Encouraging women in science

From IowaNow:  Encouraging women in science

With 100 billion nerve cells interconnected via a vast network of neural pathways, the complexity of the human brain is awe-inspiring.
Your brain serves as command center for your body’s vital functions, houses your future hopes and cherished memories, and serves as the seat of consciousness through which you draw purpose and passion.
Shreya Ahuja marvels at how the human brain executes these countless functions, especially after holding one in her hands.
“It was a lot lighter than I thought it would be,” Ahuja says. “For the number of capabilities the brain has, it is pretty amazing it only weighs three pounds.”
Ahuja and Emily Wechsler, 16-year-old high school students at The Hockaday School in Dallas, received an intensive two-week introduction to neuroscience at the University of Iowa last July. Melissa Duff, faculty member in the UI’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Neuroscience, hosted the students in her laboratory as part of this pilot program. Duff holds a faculty appointment in Communication Sciences and Disorders in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
The Hockaday School—an independent college preparatory day and boarding school for girls—has established an informal partnership with the UI allowing its students to gain summer research experience in UI laboratories. The relationship between the two schools was initiated by Hockaday science teacher Katie Croft, who earned her doctorate in neuroscience at the UI in 2009.
“Melissa is a perfect choice to work with. Her research is cutting edge, very accessible, and very interdisciplinary,” Croft says. “She’s had lots of experience mentoring students with all different abilities. Furthermore, she’s a perfect role model of a young, successful female scientist. I want our students to have an appreciation for science and feel like they have a good understanding of the real scientific process, which is best taught by doing it.”
Duff, who was a postdoctoral scholar in neurology at the UI when Croft was a graduate student, enjoyed introducing the young women to the world of neuroscience.
While at the UI, the students gained hands-on experience working alongside Duff. The students observed patients with neurological disease, read basic neuroscience research papers, assisted on a project in Duff’s lab, and learned more about traumatic brain injury.
“I’ve never mentored 16-year-old ladies, so I was intrigued about how this research experience would look for younger women,” says Duff, director of the Iowa Traumatic Brain Injury Registry. “As a woman in science and the mother of a little girl, it was fantastic. We talked a lot about the science process, the experience of going to graduate school, and what careers in science look like.”
Ahuja and Wechsler presented a poster about their Iowa experience at the Society for Neuroscience’s 2012 annual meeting in New Orleans in October. Their presentation was part of the conference session Teaching of Neuroscience: K-12.
“The poster focused on what we learned and the partnership between The Hockaday School and the UI,” Ahuja says. “It also was about how we plan to carry this experience to Hockaday.”
Both students agreed that the most valuable aspect of their research experience at Iowa was the people.
“We talked to graduate students, Ph.D.s, undergraduates,” Ahuja says. “Picking up on those conversations throughout the two weeks expanded our knowledge tenfold.”
“The most important thing we did was talk to all different people. They’re who made this experience great,” Wechsler says. “This was probably the coolest thing I’ve ever done. Being here and doing the things we did probably has changed what I will do later on in life. Now, I might do neuroscience because I absolutely love it.”
Barbara Fishel, dean of studies and director of the Hockaday Research Program, wants Hockadaystudents to participate in authentic scientific investigation, and says the UI is a great place for that to happen.
“(In our research program), we’ve seen a maturing in our girls’ scientific reasoning and understanding of the process of science, which enriches their learning experience,” Fishel says. “We would like to make this partnership a formal partnership. This has potential to be a flourishing long-term model for us.”
In addition to presenting a poster at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, Ahuja wrote an essay about traumatic brain injury for the International Science Essay Competition at Dartmouth College.
Ahuja’s entry—“Humpty Dumpty without the King’s Men”—placed second out of more than 80 submissions from more than 20 countries and has been selected for publication in the Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science.
In her essay, she calls for more researchers, funding, and awareness to be given to patients with traumatic brain injury—an “invisible” condition that is complicated to diagnose and treat. The essay was inspired by the two weeks studying neuroscience at the UI.
“I wanted to go into medicine, and I had been leaning toward surgery,” Ahuja says. “When I came to the University of Iowa, I knew nothing about neuroscience. This experience opened up a whole new world of research. Now, there are so many more possibilities for me to look at.”
Those words bring a smile to Duff’s face.
“What’s exciting about this partnership is the mission of The Hockaday School to give young women opportunities in science, coupled with the investment to make neuroscience more accessible and more attractive to younger and younger people,” Duff says.

