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livLots of fun posts celebrating Ada Lovelace day (yesterday, but I was busy writing a grant and planning a communal Passover celebration). I particularly enjoyed helenic's piece on confidence and how it affects women who write about tech in public.
Alsormc28 asked for women in science and technology to represent, so I thought I might have a go. Among other things it will serve as an introduction to my professional side for all the new people who just subscribed.
My official title is Lecturer in Bioscience, at a small but research-driven English university. What I actually do is spend half my time teaching life sciences to the undergraduate medical students, and half my time setting up a cancer research group. Well, eventually it will be set up and then I'll be spending half my time doing actual research.
In more detail, my subject is cancer cell biology. I'm interested in how cells make the "decision" to grow and divide or remain static or die, how cancer can result when those decision processes go wrong, and how to use that information to develop better cancer drugs. I spend some of my time developing systems for trying out thousands of compounds on cancer cells to pick the ones that are best at making the cancer cells die but doing minimal harm to normal cells. And some of my time trying to figure out exactly what's going on when cells start growing, and how their natural defence mechanisms work to prevent inappropriate growth and cancer. (One of those natural defence mechanisms is a protein called p53, which is pictured in my icon.)
What I love about my work is the balance between teaching and research. The teaching gives me human contact and immediate gratification. I've always loved teaching, and it's fantastic to be working with these bright, motivated students who find my subject nearly as fascinating as I do. Having that in my life makes it much more possible for me to do the research part, which I love because it's endlessly interesting and an intense intellectual challenge; there's no ceiling on how well I can do it. But at the same time it can be quite isolating and sometimes frustrating, because it may take weeks, months or even years before I see whether my effort has yielded any useful progress.
I am a little uncomfortable with the concept of Ada Lovelace day, to be honest. I think it can make a difference to see visible women doing STEM subjects. It's just that when I was a kid I found it really frustrating that I was always expected to have female role models, I was pushed into fangirling Rosalind Franklin when I wanted to fangirl Francis Crick, assumed because of my gender to be more interested in Dorothy Hodgkin than Max Perutz and so on. In some ways the message I want to send out to girls and young women is that they can do anything they want and gender doesn't matter, not that we can manage to find one or two female names in the list of influential scientists in your field, so that makes it ok for girls to have science ambitions.
But then, I did have one very important female role model growing up: my grandmother, who qualified as a doctor around the start of WW2 and devoted her whole life (literally, she died in the middle of a consultation with a patient) to women's and children's health, especially in deprived parts of the country. She also worked closely with Isabella Forshall, a surgeon born in 1902 who pretty much invented paediatric surgery.
helenic's piece on confidence and how it affects women who write about tech in public. Also
rmc28 asked for women in science and technology to represent, so I thought I might have a go. Among other things it will serve as an introduction to my professional side for all the new people who just subscribed.My official title is Lecturer in Bioscience, at a small but research-driven English university. What I actually do is spend half my time teaching life sciences to the undergraduate medical students, and half my time setting up a cancer research group. Well, eventually it will be set up and then I'll be spending half my time doing actual research.
In more detail, my subject is cancer cell biology. I'm interested in how cells make the "decision" to grow and divide or remain static or die, how cancer can result when those decision processes go wrong, and how to use that information to develop better cancer drugs. I spend some of my time developing systems for trying out thousands of compounds on cancer cells to pick the ones that are best at making the cancer cells die but doing minimal harm to normal cells. And some of my time trying to figure out exactly what's going on when cells start growing, and how their natural defence mechanisms work to prevent inappropriate growth and cancer. (One of those natural defence mechanisms is a protein called p53, which is pictured in my icon.)
What I love about my work is the balance between teaching and research. The teaching gives me human contact and immediate gratification. I've always loved teaching, and it's fantastic to be working with these bright, motivated students who find my subject nearly as fascinating as I do. Having that in my life makes it much more possible for me to do the research part, which I love because it's endlessly interesting and an intense intellectual challenge; there's no ceiling on how well I can do it. But at the same time it can be quite isolating and sometimes frustrating, because it may take weeks, months or even years before I see whether my effort has yielded any useful progress.
I am a little uncomfortable with the concept of Ada Lovelace day, to be honest. I think it can make a difference to see visible women doing STEM subjects. It's just that when I was a kid I found it really frustrating that I was always expected to have female role models, I was pushed into fangirling Rosalind Franklin when I wanted to fangirl Francis Crick, assumed because of my gender to be more interested in Dorothy Hodgkin than Max Perutz and so on. In some ways the message I want to send out to girls and young women is that they can do anything they want and gender doesn't matter, not that we can manage to find one or two female names in the list of influential scientists in your field, so that makes it ok for girls to have science ambitions.
But then, I did have one very important female role model growing up: my grandmother, who qualified as a doctor around the start of WW2 and devoted her whole life (literally, she died in the middle of a consultation with a patient) to women's and children's health, especially in deprived parts of the country. She also worked closely with Isabella Forshall, a surgeon born in 1902 who pretty much invented paediatric surgery.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-25 10:11 pm (UTC)I don't feel terribly defensive about being bad at science. I'm pretty convinced that I'm bad at science because I'm bad at maths - I was good at science until I hit the numbers problem. I used to think I was just 'naturally' bad at maths because I took after my mother, but I'm much more suspicious of the gendered implications these days (to give my dad his due, he tried to convince me to like maths, but he's not the world's most patients or interesting teacher...).
And yes, your icon not the Hypatia one, though that is also lovely.