl 1807), French astronomer
Faustina Pignatelli (d. 1785), Italian physicist
Christina Roccati (1732–1797)
Clotilde Tambroni (1758–1817), Italian philologist and linguistic
Petronella Johanna de Timmerman (1723–1786), Dutch scentist
19th century
Lovisa Årberg (1801–1881) first woman doctor and surgeon in Sweden.
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz (1822–1907), American natural historian
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917), British physician
Mary Anning (1799–1847), British natural historian
Amalia Assur (1803), Swedish dentist
Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854–1923), British physicist
Sara Josephine Baker (1873–1945), American doctor (child hygiene pioneer)
Florence Bascom (1862–1945), American geologist
Etheldred Benett (1776–1845), British geologist
Isabella Bird Bishop (1831–1904), British natural historian
Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910), American physician
Emily Blackwell (1826–1910 ), American physician
Marie Gillain Boivin (1773–1841), French midwife
Elizabeth Brown (d. 1899), British astronomer
Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930), American psychologist
Annie Jump Cannon (1863–1941), American astronomer
Mary Agnes Meara Chase (1869–1963), American biologist
Cornelia Clapp (1849–1934), American zoologist
Agnes Mary Clerke (1842–1907), British astronomer
Anna Botsford Comstock (1854–1930), American natural historian
Florence Cushman American astronomer
Lydia Maria Adams DeWitt (1859–1928) American pathologist
Amalie Dietrich (1821–1891), German natural historian
Maria Dalle Donne (19th century)
Marie Durocher (1809–1893), Brazilian obstetrician, midwife and physician
Alice Eastwood (1859–1953), American biologist
Rosa Smith Eigenmann (1858–1947), American biologist
Mileva Einstein-Maric (1875–1948), Serbian/Swiss physicist
Ellen Eglui (19th century)
Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838–1923), American ethnologist
Williamina Fleming (1857–1911), Scottish/American astronomer
Rosalie Fougelberg (1841) , Swedish dentist
Melanie Hahnemann (1800-1878), French homeopath
Margaret Lindsay Murray Huggins (1848–1915), British astronomer
Ida Henrietta Hyde (1857–1945), American biologist
Maria Jansson (1788–1842), known as Kisamor, Swedish physician
Sophia Jex-Blake (1840–1912), British physician
Mary Kies (19th century), American inventor
Helen Dean King (1869–1955), American biologist
Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850–1891), Russian mathematician (partial differential equations, rotating solids, Abelian functions)
Christine Ladd-Franklin (1847–1930), American psychologist
Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868–1921), American astronomer
Jane Webb Loudon (1807–1858), British botanist
Augusta Ada Byron Lovelace (1815–1851), British mathematician
Margaret Eliza Maltby (1860–1944), American physicist
Jane Haldimand Marcet (1769–1858), British natural philosopher
Annie Russell Maunder (1868–1947), Irish astronomer
Antonia Caetana Maury (1866–1952), American astronomer.
Olive Thorne Miller (1831–1918), American natural historian
Maria Mitchell (1818–1889), American astronomer
Johanna Mestorf (1828-1909), German prehistoric archaeologist
Mary Murtfeldt (1848–1913), American biologist
Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), British nurse and statistician
Eleanor Anne Ormerod (1828–1901), British biologist
Edith Marion Patch (1876–1954), American biologist
Mary Engle Pennington (1872–1952), American chemist
Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps (1793–1884), American science educator
Beatrix Potter (1866–1943), British mycologist (study of mushrooms)
Emmy Rappe (1835-1896), Swedish nurse
Mary Jane Rathbun (1860–1943), American marine biologist
Ellen Swallow Richards (1842–1911), American industrial and environmental chemist
Emily Roebling (1844–1903), American civil engineer
Clémence Royer (1830–1902)fr:Clémence Royer
Ethel Sargant (1863–1918), British biologist
Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–1932), American geographer
Annie Lorrain Smith (1854–1937), British lichenologist and mycologist
Mary Somerville (1780–1872), British physicist
Mary Treat (1830-1923) - American naturalist
Nettie Stevens (1861–1912), American geneticist
Lucy Hobbs Taylor (1833–1910), American dentist
Jeanne Villepreux-Power (1794–1871), French marine biologist
Mary Walker (1832–1919), American surgeon
Margaret Floy Washburn (1871–1939), American psychologist
Sarah Frances Whiting (1846–1927), American astronomer and physicist
Mary Watson Whitney (1847–1921), American astronomer
Karolina Widerström (1856–1949), Swedish physician
Anna Winlock (1857–1904), American astronomer
20th century
Faye Ajzenberg-Selove (1926- ), American nuclear physicist, (2007 US National Medal of Science)
Claudia Alexander, American planetary scientist
Irène Joliot-Curie (1897–1956), French chemist and nuclear physicist
Lorella M. Jones (1943-1995), American particle physicist
Carole Jordan (1941- ), British solar physicist
Renata Kallosh (1943- )
Berta Karlik (1904–1990)
Bruria Kaufman (1918–2010 )
Marcia Keith (1859–1950)
Ann Kiessling (1942- )
Margaret Kivelson (1928- )
Dorothea Klumpke (1861–1942), American-born astronomer
Noemie Benczer Koller (1933- )
Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf (1922–2010)
Stephanie Kwolek (1923- ), American chemist, inventor of Kevlar
Elizabeth Laird (1874–1969)
Henrietta Leavitt, (1868–1921), American astronomer (periodicity of variable stars)
Juliet Lee-Franzini (1933- )
Inge Lehmann (1888–1993)
Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909- ), Italian neurologist (Nobel prize for growth factors)
Kathleen Lonsdale (1903–1971)
Misha Mahowald (1963–1996), American neuroscientist
Margaret Eliza Maltby (1860–1944), American physicist
Louisa Martindale (1872–1966), British surgeon
Lynn Margulis (1938- ), American biologist
Barbara McClintock (1902–1992), American geneticist
Anne McLaren (1927–2007), British developmental biologist
Helen Megaw (1907- )
Lise Meitner (1878–1968), Austrian nuclear physicist (pioneering nuclear physics, discovery of nuclear fission, protactinum, and the Auger effect)
Maud Menten (1879–1960), Canadian biochemist
Kirstine Meyer (1861–1941)
Luise Meyer-Schutzmeister (1915–1981)
Ann Haven Morgan (1882–1966), American zoologist
Anna Nagurney Canadian-born, US operations researcher/management scientist focusing on networks
Chiara Nappi, Italian American physicist
Ann Nelson (1958- ), American physicist
Marcia Neugebauer,
Gertrude Neumark (1927- )
Ida Tacke Noddack (1896–1979)
Emmy Noether (1882–1935), German mathematician and theoretical physicist (symmetries and conservation laws) [73]
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (1942- ), German geneticist and developmental biologist (Nobel prize for homeobox genes)
