Tag: Women in science

Standing up for the facts: COVID-19 vaccination, fertility and pregnancy

This festive period Three Wise Women from the Faculty of Medicine will be giving us the gift of wisdom.

Dr Viki Male explains how she took matters into her own hands in response to the mixed messaging around COVID-19 vaccination advice and pregnancy.

In 2003, the world was on the brink of a SARS-1 pandemic. As a Year 12 student at the time, I followed developments closely. Although the outbreak eventually died out, my interest in infectious diseases did not. Surely, the big one was coming. And I would be ready for it.

But by the time the big one came, my research has taken me in a different direction. At university, I had become passionately interested in a family of immune cells, called NK cells, that control viral infection. But these cells have another role that captured my imagination: they help the placenta to implant during pregnancy, and my lab is working out how. In March 2020, as immunologists around the world raced to make a vaccine, I shut my lab and went home to spend the next 12 weeks home-schooling my children. I would sit this one out. What use is a reproductive immunologist in a pandemic, anyway?

Some use, it turned out. In December 2020, as the vaccine rollout began, rumours started to circulate that antibodies raised by COVID-19 vaccination would target a placental protein, called Syncytin-1, causing infertility and miscarriages. There was no basis to this claim and if I, a reproductive immunologist, wouldn’t stand up and explain why, then what was the point of me? So I began engaging with the public, first on social media and then in print and broadcast. Here’s what they taught me… (more…)

Why we still need ‘Women in Science’ Awards

Paz Tayal receiving award

Dr Paz Tayal reflects on her experience in the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Rising Talent Awards.

Do we even need an award for ‘Women in Science’? Shouldn’t there be a similar award for men in science? Well, depends on how you look at it, but you could argue all awards over the past 1000 years have been for ‘Men in Science’.

The L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Rising Talent Programme has promoted women in scientific research on a global scale since 1998. The L’Oréal-UNESCO UK and Ireland For Women in Science Programme offer awards from a partnership between L’Oréal-UNESCO UK & Ireland, the UK National Commission for UNESCO and the Irish National Commission for UNESCO, with the support of the Royal Society, to promote, enhance and encourage the contribution of women pursuing their research careers in the UK or Ireland. (more…)

My experience of lockdown and maternity as a female academic

Dr Teresa Thurston shares her experience as a relatively new PI of looking after a new-born, homeschooling and keeping in touch with her lab during lockdown.

The pressure of the pandemic has been felt particularly hard by parents juggling work and childcare, often with fewer hours available for work. In some households, the burden of care work continues to fall disproportionately on women and this may be true for academia as well; journal editors have noted that early evidence suggests fewer paper submissions from women than men whilst under quarantine.

Every one of us has been hit by lockdown and many people are struggling to juggle work with kids at home. It has been more than 50 days since my family of five begun isolation. My husband came down with a fever and cough and went to bed and I picked up the kids for the last time. After telling our afterschool nanny not to come over, panic hit. I had no idea how I was going to cope. I was still recovering from delivering a 5Kg baby who was just four weeks old and now I was solely responsible for three kids and a sick husband. This was not going to be any ordinary maternity leave. (more…)

How can we build a better balance of women in STEM?

What does it take to achieve a fair balance of women in science? Sophie Arthur shares her views on addressing the gender balance in STEM.

The International Day of Women and Girls in Science and International Women’s Day have both come and gone in 2019 already, so why write this piece now? These discussions about celebrating the achievements of women in science, providing them with the recognition they deserve and the fight for more representation across all STEM fields are conversations we need to keep having all year round. Not solely on international awareness days.

Women in STEM and their achievements often go under the radar. After all, while Alan Turing was breaking the Enigma code, Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr was taking a break from the silver screen and inventing a radio guidance system that ended up being the precursor to our modern-day Bluetooth & Wi-Fi. Also, while male scientists Andre Geim and Kostantin Novoselov may have won the Nobel Prize for working with graphene, Stephanie Kwolek invented Kevlar 40 years earlier. So, it is well past time for us to reset the balance. (more…)

Self-division: how I split my time between family life and cell cycles

This festive period Three Wise Women from the Faculty of Medicine will be giving us the gift of their wisdom.

Our second wise woman, research fellow Dr Alexis Barr, provides an insight into how she’s balancing family life with a research career.  

I never realised that when I started a family that other scientists would be so interested in my work/life balance. I am frequently asked how I manage a research career with bringing up two young children, aged two and four. Thankfully, it’s not as hard as you might think, but having a partner who shares the responsibility helps enormously.

I know why researchers are keen to talk about this as it seems to involve squaring a circle. Before I had children, I couldn’t easily conceive how working in a lab 8am – 7pm every day and often ‘popping in’ at weekends could work with caring for children. The problem is that it doesn’t, well at least not if you want to spend time with your children (which I do – not least because they’re hilarious). But it turns out that this isn’t a problem as there are other styles of working. Like most scientists I know, we love what we do so we’re quite motivated to find ways to make it work for us. (more…)

I can’t wait until I’m no longer waiting for the first Black scientist to win a Nobel Prize

The Wise Women

This festive period Three Wise Women from the Faculty of Medicine will be giving us the gift of their wisdom.

Our first wise woman, Dr Faith Uwadiae, highlighted success stories of Black scientists on her Twitter account every day throughout Black History Month 2018. In this post, she tells us what led to her taking action. 

The problem

I have been in the university academic system for almost a decade and in this time I have interacted with very few Black scientists. I have met a handful of Black PhD students and research assistants or technicians, one postdoctoral scientist, but sadly I’ve never been lectured by a Black scientist. When I attend scientific conferences or events I am frequently one of the few Black people in the room and often the only Black woman. In fact, Black professors are heavily underrepresented making up just 0.6% of UK professors, of which only 25 are Black female professors. Sadly, when people think about a scientist they don’t picture someone like me, i.e. Black, female and young, and instead default to the White, male and old archetype.

Scientists are much more diverse and I wanted to learn more about the stories of people like me. (more…)

SheNote Speaker: addressing the gender imbalance in science

SheNote Speaker

This International Women’s Day, Dr Mike Cox On is launching SheNote Speaker to help address the gender imbalance in science.

Dr Elisabeth Bik is a microbiome researcher and science editor who runs Microbiome Digest, a blog that’s updated daily and highlights microbiome literature worth reading. In 2016 she asked scientists in the field to nominate their favourite women microbiome researchers in order to improve the visibility of women in the field. This developed to become an actively updated database of experts that’s easily searchable by research interest in microbiome science – Women In Microbiome Research. Dr Bik explains the motivation for establishing the list clearly on her site, but one of the major driving forces was the lack of women as keynote speakers, panel members or chairs at conferences. (more…)