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Five of the best
Athene Donald (Credit: University of Cambridge)
By Matin Durrani
I was delighted to discover today that my former PhD supervisor Athene Donald from Cambridge University in the UK is one of five winners of this year’s L’Oreal-UNESCO awards for women in science.
Donald, who receives $100,000 in recognition of her contributions to science, was honoured for her work on the physics of “messy materials” from proteins and ice cream to cement and starch.
Head of the biological and soft systems group at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in the UK, Donald is also deputy head of the lab, director of the new “physics of medicine” initiative at the Cavendish, and director of Cambridge’s Women in Science, Engineering and Technology Initiative (WiSETI).
I e-mailed Donald about her reaction to the prize. Writing back from a meeting in Paris, she had the following message.
“Years ago I was on the jury for the first prize in physics, so I know how stiff the competition is. The publicity these prizes generate can only be good to encourage young women that serious careers in science are not completely incompatible with family life. It’s hard, of course it is, but not impossible. It also requires a very supportive husband/partner. I could not have succeeded without my husband’s support and allowing my career to take precedence. Each family has to find the right balance for them. But women can succeed and these prizes celebrate that.”
But despite the example she has set as one of the few female physics professors in the UK, Donald warned that women still drop out of science at every stage of the science career path. “That is a sad loss of talent. But of course the first challenge is to get more girls to do physics A level [exams taken by 18-year-olds in most of the UK]. Reminding them that scientists are ‘normal’ people can only help, and to counter the all too common media image of white middle aged men is part of that.”
One of the other four L’Oreal-UNESCO award winners this year is Beatriz Barbuy of the Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Sao Paolo in Brazil. She was recognized for her work on “the life of stars from the birth of the universe to the present time”.
The other winners are all chemists: Tebello Nyokong from Rhodes University, South Africa, Akiki Kobayashi from Nihon University in Japan and Eugenia Kumacheva from the University of Toronto in Canada.
The five laureates will pick up their prizes at an awards ceremony in UNESCO next March.
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