Daphne Osborne (1930–2006), British plant physiologist (plant hormones)
Donna Osif (20th century), meteorologist
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–1978), British-American astronomer
Marguerite Perey (1909–1975)
Melba Phillips (1907–2004)
Agnes Pockels (1862–1935)
P. Ya. Polubarinova-Kochina (1899- )
Edith Quimby (1891–1982)
Helen Quinn (1943- )
Lisa Randall (1962- ), American physicist
F. Gwendolen Rees (1906–1994), British parasitologist
Anita Roberts (1942–2006), American molecular biologist, "mother of TGF-Beta"
Vera Rubin (1928- )
Myriam Sarachik (1933- )
Bice Sechi-Zorn (1928–1984)
Johanna Levelt Sengers
Patsy Sherman (20th century)
Charlotte Moore Sitterly (1898–1990), American astronomer
Hertha Sponer (1895–1968)
Margaret A. Stanley, British virologist and epithelial biologist
Phyllis Starkey (1947- ) British biochemist and medical researcher
Isabelle Stone (1868–1944) , American thin-film physicist and educator
Ida Noddack Tacke (1896–1978), German chemist and physicist
Maria Telkes (1900–1995), Hungarian-American biophysicist
Jean Thomas, British biochemist (chromatin)
Karen Vousden, British cancer researcher
Katharine Way (1903–1995)
Mary Olliden Weaver (20th century), inventor
Elsie Widdowson (1908–2000), British nutritionist
Margo Wilson (1945- ), Canadian evolutionary psychologist
Fiona Wood, (1958- ), British-Australian plastic surgeon
Leona Woods (1919–1986), American nuclear physicist
Dorothy Wrinch (1894–1976), British mathematician and theoretical biochemist
Chien-Shiung Wu (1912–1997), Chinese-American physicist (nuclear physics, (non) conservation of parity) [
Sau Lan Wu [90], Chinese-American particle physicist
Xide Xie (Hsi-teh Hsieh) (1921–2000)
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (1921- ), American medical physicist (Nobel prize for radioimmunoassay)
E.K. Janaki Ammal (1897-1984) Indian botanist
Asha Kolte, Indian Biologist (1941-)[5][6]
Betsy Ancker-Johnson (1929- ) [7], American plasma physicist
Caroline Austin, British molecular biologist [8]
Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854–1923), British mathematician and electrical engineer (electric arcs, sand ripples, invention of several devices, geometry) [9]
Zonia Baber (1862-1955), American geographer and geologist
Milla Baldo-Ceolin [10], Italian particle physicist
Yvonne Barr (1932- ), British virologist (co-discovery of Epstein-Barr virus)
Gillian Bates, British geneticist (Huntingdon's disease)
Ruth Benedict (1887–1948), American anthropologist
Val Beral (1946- ), British–Australian epidemiologist
Susan Blackmore (1951- ), British science writer (memetics, evolutionary theory, consciousness, parapsychology)
Mary Adela Blagg (1858–1944), British astronomer
Marietta Blau (1894–1970) [11], German experimental particle physicist
Katharine Blodgett (1898–1979) [12], American thin-film physicist
Christiane Bonnelle [13], French spectroscopist
Alice Middleton Boring (1883–1955), American biologist
Lera Boroditsky, American psychologist
Jenny Rosenthal Bramley (1909–1997), Lithuanian-American physicist [14], [15]
Harriet Brooks (1876–1933) [16], American radiation physicist
Dorothy Lavinia Brown (1919–2004), American surgeon
A. Catrina Bryce (1956-), Scottish laser scientist
Linda B. Buck (1947- ), American neuroscientist (Nobel prize for olfactory receptors)
Margaret Burbidge (1919- ), British astrophysicist [17]
Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943- ), British astrophysicist (discovery of radio pulsars) [18]
Nina Byers (1930- ) [19], American physicist
Annie Jump Cannon (1863–1941), American astronomer
Mary L. Cartwright (1900–1998) [20]
Yvette Cauchois (1908–1999) [21]
Margaret Chan (1947- ), Chinese-Canadian health administrator; director of the World Health Organization
Martha Chase (1927–2003), American molecular biologist
Amanda Chessell computer scientist
Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat (1923- ) [22], French theoretical physicist
Patricia Cladis (1937- ) [23]
Janine Connes [24]
Esther Conwell (1922- ) [25]
Ursula M. Cowgill, American biologist and anthropologist
Suzanne Cory (1942- ), Australian immunologist/cancer researcher
Heather Couper (1949- ), British astronomer (astronomy popularisation, science education)
Gerty Theresa Cori (1896–1957), American biochemist (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1947)
Maria Skłodowska-Curie (1867–1934), Polish-French chemist (pioneer in radiology, discovery of polonium and radium) [26]
Janet Darbyshire, British epidemiologist
Ingrid Daubechies, (1954- ) Belgian mathematician (Wavelets - first woman to receive the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics)
Eleanor Davies-Colley (1874–1934), British surgeon (first female FRCS)
Cécile DeWitt-Morette (1922- ) [27]
Louise Dolan [28]
Nancy M. Dowdy (1938- ) [29]
Mildred Dresselhaus (1930- ) [30]
Helen Flanders Dunbar (1902–1959) important early figure in U.S. psychosomatic medicine.[31]
Helen T. Edwards (1936- ) [32]
Tatjana Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa (1876–1964) [33]
Gertrude B. Elion (1918–1999), American biochemist (Nobel prize for drug development)
Magda Ericson (1929- ) [34]
Sandra Faber (1944- ) [35]
Claire Fagin, American health-care researcher
Dian Fossey (1932–1985), American zoologist [36]
Rosalind Franklin (1920–1957), British physical chemist and crystallographer
Ursula Franklin (1921-), Canadian metallurgist, research physicist, author and educator
Judy Franz (1938- ) [37]
Phyllis S. Freier (1921–1992) [38]
Mary K. Gaillard (1939- ) [39]
Birutė Galdikas (1946- ), German primatologist and conservationist
Fanny Gates (1872–1931) [40]
Kate Gleason (1865–1933), American engineer
Ellen Gleditsch (1879–1968) [41]
Claire F. Gmachl, American physicist
Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1906–1972), German-American physicist [42]
Jane Goodall (1934 - ), British biologist, primatologist [43]
Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber (1911–1998) [44]
Sulamith Goldhaber (1923–1965) [45]
Evelyn Boyd Granville (1924- )
Susan Greenfield (1951- ), British neurophysiologist (neurophysiology of the brain, popularisation of science)
Gail Hanson (1947- ) [46]
Anna J. Harrison (1912–1998), American organic chemist
Evans Hayward (1922- ) [47]
Caroline Herzenberg (1932- ) [48]
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910–1994), British X-ray crystallographer [49]
Grace Hopper (1906–1992), American computer scientist
Clara Immerwahr (1870–1915), German chemist
Shirley Jackson (physicist) (1946- ) [50]
Bertha Swirles Jeffreys (1903–1999) [51]
Note: this is a historical list, intended to deal with the time period when women working in science were rare. For this reason, this list ends with the 20th century.