 

Book recounts activism, struggles of U.S. women scientists

From Chronicle Online: Book recounts activism, struggles of U.S. women scientists

For four decades, Cornell science historian Margaret Rossiter has been researching, writing and publishing on the history of women scientists in America. She started in 1972, when everyone assured her that there had never been any women scientists in the United States, or anywhere, she said.
"Not even Madame Curie counted. But the more I looked, the more I found," said Rossiter, the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History of Science.
Rossiter has completed a trilogy on the topic, with her third book focusing on women scientists' most recent pioneering efforts and contributions. In "Women Scientists in America: Forging a New World Since 1972" (Johns Hopkins University Press), she guides us from the "rather quiet, mundane, even ladylike" emergence of female researchers' first interest groups to their later direct confrontations.
Central to this story are the struggles and successes of "clever, astute, hardworking and determined" women scientists in the era of affirmative action. Scores of previously isolated women scientists were suddenly energized to do things they had rarely, if ever, done before: form organizations and recruit new members, start rosters and projects, put out newsletters, confront authorities and even fight (and win) lawsuits. Rossiter follows the major activities of these groups in several fields -- from engineering to the physical, biological and social sciences -- and their campaigns to raise consciousness, see legislation enforced, lobby for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and serve as watchdogs of the media.
The 528-page book also covers the changing employment picture in the federal government, academia, industry and the nonprofit sector and discusses contemporary battles to increase the number of women in the National Academy of Sciences and of women presidents of scientific societies.
Rossiter mined nearly 100 previously unexamined archival collections and more than 50 oral histories to write the book.
The previous books in her series are "Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940" and "Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-72," also published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The former won an award for the best book by an American woman from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. The latter was the winner in 1997 of the History of Science Society's Pfizer Award for Outstanding Book in the History of Science.

Women in Science: Florence Bascom 1862-1945

From Daily Kos:  Women in Science: Florence Bascom 1862-1945

When the subject of geology is raised it is only recently that women usually get some mention (although there were more in the past than is generally thought.) It took the efforts of a very unusual person to break the ground for other women. Florence Bascom's work resulted in our knowledge of Appalachian geology being to a large extent defined by a women, who was also a top-notch scientist and recognized as such even fairly early in her career. She was in fact the first professional female geologist in the United States.  Although not the first woman to obtain a Ph.D. in geology (Mary Holms did that at the University of Michigan in 1888), she was the first to be hired as a geologist by the United States Geological Survey and, not only the first, but the sole woman listed in the premier issue of  "American Men of Science" in 1906.
Florence Bascom was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1862, during the Civil War. Her mother was active in the women's voting rights movement and her father, who was a professor of rhetoric, supported equal opportunities for women.  She was awarded a Ph.D. by Johns Hopkins University in 1893, after having earned two bachelor's degrees at the University of Wisconsin in 1882 and 1884. She was able to go to the University of Wisconsin because when her father became president in 1874, one of the first of his actions (1875) was to admit women to classes. She also was awarded a master's degree from the same institution before going on to Johns Hopkins.  Bascom went on to establish herself as one of the formost geologists and experts in crystallography in the country. Her life was a series of being the first woman in a number of other geological areas. In 1901, she became the first woman speak at a meeting of the Geological Society of Washington. In 1924 she was elected as the first woman on the Council of the Geological Society of America and became the society's first woman officer. She published more than 40 articles and became recognized as an expert especially in the geology of the Appalachian Mountains.
Not only a researcher, she taught at several colleges and universities, including one for blacks and Native Americans, finally being appointed to teach geology, then considered to be a secondary subject, at Bryn Mawr in 1895. She founded the geology department there and made geology into a respected discipline at the college. The graduate program that she developed trained the majority of women geologists in the first third of the Twentieth Century. She also built up the geological collection.  Bascom was a demanding, but highly respected teacher and was a pioneer in both research and instruction. She deserves much more than being virtually unknown except to those in the field.
Internet References
Florence Bascom, Pioneer Geologist http://www.usgs.gov/...
Florence Bascom http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Rock Stars: A Life of Firsts: Florence Bascom http://www.gsahist.org/...

