• Question: Because it is international women's day, who is your favourite female scientist and why?

    Asked by anon-209477 to Verity, Sergio, Nick, Maria, David, Annette on 8 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Maria Walach

      Maria Walach answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      Oooh great question!!! I have quite a few personal heroes… 🙃 so, I don’t have any ONE favourite – sorry! I think Ada Lovelace’s work on the modern computer was groundbreaking and made a big difference to science. Mary Sommerville and Caroline Herschel were the two first female members of the Royal Astronomical Society (which I am also a part of), so they were really important to my field of study. I am a big fan of Mary Sommerville in general – she did some great writings and work on space science, the universe, as well as geography/geology and biology that lots of work has been based on since! She also wrote some poetry on the science that fascinated her, so I think she must have been an interesting human and I would have loved to meet her.
      I also find the work done by Margaret Hamilton really inspiring: When she was quite early in her career (in her 30s), she wrote the computer program for the Apollo-11 mission to the moon! Some of that computer code is still being used by NASA today!
      There are also a lot of women in my field that I work with everyday and they have inspired me at different stages in my career and provide inspiration and support every day! 💁

    • Photo: David Whitworth

      David Whitworth answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      This is a really good question and a hard one to answer because there are soo many brilliant and inspirational female scientists out there! We even have some is this zone 😉

      For me personally, we have people like Hedy Lamarr, who was not just a world famous Holywood actress, but also key to the inventtion of radio-guidance systems. Marie Curie who literally put her life on the line for science (though she didn’t know it at the time). Ada Lovelace for her work on modern computing. All the human computers for the early Appollo missions that sent humanity into space, but especially Katherine Johnson, a black lady in 1950’s and 60’s America that broke all the rules and worked out the flight trajectories for the space shuttles to break Earths atmosphere (which is not as simple as fly straight up unfortunately).

      There is also someone else, and that is my PhD supervisor, Dr Rowan Smith, on a daily basis she blows my mind with how amazing she is. She is younger than me and yet world renown in our field, and inspires me to be even half as good as she is.

      The list is very long but hope there are a few people there to help inspire all the young female scientists out there

    • Photo: Annette Raffan

      Annette Raffan answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      I think my favourite female scientists are:
      1. Jane Goodall – in my opinion, she led the way for international conservation and brought light into one of our closest ancestors.
      2. Rachel Carson – she has to be my top I think. It was her who led me really to be passionate about the environment. She wrote the infamous ‘Silent Spring’ which uncovered the horrors of the pesticide DDT.
      3. Marie Curie – I find it so sad that she died with little respect from her male scientists and died of exposure from the radiation that she so importantly researched. Amazing lady.

    • Photo: Nick Werren

      Nick Werren answered on 11 Mar 2019:

      I think you asked this during the live chat and my response was Emmi Noether because of her pioneering work in theoretical physics.

      She had a penetrating view into the underlying symmetries that created everything we know today. When I first learnt of her work it blew my mind. Imagine looking into a mirror, it gives you a perfect reflection of reality, everything is the same, this is symmetry. If you hit that mirror with a hammer then you will “break” the symmetry. This breaking in symmetry provides new perspective and angles on the world that was once the same.

      Emmi Noether identified certain characteristics about the universe that depended on symmetries AND she identified the things that stay the same even when that symmetry breaks. This is what holds the universe together, symmetry, but also provides us with the great variety of fields, particles, and all the other differences in physics that are super important but we take for granted.

      She was amazing. And there are other great scientists out there too, and many of them are great women from different backgrounds and countries all doing amazing things even in the face of sexism and inequality.

    • Photo: Verity Woodhall

      Verity Woodhall answered on 12 Mar 2019:

      There are so many and I agree with everyone else’s picks – one person that hasn’t ben mentioned yet is Rosalind Franklin – her work was instrumental in discovering the structure of DNA and she didn’t get the recognition she deserved in her lifetime or for many years afterwards.

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