Antiquity
Agamede (12th century BCE), (possibly mythical) physician in Ancient Greece
Aglaonike (2nd century BCE), the first woman astronomer in Ancient Greece
Agnodike (4th century BCE), the first woman physician to practice legally in Athens
Arete of Cyrene (5th-4th centuries BCE), natural and moral philosopher, North Africa
Artemisia of Caria (c. 300 BCE), botanist[citation needed]
Aspasia of Miletus (4th century BCE), philosopher and scientist
Cleopatra the Alchemist - identity is unclear, but her book, The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, is first recorded as existing in the 2nd century A.D./C.E. in Alexandria.
Diotima of Mantinea (4th century BCE), philosopher and scientist, ancient Greece (sources vary as to her historicity; possibly a fictionalized character based on Aspasia of Miletus)
Enheduanna (c. 2285-2250 BCE), Sumerian/Akkadian astronomer and poet
Hypatia of Alexandria (370-415), mathematician and astronomer, Egypt
Lastheneia of Mantinea, (5th century BCE), one of Plato's only female students
Mary the Jewess (1st or 2nd century CE), alchemist
Merit Ptah (c.2700 BCE), Egyptian physician
Pythias of Assos (4th century BCE), marine zoologist[citation needed]
Tapputi-Belatekallim first mentioned in a clay tablet dating to 2000 BCE), Babylonian perfumer, the first person in history recorded as using a chemical process
Theano (6th century BCE), philosopher, mathematician and physician
Middle Ages
Abella (14th century), Italian physician
Bettina d'Andrea (d. 1335), Italian lawyer and philosopher
Novella d'Andrea (d. 1333), Italian lawyer
Hildegard von Bingen (1099–1179), German natural philosopher
Dorotea Bocchi (fl. 1390), Italian professor of medicine
Constance Calenda (15th century), Italian surgeon specialising in diseases of the eye
Constanza, Italian physician
Calrice di Durisio (15th century), Italian physician
Jacobina Félicie (fl. 1322), Italian physician
Alessandra Giliani (fl. 1318), Italian anatomist
Rebecca de Guarna (14th century), Italian physician[2][3]
Heloise (12th century), French mathematician and physician
Herrad of Landsberg (c.1130-1195), German/French author of the encyclopedia and technological compendium Garden of Delight
Maria Incarnata, Italian surgeon[3]
Margarita (14th century), Italian physician[3]
Thomasia de Mattio, Italian physician[3]
Mercuriade (14th century), Italian physician and surgeon[2]
Empress Theodora (500-545), Byzantine philosopher and mathematician
Trotula of Salerno (c. 1090), Italian physician
Walborg and Karin Jota (c. 1350), Swedish officials of the court
15th to 17th centuries
Anna Åkerhjelm (1647–1693), Swedish traveller and amateur archeologist.
Aphra Behn (1640–1689), British astronomer
Juliana (fl. 1460), British natural historian
Celia Grillo Borromeo (1684–1777), Italian natural philosopher
Sophia Brahe (1556–1643), Danish astronomer and chemist
Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), natural philosopher
Laura Cereta (1469–1499), humanist
Isabella Cortese, (fl. 1561), Italian alchemist
Maria Cunitz (1610–1664), Silesian astronomer
Jeanne Dumée (fl. 1680), French astronomer
Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine (1618–1680), German natural philosopher
Beatriz Galindo (1465–1534), Spanish physician
Elisabetha Koopman Hevelius (c.1646), astronomer, wife of Johannes Hevelius
Hedvig Eleonora Klingenstierna, (17th century) Swedish lecturer in Latin at Linköping University
Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), naturalist
Tarquinia Molza (1542–1617), Italian natural philosopher
Elena Cornaro Piscopia (1646–1684), Italian mathematician and the first female PhD
Jane Sharp (fl. 1671), British midwife
18th Century
Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799), Italian mathematician
Maria Ardinghelli (1728–1825), Italian mathematician and physicist
Anna Atkins (1799–1871), British botanist
Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola (c. 1702-1740), natural philosopher, translator
Laura Bassi (1711–1778), Italian physicist
Margaret Bryan (c. 1760-1815), British natural philosopher
Maria Christina Bruhn (1732–1802), Swedish inventor
Elsa Beata Bunge (1734–1819), Swedish botanist
Maria Medina Coeli (1764-1846), Italian physician.
Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749), French mathematician and physicist
Jane Colden (1724–1766), American biologist
Maria Dalle Donne (1778–1842), Italian physician
Eva Ekeblad (1724–1786), Swedish agronomist
Nicole-Reine Lepaute (1723–1792), French astronomer.
Dorothea Leporin Erxleben (1715–1762), German physician
Elizabeth Fulhame (fl. 1794), British chemist
Sophie Germain (1776–1831), elasticity theory, number theory
Lucia Galeazzi Galvani (1743–1788), Italian physician
Catherine Littlefield Greene (1755–1814), American inventor
Caroline Herschel (1750–1848), German-British astronomer
Josephine Kablick (1787-1863), Botanist
Maria Margarethe Kirch, (1670–1720), German astronomer
Marie Paulze Lavoisier (1758–1836), French chemist and illustrator
Anna Morandi Manzolini (1716–1774), Italian physician and anatomist
Maria Pettracini (1759-1791), Italian anatomist and physician
Louise du Pierry (1746- fl 1807), French astronomer
Faustina Pignatelli (d. 1785), Italian physicist
Christina Roccati (1732–1797)
Clotilde Tambroni (1758–1817), Italian philologist and linguistic
Petronella Johanna de Timmerman (1723–1786), Dutch scentist
19th century
Lovisa Årberg (1801–1881) first woman doctor and surgeon in Sweden.