 

Women scientists join the men on Antarctica mission to collect meteorites

From Cordis:  Women scientists join the men on Antarctica mission to collect meteorites

A team of women scientists will be joining their male counterparts on a mission to collect meteorites in Antarctica, from 3 December until 12 December.

The meteorite research team consists of five Belgian scientists, led by Vinciane Debaille (Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Laboratoire G-Time, Faculty of Science), and three Japanese scientists from the National Institute for Polar Research (NIPR) in Tokyo.

This mission follows the success of a previous Belgo-Japanese collaboration, the Belgian SAMBA team (Search for Antarctic Meteorites, Belgian Approach), with the collection of over 800 meteorites in the Sør Rondane Mountains region. Now they are set for their latest mission to take on the Nansen blue ice field, to the south of the Princess Elisabeth station, in Antarctica.

Meteorites provide valuable information on the 4.5 billion years of evolution of the solar system and planets, including Earth. Studying these helps researchers to better understand the formation and age of the solar system, the planets, asteroids and comets. Micrometeorites constitute the largest fraction of the extraterrestrial material that falls on Earth, totalling an average of approximately 40,000 tonnes per year.

The systematic collection of meteorites, using Ski-doo snowmobiles, will concentrate on the southern and eastern sections of the Nansen blue ice field, where the scientists hope to find a piece of Mars or the Moon.

However, their research may be hampered by the fierce weather conditions expected in Antarctica. Climatic conditions are set to be very difficult, with temperatures in the region of -20 degrees Celcius, and with an average wind speed of 50 km/h giving a perceived temperature of -37 degrees Celcius. These inclement weather conditions will dictate the pace of work, as strong blizzards can sometimes halt all specimen gathering for several days at a time.

During the previous mission in 2010-2011, after searching for 13 days, 4 to 6 hours a day, a team of 5 people had found a total of 218 meteorites, varying in size from 1 to 15 cm. However, it was the types of meteorites found that proved exceptional. Among the 218 meteorites, two rare types of achondrite (stony meteorites that attest to magmatic activity in the solar system) and a carbonaceous chondrite (the most primitive meteorites having a similar composition to that of the initial material of the solar nebula) were identified.

Their mission will be carried out as part of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and ULB research programme, run by Philippe Claeys (VUB) and Vinciane Debaille (ULB). Funding for the mission has come from the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO) and logistical support is provided by the International Polar Foundation (IPF).

In 2010, Steven Goderis (VUB) and Vinciane Debaille (ULB) were awarded the InBev-Baillet Latour Antarctica Fellowship to carry out a detailed study of micrometeorites in order to better understand the formation of the planets and the development and evolution of our solar system. Recent studies have shown that micrometeorites can accumulate in the cracks and interstices of the nunataks in the Frontier Mountains, Queen Maud Land, Antarctica.

For more information, please visit:

Expedition blog:
http://antarctica.oma.be/

Université libre de Bruxelles:
http://ulb.ac.be

 

