ALD News: Announcing our first two speakers for this year's ALD Live
Plus a Fieldwork update, new ALD audience survey, Escaping Byron's Shadow and our monthly link round-up.
Hi there,
We are just four months away from Ada Lovelace Day, which might sound like a long time but there’s an awful lot of work to do! We’ve made fabulous progress on confirming speakers for our event at the Royal Institution, with all but two now confirmed. We’ll have more news on additional speakers next month!
ALD Live: Introducing our first two speakers
I’m delighted to introduce the first two of our fabulous speakers for Ada Lovelace Day Live at the Royal Institution in London and online, on Tuesday 8 October 2024.
Dr Samantha Terry
Dr Samantha Terry is a radiation biologist at King's College London where she teaches undergraduates and master's students about the use of radioactivity in imaging and treating disease, and runs a research group. With a background in radioactive, injectable therapies and using radioactive compounds to image cancer, her research group now works in the lab determining how different types of radioactivity can be best used in the clinic. Questions they try to answer include: "Are radioactive compounds used for imaging safe for healthy tissues?", "How can we make this radioactive compound only irradiate cancer cells?", and “How much radioactivity can we safely inject?"
Website: radlab.uk | Twitter: @syaterry and @kingsimaging
Takita Bartlett-Lashley
Takita Bartlett-Lashley works at the intersection of STEM, fashion and education and enjoys exploring creative applications of maths and technology across fashion and design. Her mathematical clothing/jewellery designs have doubled as educational tools gracing the red carpet and classrooms alike. She is also the founder of STEM in Style, an initiative which has delivered STEAM events/workshops for over 2000 young people. Her persistence in blending these passions has fuelled a career leveraging AI and Data Science to launch scalable solutions for challenges within the fashion and retail sectors, most recently working for companies such as ASOS and Google.
We have more amazing women in STEM lined up for you, so don’t forget to put the evening of Tuesday 8 October in your diary. In-person and livestream tickets will be available later in the summer, and I’ll send out a special announcement as soon as they go on sale.
Fieldwork project update: First draft of the script is complete!
Almost two years since we first decided to write a comedy about the experiences of ecologists working in the field, as the last part of the i-COMET project, the first draft of the half-hour sitcom pilot script is done! In this blog post, I take a look at just how much prep it took to get to the point of being able to sit and write the first draft, and what that prep looked like.
The next stage in the process is to rewrite the draft, then to condense it into a 10 minute short and convert it into a half hour radio script. Once that’s done, then I’ll be looking into finding funding to take this project to the next stage: Writing the rest of the series and producing it as a podcast. If you want to follow along, then sign up to the Fieldwork section of my Word Count newsletter.
Tell us a bit about yourself!
Every few years we ask our supporters to tell us a little bit about themselves, and that time has rolled around again! I’d be very grateful if you could take a few minutes to complete our questionnaire, which is largely multiple-choice questions so very quick and easy. Doing so will help us plan ahead for both the newsletter and the future of Ada Lovelace Day itself.
Ada Lovelace: Escaping Byron's Shadow
Nottingham University’s Dr Lydia Farina will be exploring Ada Lovelace’s relationship with her father, Lord Byron, his influence on her life and her remarkable achievement of escaping his shadow to create her own legacy.
This event will be held at Nottingham Central Library at 11:00 on Tuesday 30th July, and tickets are free.
Around the web
Here is our round up of links and reading that we’ve found this month!
Ada Lovelace featured: Jack Murtagh writes about the importance of Ada Lovelace’s notes for Scientific American.
Women of colour: Indian women in science are being featured in a new comic series, as part of a collaboration between the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) and Tinkle Comics. Professor JoAnn Trejo is interviewed in Nature’s Changemakers series about her work to increase diversity in science, such as through mentoring. Congratulations to Professor Rose Leke who is a winner of the 2024 L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Awards.
Overlooked women: Including a diverse representation of scientists in film and television is another way to promote STEM to girls and women, such as in the recent Netflix series 3 Body Problem. Rebecca Duncan writes for The Conversation about the problems female scientists face doing field work in the Arctic and Antarctica. Alex Frost writes for Success on how retention of women in engineering is just as important as getting women into STEM careers. In the Working Scientist podcast by Nature, Julie Gould takes a group of teenage girls to an exhibition on contemporary scientists to demonstrate the range of scientific careers.
News: New Zealand is celebrating women in STEM on 14 June for Dell Day, named in honour of botanist Dame Miriam Dell. ‘Lean in’ messaging may do more harm than good in tackling gender inequality, according to recent research by University of Exeter (via Phys.org).
Prizes and awards: The Story Exchange is offering grants to female scientists working in the field of extreme climate events. Deadline for applications is 31 July 2024.
Books: Chemical engineer and author Maria Marianayagam has written a children’s book that includes facts about science alongside famous women in STEM called The Amazing Power of Girls.
That’s it for this month!
All the best,
Suw & the ALD team