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz (1822–1907), American natural historian
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917), British physician
Mary Anning (1799–1847), British natural historian
Amalia Assur (1803), Swedish dentist
Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854–1923), British physicist
Sara Josephine Baker (1873–1945), American doctor (child hygiene pioneer)
Florence Bascom (1862–1945), American geologist
Etheldred Benett (1776–1845), British geologist
Isabella Bird Bishop (1831–1904), British natural historian
Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910), American physician
Emily Blackwell (1826–1910 ), American physician
Marie Gillain Boivin (1773–1841), French midwife
Elizabeth Brown (d. 1899), British astronomer
Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930), American psychologist
Annie Jump Cannon (1863–1941), American astronomer
Mary Agnes Meara Chase (1869–1963), American biologist
Cornelia Clapp (1849–1934), American zoologist
Agnes Mary Clerke (1842–1907), British astronomer
Anna Botsford Comstock (1854–1930), American natural historian
Florence Cushman American astronomer
Lydia Maria Adams DeWitt (1859–1928) American pathologist
Amalie Dietrich (1821–1891), German natural historian
Maria Dalle Donne (19th century)
Marie Durocher (1809–1893), Brazilian obstetrician, midwife and physician
Alice Eastwood (1859–1953), American biologist
Rosa Smith Eigenmann (1858–1947), American biologist
Mileva Einstein-Maric (1875–1948), Serbian/Swiss physicist
Ellen Eglui (19th century)
Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838–1923), American ethnologist
Williamina Fleming (1857–1911), Scottish/American astronomer
Rosalie Fougelberg (1841) , Swedish dentist
Melanie Hahnemann (1800-1878), French homeopath
Margaret Lindsay Murray Huggins (1848–1915), British astronomer
Ida Henrietta Hyde (1857–1945), American biologist
Maria Jansson (1788–1842), known as Kisamor, Swedish physician
Sophia Jex-Blake (1840–1912), British physician
Mary Kies (19th century), American inventor
Helen Dean King (1869–1955), American biologist
Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850–1891), Russian mathematician (partial differential equations, rotating solids, Abelian functions)
Christine Ladd-Franklin (1847–1930), American psychologist
Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868–1921), American astronomer
Jane Webb Loudon (1807–1858), British botanist
Augusta Ada Byron Lovelace (1815–1851), British mathematician
Margaret Eliza Maltby (1860–1944), American physicist
Jane Haldimand Marcet (1769–1858), British natural philosopher
Annie Russell Maunder (1868–1947), Irish astronomer
Antonia Caetana Maury (1866–1952), American astronomer.
Olive Thorne Miller (1831–1918), American natural historian
Maria Mitchell (1818–1889), American astronomer
Johanna Mestorf (1828-1909), German prehistoric archaeologist
Mary Murtfeldt (1848–1913), American biologist
Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), British nurse and statistician
Eleanor Anne Ormerod (1828–1901), British biologist
Edith Marion Patch (1876–1954), American biologist
Mary Engle Pennington (1872–1952), American chemist
Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps (1793–1884), American science educator
Beatrix Potter (1866–1943), British mycologist (study of mushrooms)
Emmy Rappe (1835-1896), Swedish nurse
Mary Jane Rathbun (1860–1943), American marine biologist
Ellen Swallow Richards (1842–1911), American industrial and environmental chemist
Emily Roebling (1844–1903), American civil engineer
Clémence Royer (1830–1902)fr:Clémence Royer
Ethel Sargant (1863–1918), British biologist
Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–1932), American geographer
Annie Lorrain Smith (1854–1937), British lichenologist and mycologist
Mary Somerville (1780–1872), British physicist
Mary Treat (1830-1923) - American naturalist
Nettie Stevens (1861–1912), American geneticist
Lucy Hobbs Taylor (1833–1910), American dentist
Jeanne Villepreux-Power (1794–1871), French marine biologist
Mary Walker (1832–1919), American surgeon
Margaret Floy Washburn (1871–1939), American psychologist
Sarah Frances Whiting (1846–1927), American astronomer and physicist
Mary Watson Whitney (1847–1921), American astronomer
Karolina Widerström (1856–1949), Swedish physician
Anna Winlock (1857–1904), American astronomer
20th century
Faye Ajzenberg-Selove (1926- ), American nuclear physicist, (2007 US National Medal of Science)
Claudia Alexander, American planetary scientist
Irène Joliot-Curie (1897–1956), French chemist and nuclear physicist
Lorella M. Jones (1943-1995), American particle physicist
Carole Jordan (1941- ), British solar physicist
Renata Kallosh (1943- )
Berta Karlik (1904–1990)
Bruria Kaufman (1918–2010 )
Marcia Keith (1859–1950)
Ann Kiessling (1942- )
Margaret Kivelson (1928- )
Dorothea Klumpke (1861–1942), American-born astronomer
Noemie Benczer Koller (1933- )
Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf (1922–2010)
Stephanie Kwolek (1923- ), American chemist, inventor of Kevlar
Elizabeth Laird (1874–1969)
Henrietta Leavitt, (1868–1921), American astronomer (periodicity of variable stars)
Juliet Lee-Franzini (1933- )
Inge Lehmann (1888–1993)
Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909- ), Italian neurologist (Nobel prize for growth factors)
Kathleen Lonsdale (1903–1971)
Misha Mahowald (1963–1996), American neuroscientist
Margaret Eliza Maltby (1860–1944), American physicist
Louisa Martindale (1872–1966), British surgeon
Lynn Margulis (1938- ), American biologist
Barbara McClintock (1902–1992), American geneticist
Anne McLaren (1927–2007), British developmental biologist
Helen Megaw (1907- )
Lise Meitner (1878–1968), Austrian nuclear physicist (pioneering nuclear physics, discovery of nuclear fission, protactinum, and the Auger effect)
Maud Menten (1879–1960), Canadian biochemist
Kirstine Meyer (1861–1941)
Luise Meyer-Schutzmeister (1915–1981)
Ann Haven Morgan (1882–1966), American zoologist
Anna Nagurney Canadian-born, US operations researcher/management scientist focusing on networks
Chiara Nappi, Italian American physicist
Ann Nelson (1958- ), American physicist
Marcia Neugebauer,
Gertrude Neumark (1927- )
Ida Tacke Noddack (1896–1979)
Emmy Noether (1882–1935), German mathematician and theoretical physicist (symmetries and conservation laws) [73]
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (1942- ), German geneticist and developmental biologist (Nobel prize for homeobox genes)
Daphne Osborne (1930–2006), British plant physiologist (plant hormones)
Donna Osif (20th century), meteorologist
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–1978), British-American astronomer
Marguerite Perey (1909–1975)
