Today is International Women’s Day and to celebrate we are highlighting some of our favourite content from the past 12 months that is by or about women.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell is one of the UK’s most distinguished physicists, whose career began with the ground-breaking observation of the first pulsar in 1968 and has also included the presidencies of both the Royal Astronomical Society and the Institute of Physics. In “Look happy dear, you’ve just made a discovery!” Sarah Tesh and Jess Wade look at the highs and lows of Bell Burnell’s career.
“Society expected young women to get married, not make major astronomical discoveries!” says Bell Burnell about the attitude she faced as an early-career scientist. Fortunately, things have changed since the late 1960s and today we are also highlighting videos that look at the aspirations of two early-career scientists today. In “Faces of Physics: human organs on a chip“, Samira Musah talks about her multidisciplinary work as a post doc at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute. Meanwhile at the University of Bristol, PhD student Kate Wyness talks about her work on nuclear waste in “Faces of Physics: a nuclear-powered PhD“.
Our other Women’s Day recommendations are:
- “Just beyond our fingertips” in which Kate Bechtel describes the quest for an optical glucose sensor
- “Tales from a British physicist in Japan” where Elizabeth Tasker writes about working as a physicist in Japan
- “A quantum boost for machine learning” in which Maria Schuld explains how machine learning could be boosted by quantum computation
- “The universe through a glass darkly” where Tushna Commissariat reviews Dava Sobel‘s book about female astronomers at the Harvard Observatory
- “The great detector” in which Tushna Commissariat travels to the forests of Louisiana to meet LIGO’s Amber Stuver
