Women in Physics

This International Women’s Day I sat down with Michele Dougherty to talk about her journey, research, and experiences as a Woman in Physics. Thank you very very much for your time Michele and we wish you the best of luck as you move to the Institute of Physics!

As an introduction, what is your area of expertise within physics and what has been your journey to where you are now?

I am a planetary scientist. So what my team does is they build instruments, magnetometers, that fly o

n spacecraft and my focus in the last 20 years or so has been Saturn and its moons, and now it’s Jupiter and its moons; there’s an instrument on its way to Jupiter. And the way in which I got into this area was rather a roundabout way. I was actually trained as an applied mathematician. I was at an all girls school in South Africa and I didn’t do science and I was really fortunate, my dad worked at the local university and they were prepared to take a chance on me, so I did a BSc without having done science and the first year was really hard. I remember I’d go home every evening and my dad would go through the lecture notes with me. So it took me a while to feel that I’d come up to speed, but I got a PhD in applied maths and then I was in Germany for two years on a fellowship and then I came to imperial as a postdoc on a two year contract and I was asked if I wanted to put a magnetic field model together for Jupiter. I knew nothing about either. And I thought yeah, that sounded cool. So I said yes. And so that’s how I ended up doing what I do.

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Read International Women’s Day #WomenonWednesdays: Michele Dougherty in full

For our final #WomenonWednesdays interview of 2023 we spoke to Dr Yasmin Andrew, student liaison officer and researcher in plasma physics!

As an introduction, what is your area of expertise within Physics?

My plasma physics research is on magnetically confined fusion.  I plan and run experiments on a number conventional and spherical tokamaks across the world, including MAST-U and ST40 in Oxfordshire, and DIII-D in San Diego. The specific topic I work on, with a very talented team of physicists, is fusion plasma turbulence and self-organisation in a very narrow edge region of the tokamak.  My interest in the dynamics of self-regulation between different plasma variables and causality, which I study using a combination of dedicated tokamak experiments, high resolution diagnostic data, 3-D turbulence simulations and novel statistical analysis approaches.

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Read #WomenonWednesdays: Yasmin Andrew in full

This week for #WomenonWednesdays we spoke to Abigail, a third year physics undergraduate, currently on her year abroad in Switzerland!

Describe your path into physics, what kickstarted it?

My path into physics is slightly unusual: I had planned for all of sixth form to study maths at university since that was always my favourite subject at school. I even applied to do maths at some universities. It took sitting the STEP papers (an admissions test used by some universities for maths) for me to realise I loved applied maths much much more than pure maths. Every time I read about pure maths I thought, “that’s cool, but what can I use this for?”

I discovered that the problem-solving I loved from maths and further maths A level was in fact closer to the maths in a physics degree than in a maths degree. And when I came to Imperial and started my physics degree, I knew immediately that physics was exactly the subject I wanted.

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Read #WomenonWednesdays: Abigail Levison in full

For this week’s #WomenonWednesdays interview, we spoke to Dr Ellie Tubman, a lecturer in Experimental ICF / HEDP Science.

As an introduction, what is your area of expertise within Physics?

I am a plasma physicist working on fusion energy and laboratory astrophysics using laser facilities such as NIF, Omega and Orion. You may have heard of NIF in California where they recently achieved ignition last Christmas where we got more energy out than we put in to our fuel, a really exciting result! I am particularly interested in the magnetic fields that can be generated in the interactions and how that affects the phenomena. At Imperial I am involved in teaching 1^st year laboratory.

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Read #WomenonWednesdays: Ellie Tubman in full

This week for #WomenonWednesdays we spoke to Nikita, a PhD student in plasma physics!

As an introduction, describe your pathway into physics, what kickstarted it?

I was first drawn to physics through maths in high school – I enjoyed the subject itself but liked the applied side much better. Physics seemed to combine the theoretical side of maths into something grounded in reality, at least that’s what I thought until starting quantum mechanics in uni! Once at Imperial I started off terrible at computational physics, but grew to enjoy it over the years, so much so that I ended up doing an MSc in a field called computational fluid dynamics. There is something very satisfying about translating governing equations into a code, and using it to simulate complicated systems. My master’s degree then laid the groundwork for my PhD, which is also based in numerical physics.

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Read #WomenonWednesdays: Nikita Chaturvedi in full

For this week’s #WomenonWednesdays interview we spoke to Clarisse, a fourth year physics undergraduate student.

Describe your path into physics. What kick started it?

I grew up in the South of France and did my education there under the French system (the French Baccalaureate). I decided to go to the UK for my studies simply because I liked the idea of going abroad. In my area, it’s quite uncommon to do that, so I sort of embarked on this journey knowing very little about how difficult it was to get in, how demanding the course would be, how many opportunities I would have. I didn’t have any ort of international exposure prior to that. It was a big step up throwing myself into university in a country where the language is not my native tongue. And I’m glad I didn’t know, I think I wouldn’t have had the confidence to just throw myself into this if I knew, I’m glad I had the courage to go into the unknown like this. I’m now in my in my 4th year and I would do it all again.

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Read #WomenonWednesdays: Clarisse Bonacina in full

This week we spoke to Amaya, current postgraduate co-president of the Women and Non-Binary in Physics Committee.

Describe your path into physics, what kickstarted it?

I grew up in Torrelavega, which is in a rural part of northern Spain. I was very lucky that my family and environment were always very supportive and encouraged me to explore many different interests. I was enrolled in our local music conservatory while in regular school and considered classical guitar and other creative roles as possible career paths. I was also good at maths and really enjoyed it. When we got to physics in high school, I found in it the same problem-solving and pattern-finding elements that I’d previously enjoyed in my music education. I also liked that I found it challenging — I felt struggling through problems only made the result more satisfying. I went on to do my undergrad degree in Physics with Theoretical Physics here at Imperial, which was a huge jump in difficulty, but I gained a strong foundation and exposure to a lot of different fields. I finally narrowed down my interests to quantum optics and quantum information once I completed my BSc project.

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Read #WomenonWednesdays: Amaya Calvo Sanchez in full