Melba Phillips (1907–2004)
Agnes Pockels (1862–1935)
P. Ya. Polubarinova-Kochina (1899- )
Edith Quimby (1891–1982)
Helen Quinn (1943- )
Lisa Randall (1962- ), American physicist
F. Gwendolen Rees (1906–1994), British parasitologist
Anita Roberts (1942–2006), American molecular biologist, "mother of TGF-Beta"
Vera Rubin (1928- )
Myriam Sarachik (1933- )
Bice Sechi-Zorn (1928–1984)
Johanna Levelt Sengers
Patsy Sherman (20th century)
Charlotte Moore Sitterly (1898–1990), American astronomer
Hertha Sponer (1895–1968)
Margaret A. Stanley, British virologist and epithelial biologist
Phyllis Starkey (1947- ) British biochemist and medical researcher
Isabelle Stone (1868–1944) , American thin-film physicist and educator
Ida Noddack Tacke (1896–1978), German chemist and physicist
Maria Telkes (1900–1995), Hungarian-American biophysicist
Jean Thomas, British biochemist (chromatin)
Karen Vousden, British cancer researcher
Katharine Way (1903–1995)
Mary Olliden Weaver (20th century), inventor
Elsie Widdowson (1908–2000), British nutritionist
Margo Wilson (1945- ), Canadian evolutionary psychologist
Fiona Wood, (1958- ), British-Australian plastic surgeon
Leona Woods (1919–1986), American nuclear physicist
Dorothy Wrinch (1894–1976), British mathematician and theoretical biochemist
Chien-Shiung Wu (1912–1997), Chinese-American physicist (nuclear physics, (non) conservation of parity) [
Sau Lan Wu [90], Chinese-American particle physicist
Xide Xie (Hsi-teh Hsieh) (1921–2000)
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (1921- ), American medical physicist (Nobel prize for radioimmunoassay)
E.K. Janaki Ammal (1897-1984) Indian botanist
Asha Kolte, Indian Biologist (1941-)[5][6]
Betsy Ancker-Johnson (1929- ) [7], American plasma physicist
Caroline Austin, British molecular biologist [8]
Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854–1923), British mathematician and electrical engineer (electric arcs, sand ripples, invention of several devices, geometry) [9]
Zonia Baber (1862-1955), American geographer and geologist
Milla Baldo-Ceolin [10], Italian particle physicist
Yvonne Barr (1932- ), British virologist (co-discovery of Epstein-Barr virus)
Gillian Bates, British geneticist (Huntingdon's disease)
Ruth Benedict (1887–1948), American anthropologist
Val Beral (1946- ), British–Australian epidemiologist
Susan Blackmore (1951- ), British science writer (memetics, evolutionary theory, consciousness, parapsychology)
Mary Adela Blagg (1858–1944), British astronomer
Marietta Blau (1894–1970) [11], German experimental particle physicist
Katharine Blodgett (1898–1979) [12], American thin-film physicist
Christiane Bonnelle [13], French spectroscopist
Alice Middleton Boring (1883–1955), American biologist
Lera Boroditsky, American psychologist
Jenny Rosenthal Bramley (1909–1997), Lithuanian-American physicist [14], [15]
Harriet Brooks (1876–1933) [16], American radiation physicist
Dorothy Lavinia Brown (1919–2004), American surgeon
A. Catrina Bryce (1956-), Scottish laser scientist
Linda B. Buck (1947- ), American neuroscientist (Nobel prize for olfactory receptors)
Margaret Burbidge (1919- ), British astrophysicist [17]
Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943- ), British astrophysicist (discovery of radio pulsars) [18]
Nina Byers (1930- ) [19], American physicist
Annie Jump Cannon (1863–1941), American astronomer
Mary L. Cartwright (1900–1998) [20]
Yvette Cauchois (1908–1999) [21]
Margaret Chan (1947- ), Chinese-Canadian health administrator; director of the World Health Organization
Martha Chase (1927–2003), American molecular biologist
Amanda Chessell computer scientist
Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat (1923- ) [22], French theoretical physicist
Patricia Cladis (1937- ) [23]
Janine Connes [24]
Esther Conwell (1922- ) [25]
Ursula M. Cowgill, American biologist and anthropologist
Suzanne Cory (1942- ), Australian immunologist/cancer researcher
Heather Couper (1949- ), British astronomer (astronomy popularisation, science education)
Gerty Theresa Cori (1896–1957), American biochemist (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1947)
Maria Skłodowska-Curie (1867–1934), Polish-French chemist (pioneer in radiology, discovery of polonium and radium) [26]
Janet Darbyshire, British epidemiologist
Ingrid Daubechies, (1954- ) Belgian mathematician (Wavelets - first woman to receive the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics)
Eleanor Davies-Colley (1874–1934), British surgeon (first female FRCS)
Cécile DeWitt-Morette (1922- ) [27]
Louise Dolan [28]
Nancy M. Dowdy (1938- ) [29]
Mildred Dresselhaus (1930- ) [30]
Helen Flanders Dunbar (1902–1959) important early figure in U.S. psychosomatic medicine.[31]
Helen T. Edwards (1936- ) [32]
Tatjana Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa (1876–1964) [33]
Gertrude B. Elion (1918–1999), American biochemist (Nobel prize for drug development)
Magda Ericson (1929- ) [34]
Sandra Faber (1944- ) [35]
Claire Fagin, American health-care researcher
Dian Fossey (1932–1985), American zoologist [36]
Rosalind Franklin (1920–1957), British physical chemist and crystallographer
Ursula Franklin (1921-), Canadian metallurgist, research physicist, author and educator
Judy Franz (1938- ) [37]
Phyllis S. Freier (1921–1992) [38]
Mary K. Gaillard (1939- ) [39]
Birutė Galdikas (1946- ), German primatologist and conservationist
Fanny Gates (1872–1931) [40]
Kate Gleason (1865–1933), American engineer
Ellen Gleditsch (1879–1968) [41]
Claire F. Gmachl, American physicist
Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1906–1972), German-American physicist [42]
Jane Goodall (1934 - ), British biologist, primatologist [43]
Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber (1911–1998) [44]
Sulamith Goldhaber (1923–1965) [45]
Evelyn Boyd Granville (1924- )
Susan Greenfield (1951- ), British neurophysiologist (neurophysiology of the brain, popularisation of science)
Gail Hanson (1947- ) [46]
Anna J. Harrison (1912–1998), American organic chemist
Evans Hayward (1922- ) [47]
Caroline Herzenberg (1932- ) [48]
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910–1994), British X-ray crystallographer [49]
Grace Hopper (1906–1992), American computer scientist
Clara Immerwahr (1870–1915), German chemist
Shirley Jackson (physicist) (1946- ) [50]
Bertha Swirles Jeffreys (1903–1999) [51]
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Blogs from women in science: Sciencewoman
http://scienceblogs.com/sciencewoman/
This blog only lasted from Sept 2007 to Dec 2009, which is a pity because the two authors wrote well and had interesting stuff to say about their respective fields. (One was a scientist, the other an engineer.) Each entry also received plenty of comments from fellow scientists - this was a very popular blog.