Teen Starts Campaign for Gender Neutral Easy Bake Oven

From ABC News:  Teen Starts Campaign for Gender Neutral Easy Bake Oven
Like most four year olds,  Gavyn Boscio knows what he wants for Christmas — a dinosaur and an Easy Bake Oven.
But the budding chef and his 13-year-old sister McKenna Pope, weren’t thrilled to find out the only colors the Hasbro oven comes in are pink and purple or that the ads and packaging don’t show a single boy.
McKenna decided to take the issue into her own hands and began a petition on Change.org asking Hasbro to alter its packaging and color options. To date, the petition has garnered nearly 10,000 signatures.
“He should know that it’s okay for him to go against societal norms and gender roles,” McKenna said.
Hasbro did not immediately return requests for comment on whether they plan to make the Easy Bake Oven in any other colors.
Jeff Gardere, a child psychologist, said gender neutral toys are crucial to child development.
“In order for children to not face limitations in their occupational choices, we need to present them with gender neutral toys,” he said.
VIDEO: Girl, 4, Blasts Companies for Pushing Girls to Buy ‘Pink Stuff’
This holiday season, overly-gender-specific toys are a hot button issue.  The Butterfly Beauty Shop from Lego’s Friends line has drawn the ire of a group called the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.
They’ve nominated it for one of their “TOADY” (Toys Oppressive And Destructive to Young Children) award, saying it’s “so jam-packed with condescending stereotypes it would even make Barbie blush.”
Lego did not immediately respond to a request for comment.  But previously, in response to the criticism which began late last year, Lego officials said in a statement that their “goal with LEGO Friends is to engage more girls in the positive benefits of construction play.”
Read: Top 5 Nominees for 2012′s Worst Toy
In contrast, in Sweden, the Top Toys group just published a catalog of gender-neutral toy images, showing girls playing with toy guns and boys with blow dryers.
The company is even selling a blue and green kitchen, and depicts a budding chef, a boy like Gavyn, using it.

 

Top secret Doctor Who script found by student in taxi on night out

Okay, not really science related, but interesting!

From Wales Online :  Top secret Doctor Who script found by student in taxi on night out

If you found a top secret script for a new episode of one of TV’s most popular shows, would you be able to hand it straight back without releasing any spoilers?
That’s exactly what one Cardiff student did after finding a Doctor Who script in the back of a Cardiff taxi.
Hannah Durham stumbled upon the script for a forthcoming episode of the sci-fi show during a night out with friends.

Producers, scriptwriters and fans of Doctor Who thanked her for returning the missing script and preventing precious plot details from being leaked online.
Hannah told WalesOnline she was unaware of the significance of the find until she was bombarded with praise from the show’s “Whovian” fans.
She said: “I had never even heard of a Whovian before. I have had so many tweets from people thanking me for returning it – it has just been crazy.”
She added: “I like Doctor Who but I haven’t seen it in a while, so the whole significance passed me by a bit.”

Hannah discovered the script on Halloween night at about 10pm after getting into a black cab with friends in Cathays.
Dressed as a skeleton, Hannah spotted the top-secret script, entitled The Last Cyberman, tucked inside a seat pocket.
The 20-year-old said she placed the script in her bag and only fully realised it was a Doctor Who script the next day.
Hannah said she wasn’t tempted to read the contents – or sell it.
She said: “I glanced at it enough to see that it was a script and I saw the title and everything, but I didn’t feel the urge to read through it or copy it or anything.”
Hannah set about attempting to return the script to show bosses by e-mailing and tweeting scriptwriters and producers.
Her friend Ben Rowling, a fan of Doctor Who, helped her get in touch with the show’s production team.
Cardiff University student Hannah said: “He was more excited than me to be honest. It made his life really. He was just really happy that he could help out.”
She eventually arranged to hand in the script at the BBC’s Roath Lock studios in Cardiff Bay.
The final year English Literature student’s good deed was widely praised.
And scriptwriter Neil Gaiman, who wrote the episode, personally offered his thanks.
He wrote on Twitter: “A world-sized pat on the back to Hannah who found a copy of the Dr Who I wrote, an actress left in a taxi, and returned it safe & sound.”
Hannah said she hoped the BBC would be able to offer her some work experience after returning the Doctor Who script.
What can Doctor Who fans expect from The Last Cyberman?
Doctor Who villains the Cybermen will make a reappearance when the show returns for a run of eight episodes in Spring 2013.
An all-star cast has been lined up to appear in the episode, including Eastenders actress Tamzin Outhwaite and Warwick Davis, the star of Ricky Gervais’ sitcom Life's Too Short.
Jason Watkins, from Being Human and Lark Rise to Candleford, will also appear among the stellar cast.
The official Doctor Who team blog said the guest stars would portray “a band of misfits on a mysterious planet”.

