ALD News: Two more ALD Live speakers and our guest author announced!
Plus how to organise a watch party, Substack paid sub snafu, join us on Bluesky or LinkedIn, and engineer Roma Agrawal's latest book for children.
Hi there,
Ada Lovelace Day is just two months away and our preparations are going well! We have six speakers confirmed, along with our guest author. You’ll shortly be getting an email with details of how to buy tickets for the in-person performance and the livestream, so keep an eye out for that!
For those of you who’ve joined up to this newsletter in the last year, I just want to give you a heads-up that newsletters will start to become a little bit more frequent in the run-up to Ada Lovelace Day on 8 October. Then, once ALD is over, we’ll go back to our regular cadence.
Introducing our next ALD Live speaker and new compère
We have another brilliant speaker for Ada Lovelace Day Live, plus our new compère to introduce to you!
Joysy John MBE
Joysy John MBE is a software engineer, education entrepreneur and edtech advisor who left her banking career to change education after spending a decade across Singapore, US and UK. She helped launch three non-profits focused on education, and actively shaped edtech policy as part of the Department of Education’s Edtech Leadership Group and Welsh Government’s expert panel on Schooling Reimagined.
Dr Sally Le Page
Dr Sally Le Page will be our new compère for 2024. Sally is a science presenter and producer who takes any opportunity to talk about biology, nature and the climate with her typical infectious enthusiasm. Her mission is to enrich everyone's lives with science stories whether or not they're scientists. Sally started her career over a decade ago making fun videos on YouTube about evolutionary biology from her shed. Since then she's made videos and documentaries all over the world, from talking about resilience while scuba diving over a Polynesian coral reef to explaining the science behind movies from a red carpet premiere in LA.
Announcing our ALD Live author: Lisa Rajan
Children’s author Lisa Rajan will be on hand before the performance to sign copies of her books, including Tara Binns - Bright Spark Scientist: With scientists going missing and experiments going wrong, can Tara Binns save the lab with her bright ideas?
Lisa Rajan wrote the Tara Binns books to inspire more girls to channel their curiosity and imagination into STEM careers. Scientist, engineer, palaeontologist, astronaut, coder, vet, volcanologist, marine biologist, inventor... Tara Binns gives them all a go and has fantastic adventures while doing so.
You can find out more about all our fabulous speakers and about our guest author on our website.
Are you organising your own ALD event?
Whether you are hosting an Ada Lovelace Day Live watch party, or running another type of event to celebrate women in STEM on or around 8 October? If you’d like to host a watch party but don’t know where to start, take a look at our blog post for some tips and ideas.
Don’t forget to add it to our official map! When you add your event, we’ll include it in our newsletter and promote it on our social media accounts. Indeed, our first event listing for this year has just come in:
Bletchley, UK: Digital Future Days: Ada Lovelace Day (13-18 years), a thrilling series of educational events designed exclusively for school and home-educator groups, 2 Oct, 9.30am - 3.30pm, £5.
Every year we hear about a wide variety of events on and around Ada Lovelace Day, and we’ve very existed to see what our wonderful organisers have planned this year!
Substack paid subscription snafu
Due to an unfortunate mistake by Substack, I’m sorry to say that every paid subscription to this newsletter has been cancelled.
If you were on a monthly plan, please simply resubscribe by clicking the button below. If you weren’t donating to ALD but would like to support our work, then why not upgrade?
The default monthly donation is £8, but we have three discount codes available:
If you were on a yearly plan, then I will be emailing you personally towards the end of August to discuss how best to restart your subscription.
I do apologise for any inconvenience, and hope that you’ll renew your subscription – every single one helps keep ALD going!
Join us on Bluesky or LinkedIn!
After this year’s Ada Lovelace Day is over, we will be scaling back our usage of Twitter. Despite having built up a community of over 26,000 people there since our very first Tweet on 14 October 2008, it’s time for us to move our attention to other social platforms.
We’ll be focusing most of our efforts on Bluesky, which is very much like Twitter but has stronger moderation tools and a nicer community, and on LinkedIn. So do pop in and say hello:
Bluesky: adalovelaceday.bsky.social
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/ada-lovelace-day/
Seven Small Inventions that Changed the World
Ada Lovelace Day alum and bestselling author Roma Agrawal has teamed up with illustrator Jisu Choi to bring us Seven Small Inventions that Changed the World, a children's illustrated adaptation of her adult book, Nuts and Bolts. In Seven Small Inventions that Changed the World, Roma “makes STEM accessible, intriguing and aspirational, and encourages children to be endlessly curious about the 'things' that make up our world.”
Technology and engineering surround us. From HUGE things, like spaceships and skyscrapers, to much smaller things like the toaster in our kitchen and the shoes on our feet. But all of these things only exist because of seven small inventions: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the magnet, the lens, the pump and ... string. And each of these inventions has a fascinating story to tell.
Travel through centuries of history, through ancient Egypt, along the Silk Road, across the high seas and even into space, and discover how each of these seven small inventions came to be, how they work and how they changed the world forever. Find out how it's thanks to the potter's wheel that the International Space Station exists, and how the same nails that built pirate ships hold together the tallest buildings in the world.
Around the web
Here is our round up of links and reading that we’ve found this month!
Women of colour: Dr Nana Lee writes for Inside Higher Ed on the challenges facing Asian women in STEM, and how to overcome them. Dr Sigourney Bonner has launched Black in Cancer to increase the number of black women scientists in cancer research as well as increase knowledge of cancer in the black community.
Overlooked women: Melanie Zeppel, an environmental scientist, has been creating Wikipedia entries for Australian women scientists, and Dr Astrid Rodriguez, a geneticist, has been ensuring that pages on women in science have entries in other languages. The Revelator tells the story of Mary Elizabeth Barber, the first female botanist in South Africa, whose discoveries and work were only rediscovered after the rare plant she identified was found once again. The genius of Emmy Noether is the subject of this article by SheThePeople.
News: Dr Elizabeth Babcock, Founding Director of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum about what she has learned about women’s history, how female scientists have inspired her and what the museum has planned in the future. Science communicator and MIT engineer Emily Calandrelli will be one of 6 people on the Blue Origin spaceflight. Science and Technology Australia is looking for scientists to become Superstars of STEM, part of its programme to create diverse science communicators. Forbes asks why women are leaving academia mid-career and what can be done about it.
Podcasts and videos: Times of India has put together a list of biopics about scientists, including Katherine Johnson, Hypatia, Dian Fossey and Mary Anning.
That’s it for right now, but keep an eye out for our ALD Live email with ticketing details that will be landing in your inbox very soon!
All the best,
Suw & the ALD team