In any event, the archives are still there and they definitely make for interesting reading. For example, here's a post entitled, "Negotiating the 'illegal questions' on an academic job interview"
Negotiating the "illegal questions" on an academic job interview
Category: academic adventures • basic concepts • let's talk about solutions
Posted on: August 25, 2008 5:21 PM, by Alice
So, have you been asked whether you are married or have kids on an academic job interview? Many of us have, even though the people interviewing you are not supposed to ask. What strategies have you used (or would have liked to use ;-) ) to deal with these awkward questions? Do you wear your wedding rings? Do you change the background of your computer screen before using your laptop to give your presentation? If you are part of a dual-career couple, when do you bring up your spouse to take advantage of spousal hiring opportunities?
This thread stems from a comment on this post about an invitation to tailgate on an academic job interview, and I didn't want the comment thread to derail there, so consider this comment thread open!
(Note: I don't think they're technically illegal per se, but if they're asked and you don't get the job, they can be damning evidence in an AA complaint...)
My thoughts are below the fold...
For my own part, I was asked these questions in the context of trying to be recruited to a department, and I'm afraid it scared me off the department instead of drawing me to it. I always thought the query of "can you tell me how that question pertains to my job interview here?" a graceful answer to either of the questions. I kept my wedding rings on. I have landscapes on my computer laptop background. And I brought up my husband's need for a job once the department chair called saying he wanted to make me an offer.
What are your experiences?
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Study: Women Still Act Less Smart to Attract Men
In defiance of the U of Buffalo study, Darlene Cavalier and the Science Cheerleaders rally future female scientists at the USA Science and Engineering Festival.
From Take Part.com: Study: Women Still Act Less Smart to Attract Men
If researchers at the University of Buffalo are correct, the typical female is skeptical of any male who insists that the most attractive thing about her is her mind. Sexy, brainy women, and the men turned on by them, may wish and believe that the days of ladies hiding their intelligence in deference to the male ego have faded into history, but four new studies say, “No.”
Associate professor of psychology Lora E. Park stands by her teams findings that the goal of “romantic desirability” impels women to downplay interest and aptitude in science, technology, engineering and math (the STEM subjects).
From Science Daily:
Park says, “When the goal to be romantically desirable is activated, even by subtle situational cues, women report less interest in math and science. One reason why this might be is that pursuing intelligence goals in masculine fields, such as STEM, conflicts with pursuing romantic goals associated with traditional romantic scripts and gender norms.”
Bonehead translation: If a woman engages a man’s brain at the STEM level, he won’t have enough smarts left over to keep up with her reading of the romance script.
The studies were partially funded by the National Science Foundation, which was curious (if not desperate) to find out why women, despite marked progress in education and workplace, are still underrepresented at the highest levels of STEM. The results, “Effects of Everyday Romantic Goal Pursuit on Women’s Attitudes Toward Math and Science,” will appear in September’s Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, but don’t jumble up your quadratic equations just because your subscription has lapsed.
A study is all well and good, for the study industry at least, but studies can also be dry exercises in over-explanation that dice the life out of a subject.
If the National Science Foundation truly wants more women representing at the highest STEM levels, maybe it should file the academic findings and try a few sets of high kicks and pom-poms.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Science Cheerleaders - Does it send the wrong message?
The Science Cheerleaders were founded in 2010. Sports cheerleaders who went on from that job to become scientists, have started a cheerleading squad to show girls that scientists can be sexy.
The problem is, in my opinion, that sexily clad cheerleaders are sending entirely the wrong impression to little girls.
Who watches cheerleaders? Men. Why do men watch cheerleaders? To see the breasts bob and the legs kick. But mainly the breasts bob. As well as the lovely faces, of course.
So what is the message being sent? That girls who want to be scientists must also be skinny, and pretty, and willing to show off their breasts and their belly buttons and their legs to boys and men... because it's not their brains that men care about, it's their physical appearance.
So as far as I'm concerned... good intentions...but a poor program.
Expert on gender equity among female scientists to speak Sept. 16 at MSU
From Montana State University: Expert on gender equity among female scientists to speak Sept. 16 at MSU
Virginia Valian, the author of "Why So Slow?," the acclaimed examination of why so few women occupy positions of power and prestige at universities, will headline a day of activities and conversations about gender equity set Friday, Sept. 16, at Montana State University.
Valian will give a free public lecture, "Why So Slow? A Campus Conversation About Gender in the Academy," at 1 p.m.in the SUB's Procrastinator Theater. A book signing will follow in Leigh Lounge.
Valian is a professor in the Department of Psychology in Hunter College. Her work in the college's Language Acquisition Research Center investigates the use of language in children. However, her work in cognition and gender and gender equity was spotlighted beginning in 1998 when she published "Why So Slow? The advancement of women." Since that time, she has become an expert in the advancement of women in sciences, engineering, and in higher education, called "the academy."
Valian is also co-director of the Gender Equity Project at Hunter College, which is dedicated to "demolishing the glass ceiling for academic women scientists."
"Even those of us with the best of intentions can unconsciously act in biased ways " said Jessi L. Smith, professor of psychology at MSU and project leader of the MSU National Science Foundation's ADVANCE grant proposal. Smith said the ADVANCE grant aims to transform MSU culture to one that is as inclusive as possible. "The ADVANCE team sees Dr Valian's visit as a chance to help our campus re-think gender issues in academic work settings, as a first step to confronting and preventing gender bias. We are thrilled that President (Cruzado) and Provost (Potvin) and the Women's Task Force have committed to her visit"
While visiting MSU on Sept. 16, Valian will meet with MSU President Waded Cruzado and MSU Provost Martha Potvin. She also will meet with the newly formed President's Commission on the Status of University Women. Other events include a meeting with MSU deans and departments heads to discuss equity, a workshop on professional development for women faculty members a leadership development workshop for emerging leaders on campus, as well as a reception and book discussion with students and faculty of MSU Women and Gender Studies.
"MSU is one of only four institutions nationally with both a woman president and provost. But this doesn't mean MSU is "done" and gender issues are a thing of the past," Smith said. "What it does mean is that MSU is poised for change and growth. This event will be an important reminder for all of us that everyone benefits from diversity and equality."
