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5 More Great Scientists and Engineers

(who also happen to be women)

#5GreatSciEng

As mentioned in the introduction this post grew (and grew - into 3 posts) from my experiences in Outreach. One of the schools at a TEAtime lecture was so enthused by the effects of freezing things with liquid nitrogen (such as tennis balls, bananas, aliens etc.) that they asked me to come to their school and freeze some more things. Having already wowed them with the 5 Greats I now take with me everywhere, I decided to prove a point and bring 5 more with me. And if I go again, I'll bring 5 more...and 5 more...and...

Ida Noddack née Tacke (1896-1978)

Her team discovered the two 'missing' elements of the periodic table in 1925 and she was reportedly the first scientist the postulate the idea of Nuclear Fission and the concepts behind it. However her story is one of great controversy and it is only recently being acknowledged how important her discoveries were - and how great a scientist she was.

Lise Meitner (1878-1968)

Partially driven by the arms races spurred by the two World Wars, Nucelar Fission was a hotly pursued subject. Lise Meitner, despite having support and funding restricted due to the fact she was a woman, was the first not only to publish the term 'Nuclear Fission' but also to come up with a working, theoretical explanation. Her contribution was downplayed, however, by Otto Hahn, the chemist in whose laboratory she ran the tests that proved her theory. Hahn went on to receive the Nobel in Chemistry for the work while Meitner was all but forgotten.

Attempts were later made to rectify this error by jointly awarding Meitner, Hahn and a third scientist, Fritz Strassman the Enrico Fermi Award and, posthumously, naming element 109 'meitnerieum' (Mt) after her.  Today she is recognised as one of the pioneering scientists of nuclear research.

Grace Hopper (1906-1992)

Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Murray Hopper was one of the first programmers of the Havard Mark I computer and a pioneer in computer science. She was the first to put forward the idea of machine-independent programming languages and also came up with the term 'de-bugging' after removing and actual moth from a computer. As well as being renowned as a technical genius, her success also lends itself to her immense marketing, political and business skills.

Hedy Lamarr (1914-200)

Hollywood actress ($3000/week MGM contract on first arriving in Hollywood)

Patent for 'secret communication system'

Bouillon cubes inventor

Not your average extracts from a CV. Yet they all belong to one person, Hedy Lamarr. Her patent (mentioned above) intended for torpedo guidance systems later became a key part of the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS technology. Her genius revolutionised telecommunications  - and her acting roles revolutionised the film industry.

Amalia Ballarino

Amalia Ballarino is leading the team behind the HTS (high temperature superconducting) Power Transmission Cables Project, as part of the LHC high luminosity upgrade at CERN. The LHC is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator performing some of the most cutting edge experiments in particle physics today. Thanks to the team led by Ballarino during its construction, the HTS Current Lead Project reduced the power consumption of the LHC by a factor of three [1]. In 2006 she was awarded Superconductor Industry Person of the Year, the industry's most prestigious international award.

[1] A. Ballarino. Application of high temperature superconductors to accelerators.
Report, CERN, 2000. 
http://at-mel-cf.web.cern.ch/at-mel-cf/resources/HTS_for_Accelerators_PAC.pdf

***

As I find the time there will most likely be many more posts to come on this subject. I haven't even mentioned Rosalind Franklin (except briefly here), pioneer microbiologist without whose work Crick and Watson would have been unable to model DNA structure. Or Marie Curie, not only an inspiring woman but the only scientist ever, male or female, to be awarded a Nobel Prize in both Chemistry and Physics and one of only four people ever to be awarded two Nobel Prizes. Or Dorothy Hodgkin, Mary Somerville, Barbara Cartland (yes, the author - also inventor), Florence Lawrence...So watch this space. And spaces like these:

http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/contents.html
http://www.nature.com/news/specials/women/index.html
http://www.engineergirl.org/
http://conferences.ted.com/TEDWomen2013/

In the meantime, whatever your gender, show encouragement to the women in your life who might be about to solve the next big engineering problem or make the next big scientific breakthrough. Share the news about these inspiring people and show people like Emily, here, that she's not on her own.

And if you are a woman - ever thought about a career in engineering?

5 Great Scientists and Engineers

(who happen to be women)

#5GreatSciEng

And here's to many more to come in 2014!

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)

As mentioned in a previous post, Ada is credited as the 'World's First Computer Programmer'. At just 18 years old Ada was invited by Charles Babbage to see the prototype for his Analytical Engine. Becoming fascinated with the machine it was she who was to write and explanation for how it was to work, a concept few other scientists of the time could understand. She also wrote the first 'program' for this or any other computing machine, a method for it to perform a series of calculations. Acknowledged as a true pioneer in the computing world, (a high level computing language, Ada,  has been named after her) it's time that her achievements were more widely appreciated.

Emily Warren Roebling (1843-1903)

The Brooklyn bridge is one of the largest engineering projects in North American history. Designed by her father-in-law and originally managed by her husband, Emily Roebling took up civil engineering studies in order to help with the project. It's lucky for North American engineering history (and the millions of people that use the bridge) that she did, for when her father-in-law died and her husband was struck with an illness that left him bed-ridden and partially paralised, it was Emily who took the role (though not the title) of Master Bridge Builder or Chief Engineer and saw the project through to completion.

Valentina Tereshkova (1937-present) and The Mercury 13 (1959)

In 1959 NASA 'auditioned' test pilots for the Mercury program - the first manned space flight mission. 'Manned' is right term here for only male pilots were invited to undergo the rigorous testing program. 500 applied, 110 were made it to the first round of tests and 7 were finally accepted for the program (2 of which were later grounded) - the Mercury 7. 

However, as one of the independent researchers who helped developed the tests noticed, women (on average) weight 15 % less than men and require less oxygen - significant advantages in the confines of space travel. What's more, there was no shortage of female test pilots in the USA at that time. And so 13 out of the 19 women selected underwent an passed the same tests as the Mercury 7. Originally called the FLATs (Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees) and later dubbed the Mercury 13, they were sadly ahead of their time (gender discrimination in the workplace would still be legal in the USA until the Civil Rights Act of 1964) and never made it into space. As said in the introduction, where would society be now without such pointless self-inflicted barriers to development? 

The names of these amazing women:

Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb 

Bernice "Bea" Steadman

Janey Hart 

Geraldine "Jerri" Sloan Truhill 

Rhea Allison Woltman 

Sarah Lee Gorelick Ratley 

Jan & Marion Dietrich 

Myrtle Cagle 

Irene Leverton 

Gene Nora Jessen 

Jean Hixson 

Wally Funk 

Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union...

Despite such ridiculous hurdles, women have never been completely eclipsed from scientific history. In 1963, Valentina Tereshkova, Russian cosmonaut, became the first woman in space. More than that, she was a particularly gifted astronaut and soon clocked up more hours in space than all of her male peers - Russian and American - put together. And at the age of 76 she's still going strong, reported here to be the first to sign up for a one-way trip to Mars in the name of scientific discovery.

Find out more about Valentina, the FLATs and other great women of space exploration here.

The Mars Curiosity Rover Engineers and Scientists (2013)

40 years after the Mercury 13 were grounded and Valentina made here space flight debut, things are looking up. One of the most exciting and well-followed missions in NASA's, recent history, Curiosity has been fueling the imaginations of artists and scientists alike with its ground-breaking images and samples from the surface of the planet Mars. And, as posted here, it owes its launch into space to a number of fantastic female engineers and scientists. 

Lene Hau (1959-present)

Quantum computing is predicted to the be the way forward in modern technology and the next significant step after the internet. In the early noughties, Danish physicist Lene Hau led her team at Havard University in making several scientific breakthroughs that were as remarkable in their own right as they are important in pioneering this revolutionary field. As skilled in experimental work as in theoretical, with a stint at CERN on her CV and publications in many a prestigious journals including a cover article in the much coveted Nature, her scientific career is already pretty stunning. May 2014 and the future hold many new adventures for her! And perhaps a Nobel?

Introduction: 5 Great Scientists and Engineers

(who happen to be women)

#5GreatSciEng

The post that follows (and its sequel) is probably the one that is the closest to my heart and has been the longest time coming. Originally to be titled 'Quantum Leaps', it has developed and grown thanks to the Outreach work I've been lucky enough to take part in this year.

In case you're unfamiliar with the term, Outreach involves engaging schools, colleges and other local groups with your work or, in my case, research, in the hope that you will all go away having learnt something. In my field I'm lucky enough to get to play with cryogens and superconductors, and freezing things with liquid nitrogen is a very effective way to get people interested in science and engineering (by showing them that it's really cool *science pun*).

For my workshop in the 2013 edition of Dragonfly Day I started the session by looking at some of my female engineering heroes - some of whom have already been mentioned on this blog. After a conversation spawned from a faculty equality and diversity committee meeting, however, it became clear that encouraging girls and young women to reach their potential in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects was only one of the tasks that lay ahead on the road to closing the appalling gender gap that still exists in the UK in these areas. One of the biggest discouraging factors for many people hoping to enter STEM areas (men as well as women) is the subtle, residual culture of misogyny that can (though does not always) still haunt these subjects and occupations. Educating the boys from a young age in the great achievements of STEM women, therefore, is just as important.

And so I've started taking my WISE (Women into Science and Engineering) slides to all the schools I visit and prefacing all my talks with this message: 

At no point in history have there not been great female scientists and engineers to equal - and often better - the work of their male peers. We have always been there, often behind some of the biggest breakthroughs to shape our society. Unfortunately, not a lot of people know that.

Sometimes, the scientists or engineers in question have been modest and unassuming or their work has been overshadowed by similar advances in the same field; and so their names have passed into obscurity naturally, as is sometimes the case in all fields and for all people, male or female. Often, however, these incredible people have been direct victims of a prejudiced society: most have had to fight incredibly hard be able to do their work in the first place, as well as to have it even read - let alone accepted - by their contemporaries, and after all that, more often than not the credit has intentionally gone to a male colleague, sometimes one without a fraction of the their skill or knowledge.

This is a problem that is slow to change. A recent careers special in the New Scientist magazine shows that women are still likely to earn an average of £2k/year less than men in all STEM occupations other than 'Subjects allied to medicine' and 'Education'. (Page 8.)

It's time for this to stop. It is widely acknowledged ([1] [2] [3] for example) that the STEM gender gap is detrimental not only to women but to society as a whole. Imagine all the great inventions, technological developments, solutions to everyday problems that we are denying ourselves by discouraging 50 % of our potential scientists and engineers from ever entering their fields. How far would we have advanced already if we hadn't been suffering from this social disease for so long? (This of course also applies to the the equally important issues of economic and racial segregation that still shockingly exist in these areas too.)

But enough from me - the point of this blog is not to rant but to celebrate as many great achievements as possible, to publicise the previously unpublicised and give voice to some of the many unsung heroes of our society.

So let us now embrace the positive, rather than the negative, of women in the STEM world. Read on with the optimism that we are on the road to change [4] rather than the pessimism that this post may have accidentally engendered (no pun intended in this case).

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to all of the people I'm about to mention, not only for your fantastic contributions to the world - without most of which I wouldn't be sitting here now, with a laptop, sharing this information wirelessly over the internet - but also for the message you personify:

No matter what anyone says, or what society suggests - you can change the world too.

[1] http://www.wisecampaign.org.uk/
[2] http://www.thenuclei.com/why-women-stem/
[3] http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/12/saving-our-science-anissa-ramirez/
[4] http://oro.open.ac.uk/29517/1/ukrc_statistics_guide_2010.pdf 

Guest Post - and a Tennis Tribute

Many thanks again to our guest blogger Ellie (of Apartment 4H) for another great insight into another world which she knows a lot more about than me!

A Sporting Chance

As we enter the new year and reflect on the main events of 2013, Andy Murray's Wimbledon success will be enjoyed and celebrated anew in which he became the 5th Brit to win the Wimbledon in 77 years - that's right, the 5th! So let's take a moment to remember his lesserknown predecessors:

Virginia Wade, British, Wimbledon Singles Champion 1977
Ann Haydon Jones, British, Wimbledon Singles Champion 1969
Angela Mortimer Barrett, British, Wimbledon Singles Champion 1961
Dorothy Round Little, British, Wimbledon Singles Champion 1934 and 1937

Wimbledon Champions

Hungry Women welcomes guest posts and contributions from everyone - all of which will of course be duly credited - so get in touch if you have any ideas!

A Sporting Chance - Guest Post

#ASportingChance

We were discussing our first footballing memories in the pub.  Gazza crying at the World Cup in 1990; missed penalties at Euro ’96.  For me it was France ’98: eighteen-year-old Michael Owen bursting onto the scene and scoring that fantastic goal against Argentina.  My sister had a crush on him; I wanted to be Michael Owen when I grew up.  At eleven, it didn’t occur to me that, as a girl, growing up to be a professional footballer worshipped by millions wasn’t an option.  I played with the boys in the school team, had a full West Ham kit and my own boots and posters from my Match magazines all over my claret and blue bedroom walls.

Me, circa 1996

Then puberty hit, and I wasn’t allowed to play with the boys anymore.  My school didn’t have a girl’s football team – it was hockey or nothing.  It was sort of ok for girls to support a football team, but wanting to play football was seriously weird.  I changed my mind about wanting to become a footballer, opting instead for the security of becoming a writer (or, as my failsafe backup, a musician).  But I still wanted to play football, as a hobby. At University, if you weren’t good enough to play for the Uni team, there were no opportunities for women.  Every year I signed up for the intra-mural football teams, only to be told that as I was the only name on the list, there wouldn’t be a team this time around.  Many of my male friends played in amateur leagues every weekend during the winter.

I haven’t played football for several years now.  My football sits unloved and deflated under the stairs.  For guys who want to play amateur football there are a wealth of local Sunday leagues, Saturday leagues, pub leagues, 5-a-side games – if you can scrape together enough friends who want to play, you’re in.  I don’t know of any similar leagues, but even if they exist, I know I don’t have any female friends who would want to play.

Despite some improvements, women’s professional sport still takes a backseat to men’s.  The prize money is less, the coverage minimal and the recognition barely existent.  Women in sport have to face comments about their appearance and their sexuality that men do not.  If this is the way professional sportswomen are treated, is it any wonder that the availability of grassroots and amateur sport for women is so limited?  Competitiveness and physicality are not seen to be feminine.  The women who have risen to the top of their sport need more recognition, to be treated on equal footing as men, to show those girls who are told they have to stop playing football, or rugby, or mountain biking, or underwater hockey with the boys, that they can keep on playing, just for fun.  Sport is hugely beneficial for us –for our physical and mental health and for meeting and bonding with new friends.

I had a bit of trouble deciding on the women to include in this blog.  There are so many – from ground-breakers to record-breakers, famous Olympians to lesser-known athletes.  In the end I turned to the BBC Sport website for inspiration, picking the top six sports on their homepage – sports from which even the most disinterested person could probably name a male sportsman – and featuring the top women in them.  Highlighting the achievements of the six women below is my small contribution to fighting the social stigma attached to women playing sport and may encourage more women to give traditionally male sports a go.