Courtney Stevens assigns outreach projects to inspire her students

From WIllamette University:  Courtney Stevens assigns outreach projects to inspire her students

Sydney Moberg ’13 was nervous about dissecting a sheep brain. But once she held a scalpel in her hand, she discovered the only thing she didn’t enjoy about it was the smell.
“I was fascinated by how the brain looked, how it felt and where each individual part was located,” says Moberg, a psychology major. “When it came time to choose an outreach project, I knew I wanted to teach a brain dissection lab. I wanted other students to have the same type of experience I did.”
Through professor Courtney Stevens’ Cognitive Neuroscience course at Willamette University, students pick an outreach project that connects neuroscience to real-world issues, and in doing so, act out the university’s motto, “Not unto ourselves alone are we born.”
Some, like Moberg, have helped high school students dissect a sheep brain, while others have taught a brain class at Bush Elementary School or discussed the effects of drug addiction with incarcerated teens.
Through community outreach, Stevens hopes to link neuroscience content to her students’ individual career goals and interests. She also wants to connect her students with neuroscience content and resources they can access after graduating.
“Some students come in not believing that cognitive neuroscience is relevant to their future,” Stevens says. “But as they begin to work on their projects, they see the connections between neuroscience and the real world.”
Stevens’ program has been adopted in classes at the University of Oregon. Her program also received praise from the Society of Neuroscience, which awarded Stevens the Junior Faculty Next Generation Award in October for outstanding contributions to public communication, education and outreach about neuroscience.
“For me, the beauty of the outreach project is that students take ownership of the material,” Stevens says. “They choose what they will do. They’re the ones making connections within the community.”

Community Partnerships

Stevens developed the Cognitive Neuroscience course in 2008. Back then, outreach activities were relatively uncommon in undergraduate, neuroscience classes — and they still are today.
“For large classes of 300 students, there would be concerns about quality control,” Stevens says. “There’d be little incentive for faculty members to do this because it’s too much of a burden.”
But in Stevens’ class, not only is there no need for outside funding, students absorb the responsibility.
First, they pick a neuroscience project that interests them. The project features a tangible component that may be evaluated — such as a video or a set of lesson plans.
Students then develop an evaluation rubric that describes what A-, B- and C-level work looks like. Prior to implementing their projects, they submit a project proposal, which Stevens evaluates to help them refine their plans.
When delivered, supervising teachers and participants help grade the presentations, worth up to 10 percent of the students’ final grade.
So far, more than 75 Willamette undergraduates — most of whom are psychology, exercise science and biology majors — have taken the upper-division course.
Two of these students are Linnea Hardlund ’13 and Jennifer Wade ’13, who taught a brain class at Bush Elementary. Through pictures and demonstrations, they showcased the lobes of the brain and the functions of each lobe.
As part of the interactive class, the primary students colored worksheets on the brain and ate a “brainfood” snack of frozen blueberries, which stimulates healthy brain function.
Hardlund and Wade say the outreach project not only challenged them to think critically, it forced them to find creative ways to share their knowledge.
“Professor Stevens’ class was one of the best I have taken at Willamette,” says Hardlund, a biology major. “The outreach project allowed us to take our knowledge from the classroom and bring it full circle in a real-life situation.”

Making a Difference

Maxx Kaplan ’11 also enjoyed Stevens’ class. For his project, he and another student gave a PowerPoint presentation to youths incarcerated at the Hillcrest Youth Correctional Facility in Salem.
The presentation focused on the neural effects of drugs and the biological explanations for cravings and addiction.
“We wanted the youths to come away with an understanding that the brain is a growing, changing organ, and that they weren’t necessarily doomed by their family history or past experiences, ” says Kaplan, a psychology major who had interned at the facility.
For Kaplan, seeing the teens make connections between his presentation and their own experiences proves Stevens understands the value of community outreach.
“Professor Stevens knows what she’s talking about, and everyone in the classroom knows it,” he says.
Going forward, Stevens plans to continue soliciting feedback from students and area partners to improve the outreach activities.
“I want my students to do more than read a textbook and take an exam. I want them to be creative and to take ownership of the material,” Stevens says. “They’ve done that. Some of their work has blown me away.”