Valian's visit is sponsored by the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, the College of Letters and Science and the Office of Affirmative Action.
For more information about Valian's visit, go to http://www.montana.edu/lettersandscience/Temp/virginia_valian.html.
Virginia Valian, the author of "Why So Slow?," the acclaimed examination of why so few women occupy positions of power and prestige at universities, will headline a day of activities and conversations about gender equity set Friday, Sept. 16, at Montana State University.
Valian will give a free public lecture, "Why So Slow? A Campus Conversation About Gender in the Academy," at 1 p.m.in the SUB's Procrastinator Theater. A book signing will follow in Leigh Lounge.
Valian is a professor in the Department of Psychology in Hunter College. Her work in the college's Language Acquisition Research Center investigates the use of language in children. However, her work in cognition and gender and gender equity was spotlighted beginning in 1998 when she published "Why So Slow? The advancement of women." Since that time, she has become an expert in the advancement of women in sciences, engineering, and in higher education, called "the academy."
Valian is also co-director of the Gender Equity Project at Hunter College, which is dedicated to "demolishing the glass ceiling for academic women scientists."
"Even those of us with the best of intentions can unconsciously act in biased ways " said Jessi L. Smith, professor of psychology at MSU and project leader of the MSU National Science Foundation's ADVANCE grant proposal. Smith said the ADVANCE grant aims to transform MSU culture to one that is as inclusive as possible. "The ADVANCE team sees Dr Valian's visit as a chance to help our campus re-think gender issues in academic work settings, as a first step to confronting and preventing gender bias. We are thrilled that President (Cruzado) and Provost (Potvin) and the Women's Task Force have committed to her visit"
While visiting MSU on Sept. 16, Valian will meet with MSU President Waded Cruzado and MSU Provost Martha Potvin. She also will meet with the newly formed President's Commission on the Status of University Women. Other events include a meeting with MSU deans and departments heads to discuss equity, a workshop on professional development for women faculty members a leadership development workshop for emerging leaders on campus, as well as a reception and book discussion with students and faculty of MSU Women and Gender Studies.
"MSU is one of only four institutions nationally with both a woman president and provost. But this doesn't mean MSU is "done" and gender issues are a thing of the past," Smith said. "What it does mean is that MSU is poised for change and growth. This event will be an important reminder for all of us that everyone benefits from diversity and equality."
Valian's visit is sponsored by the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, the College of Letters and Science and the Office of Affirmative Action.
For more information about Valian's visit, go to http://www.montana.edu/lettersandscience/Temp/virginia_valian.html.
Braintree’s Liz O’Day uses fashion to show that science is cool
From The Milford Daily News: Braintree’s Liz O’Day uses fashion to show that science is cool
Cancer researcher Liz O’Day is so busy that she hardly has time to do her laundry. Instead, she chooses clean T-shirts from the stock of her online store, Lizzard Fashion, contained in cartons in her Boston apartment.
O’Day, a chemical biology doctoral candidate at Harvard University and winner of a National Science Foundation Fellowship, designed the intriguing science-inspired images on the eco-friendly shirts. The shirts look hip like ones from Urban Outfitters, but their explanatory tags express the scientific mind and humor of O’Day. Her mission is to “make geek chic” by using fashion to show that science is cool and exciting.
“To own a fashion company may seem a bit bizarre for me, but I’ve always loved fashion,” said O’Day, who grew up in Braintree. “There’s a lot of parallels between fashion and science. It’s all about being creative and not being afraid to take risks.”
While she has pursued science her entire academic life, she stepped into fashion inadvertently.
“I’ve always drawn, and science started to seep into my drawings, reflections of things I was working on in the lab,” she explained. “People said, ‘You should put that on a shirt.’ I decided to go for it and start a company.”
That can-do spirit is reflected in her T-shirts. One has a web of regenerating lizard neurons. The words Team Lizzard and Sapere Aude (meaning “dare to know”) are printed around it.
“If a lizard loses its tail, it grows back because nerve cells regenerate,” she said. “Life can throw a lot on you, but if you hold your ground, you’ll recover.”
Apoptosis, a shirt with three skulls and bones and the words Bid, Bad and Bax (which refer to proteins), is about the process of programmed cell death.
“This is an incredibly complex pathway and delicately balanced – too little cell death and diseases like cancer ... can occur,” explains the tag.
The shirts, made mostly at plants in the Southeast, are either made from organic cotton, bamboo, regenerated cotton, or recycled plastic bottles or bottle tops. They are available online for $22 and at gift shops at the Harvard Museum of Natural History and at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. O’Day also makes custom shirts for biotech companies and conferences. A portion of the profits goes to cancer research and computers for orphans in Mexico.
O’Day has run the company with help from her father, a lawyer, and her brothers, Chris, 23, of Boston and Rob, 29, of Nantucket. Now a year old, the company has grown enough to support the hiring of a full-time business manager.
“I never started it to make money,” she said. “It was more driven by a social mission and a fun way to express myself.”
O’Day had a huge learning curve when she started Lizzard Fashion. She had never taken a business course or had any business experience.
When a scientist/entrepreneur friend suggested she needed a venture capitalist, she at first was confused.
“VC to me means voltage channel, and I’m nodding and smiling and thinking, ‘What are we talking about?,” she said. “I had thought, ‘Oh, I’m a clever girl, and I can learn what to do.’ But the business world is a whole different language.”
So she did what she does in science – research the answers to her questions. She got information online and sought advice from Walter Salmon, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, who, along with MBA student Jake Kirsch, unexpectedly offered to work with her on the start-up.
“I am so grateful,” she said. “People really want to help others if you give them a chance.”
There seems to be something about O’Day that inspires people to pitch in. She is sociable, enthusiastic and optimistic, articulate in her vision for the difference people can make.
Last year, she marshaled Harvard computer scientists to install educational software on donated computers. Since she started Proyecto Chispa (Project Spark), 90 computers have been shipped to orphanages in Haiti and Mexico, where she has sponsored a 13-year-old girl for three years.
“At Harvard, we go through computers so quickly and sometimes we use them as doorstops,” she said. “I thought what if we could get them where they’re needed?”
As an undergraduate at Boston College, she recruited fellow female scientists to mentor high school girls, because she saw too many young women quell their interest in science because of the geek stereotype. The program, Women in Science and Technology, continues to inspire six years later.
O’Day can thrive on only four hours of sleep a night, which partially explains her prodigious energy. But her passion is what really fuels it.
“When I do something, I tend to do it full force,” said O’Day, who began pursuing a doctorate four years ago. “It’s unusual to do that, but I thought I had a unique opportunity to do something cool, and it’s been so much fun.”
O’Day knows personally how science can save lives. When she was 6, her brother Rob was diagnosed with neuroblastoma and spent two years in and out of Children’s Hospital in Boston receiving the treatment that cured him.
“I remember how terrified and pissed off I was,” she recalled. “I wanted him to be better and didn’t want this suffering going on.”
In recent years, she has faced her own pain, resulting from what she called bullying by a fellow scientist, who she said has repeatedly attacked her personally and academically. That has motivated her to speak in public about bullying.
“It has hurt a lot. I tell students, ‘You’re going to find yourself in some argument that doesn’t make sense to you, and you will be baited to behave badly,” said O’Day, who has spoken to students in Braintree and other communities. “I say, ‘Hold your ground, don’t quit or lose your integrity.’”
When O’Day finishes her doctoral program in the next year or so, she hopes to get a post-doctoral fellowship and eventually become a university professor.
“I’m thankful to be surrounded by scientists in the forefront of cancer research where we’re making discoveries all the time,” she said. “I know it can sound naive, but I believe we will cure cancer one day.”
Proyecto Crispa will accept volunteers and donations of Mac and PC laptops the first Saturday of each month at Harvard Medical School, starting in September. For more information, contact chispa@lizzardfashion.com or go to www.lizzardfashion.com.
Cancer researcher Liz O’Day is so busy that she hardly has time to do her laundry. Instead, she chooses clean T-shirts from the stock of her online store, Lizzard Fashion, contained in cartons in her Boston apartment.
O’Day, a chemical biology doctoral candidate at Harvard University and winner of a National Science Foundation Fellowship, designed the intriguing science-inspired images on the eco-friendly shirts. The shirts look hip like ones from Urban Outfitters, but their explanatory tags express the scientific mind and humor of O’Day. Her mission is to “make geek chic” by using fashion to show that science is cool and exciting.
“To own a fashion company may seem a bit bizarre for me, but I’ve always loved fashion,” said O’Day, who grew up in Braintree. “There’s a lot of parallels between fashion and science. It’s all about being creative and not being afraid to take risks.”
While she has pursued science her entire academic life, she stepped into fashion inadvertently.
“I’ve always drawn, and science started to seep into my drawings, reflections of things I was working on in the lab,” she explained. “People said, ‘You should put that on a shirt.’ I decided to go for it and start a company.”
That can-do spirit is reflected in her T-shirts. One has a web of regenerating lizard neurons. The words Team Lizzard and Sapere Aude (meaning “dare to know”) are printed around it.
“If a lizard loses its tail, it grows back because nerve cells regenerate,” she said. “Life can throw a lot on you, but if you hold your ground, you’ll recover.”
Apoptosis, a shirt with three skulls and bones and the words Bid, Bad and Bax (which refer to proteins), is about the process of programmed cell death.
“This is an incredibly complex pathway and delicately balanced – too little cell death and diseases like cancer ... can occur,” explains the tag.
The shirts, made mostly at plants in the Southeast, are either made from organic cotton, bamboo, regenerated cotton, or recycled plastic bottles or bottle tops. They are available online for $22 and at gift shops at the Harvard Museum of Natural History and at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. O’Day also makes custom shirts for biotech companies and conferences. A portion of the profits goes to cancer research and computers for orphans in Mexico.
O’Day has run the company with help from her father, a lawyer, and her brothers, Chris, 23, of Boston and Rob, 29, of Nantucket. Now a year old, the company has grown enough to support the hiring of a full-time business manager.
“I never started it to make money,” she said. “It was more driven by a social mission and a fun way to express myself.”
O’Day had a huge learning curve when she started Lizzard Fashion. She had never taken a business course or had any business experience.
When a scientist/entrepreneur friend suggested she needed a venture capitalist, she at first was confused.
“VC to me means voltage channel, and I’m nodding and smiling and thinking, ‘What are we talking about?,” she said. “I had thought, ‘Oh, I’m a clever girl, and I can learn what to do.’ But the business world is a whole different language.”
So she did what she does in science – research the answers to her questions. She got information online and sought advice from Walter Salmon, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, who, along with MBA student Jake Kirsch, unexpectedly offered to work with her on the start-up.
“I am so grateful,” she said. “People really want to help others if you give them a chance.”
There seems to be something about O’Day that inspires people to pitch in. She is sociable, enthusiastic and optimistic, articulate in her vision for the difference people can make.
Last year, she marshaled Harvard computer scientists to install educational software on donated computers. Since she started Proyecto Chispa (Project Spark), 90 computers have been shipped to orphanages in Haiti and Mexico, where she has sponsored a 13-year-old girl for three years.
“At Harvard, we go through computers so quickly and sometimes we use them as doorstops,” she said. “I thought what if we could get them where they’re needed?”
As an undergraduate at Boston College, she recruited fellow female scientists to mentor high school girls, because she saw too many young women quell their interest in science because of the geek stereotype. The program, Women in Science and Technology, continues to inspire six years later.
O’Day can thrive on only four hours of sleep a night, which partially explains her prodigious energy. But her passion is what really fuels it.
“When I do something, I tend to do it full force,” said O’Day, who began pursuing a doctorate four years ago. “It’s unusual to do that, but I thought I had a unique opportunity to do something cool, and it’s been so much fun.”
O’Day knows personally how science can save lives. When she was 6, her brother Rob was diagnosed with neuroblastoma and spent two years in and out of Children’s Hospital in Boston receiving the treatment that cured him.
“I remember how terrified and pissed off I was,” she recalled. “I wanted him to be better and didn’t want this suffering going on.”
In recent years, she has faced her own pain, resulting from what she called bullying by a fellow scientist, who she said has repeatedly attacked her personally and academically. That has motivated her to speak in public about bullying.
“It has hurt a lot. I tell students, ‘You’re going to find yourself in some argument that doesn’t make sense to you, and you will be baited to behave badly,” said O’Day, who has spoken to students in Braintree and other communities. “I say, ‘Hold your ground, don’t quit or lose your integrity.’”
When O’Day finishes her doctoral program in the next year or so, she hopes to get a post-doctoral fellowship and eventually become a university professor.
“I’m thankful to be surrounded by scientists in the forefront of cancer research where we’re making discoveries all the time,” she said. “I know it can sound naive, but I believe we will cure cancer one day.”
Proyecto Crispa will accept volunteers and donations of Mac and PC laptops the first Saturday of each month at Harvard Medical School, starting in September. For more information, contact chispa@lizzardfashion.com or go to www.lizzardfashion.com.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
