Finding Ada Network Webinar: Giving a Great Presentation

Whether you are giving a conference talk or making a presentation to your colleagues, your aim is to communicate information to your listeners. But to do that successfully, you need to understand your audience’s perspective.

In this one-hour masterclass with public speaking coach Sarah Cruise, you will learn how to engage, motivate and make it easy for your audience to listen, understand and remember your information. Sarah will outline the research in support of this approach and focus on the fundamental skills needed to present successfully.

Join us at 12:00 BST on Wednesday 27 April 2022 for this hour-long webinar and take your presenting skills to the next level.

About Sarah Cruise

Sarah CruiseSarah Cruise specialises in the art and science of effective communication and her business, eloquential, represents the rattle bag of knowledge, skills and experience that she has collected over the years. Sarah combines research from well-founded and respected sources across many disciplines, with practitioners experience in the performing arts, and person-centred psychology and practices.

eloquential has been trading since 2006 and Sarah has worked with a number of well known companies and organisations including most recently: AstraZeneca, The British Medical Journal, