• Question: When you where younger did you aspire to be a scientist and if you did achieve your childhood goal did you have a role model and i say again, if so were they inspirational female models

    Asked by anon-290486 on 16 Mar 2021. This question was also asked by anon-288219.
    • Photo: Megan Metcalfe

      Megan Metcalfe answered on 16 Mar 2021:

      Wow, good question! If I’m honest, not really. I don’t think it was until my A-levels that I really started considering it as a career. During my A-levels we learnt about a man called Bernard Chouet, who used geophysics to predict volcanic eruptions. Learning about him was probably the first time I felt excited about a particular area of environmental science and decide that I wanted to pursue it further. When I went on to study at the university of East Anglia, there were a lot of incredible female lecturers, so I would count them as inspirational female role models.

    • Photo: Jo Brodie

      Jo Brodie answered on 18 Mar 2021:

      I did want to be a scientist when I was younger but it was really the subject that drew me further into it rather than the people, so I didn’t really have any role models, male or female. When I was at school in the 1980s I think it’s safe to say that I would have heard mostly about male scientists and it was probably later once I was doing my degree that I started to hear a little more about the contributions made by women to science.
      ~
      Since then I’ve worked with brilliant and inspiring female scientists like Ann Blandford and Anna Cox, both of whom are Professors at University College London – I worked with them on a project about medical devices. Prof Blandford received a Suffrage Science award (celebrating women in science for their scientific contributions) for her work in computing. It’s a beautiful piece of jewellery and you can see it here https://www.suffragescience.org/m-c-jewellery (she won the ‘Pattern of Thought’ award).
      ~
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Cox
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Blandford
      ~
      Jo

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