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.