Stafanie Taylor

Cricket, West Indies

At 22-years-old, the West Indies’ all-rounder Stafanie Taylor has become the first player, male or female, to hold the batting, bowling and all-rounder number one spots in ODI cricket at the same time.  Taylor made her debut for the West Indies at just 17 on their tour of Europe in 2008.  Her impressive Twenty20 debut against Ireland saw her hit 90 off 49 balls.  She has been named the ICC Women’s ODI Cricketer of the Year for the past two years and was also awarded the West Indies’ Women’s Cricketer of the Year.  An explosive right-hand batter with a right-arm off-break, in 67 ODIs for the West Indies, Taylor has made 2626 runs at an average of 45.27, scoring 5 centuries and 16 half-centuries in the process, and taken 91 wickets at an average of 16.30.  At only 22 and with some arguing that she would not be out of place in the men’s game, Taylor surely has many more years of success ahead of her.

Marta

Football, Brazil

Though it might not appear so in the British media, women’s football, or soccer, enjoys a lot of success abroad, particularly in the US and South America. 

Marta Vieira da Silva, commonly known as Marta, has achieved celebrity status in her home country of Brazil. 27-year-old Marta is a forward for Tyresö FF of Damallsvenskan and the Brazil women's national football team.  She was named FIFA World Player of the Year five consecutive times, from 2006-2010.  She won a silver medal with the Brazil team in the 2004 and 2008 summer Olympics and is joint top of the all-time Women’s World Cup goal scorer list.  Hailed as the Pele of the woman’s game, Marta is also a passionate advocate of female participation in football.

Emily Scarratt

Rugby Union, England

Emily Scarratt burst onto the International scene in 2008 with 12 tries in 12 games.  Scarratt first played rugby at the age of five, but could easily have gone on to represent England at hockey, rounders or even basketball (she was offered a US Basketball Scholarship when she was 16).  Wearing 13 or 15 on her back, Scarratt has scored 25 tries and 192 points for England, and at 23 is likely to score many more. She plays club rugby for Lichfield, represents England in Rugby Union and Sevens and was named the 2013 Women's Rugby Player of the Year.  Oh, and she is also a PE Assistant in her spare time.

Susie Wolff

Formula One, Britain

Motorsports are a notoriously testosterone-driven arena.  Scottish racing driver Susie Wolff has had to battle the ridiculous stereotype that women make terrible drivers, whether they’re in a Ford Fiesta or Formula One car to become a development driver for the Williams Formula One team in 2012.   Women have competed alongside men in Formula One, but not for forty years, and Susie is determined to become the first British woman to drive in a Formula One race.  The critics have been lining up to claim that women can’t compete at the pinnacle of the racing world, and Wolff has plenty of tales to tell of the sexism she faces.   But she hopes that she will be able to inspire girls to get into the sport: “People tell me that their daughters didn’t realise that girls could even race until they had heard of me.”

Serena Williams

Tennis, US

Despite its popularity being troublingly tied up with the marketability of the women who play it, women’s tennis fares a little better than many other sports, with equal prize money handed out at all four Grand Slam tournaments since 2007.  The Williams sisters can be credited with raising the profile of the women’s game and becoming household names in the process.  Whilst Venus Williams has not sustained her initial level of success, her younger sister has been consistently at the top of the game since she won her first US Open in 1999, at the age of 18.  Since then, Williams has notched up 16 more Grand Slam wins, across all surfaces, as well as an Olympic Gold.  Now 32, in 2013 Williams has regained the WTA’s Number One ranking for the sixth time in her career, indicating that there may well be more titles to come.

Inbee Park

Golf, South Korea

25-year-old South Korean Inbee Park has been the number one ranked player in the Women's World Golf Rankings since 15 April 2013.  Having started playing golf at the age of 10, Park turned professional at 18,as soon as she was allowed under the LPGA rules. Park has won four major championships in her career, including three consecutive major wins during the 2013 season, becoming only the fourth LPGA Tour player to win three majors in a calendar year. She is also the youngest player to win the U.S. Women's Open.  Awarded the LPGA's Player of the Year, Park's successes in 2013 have brought a lot of publicity to women's golf.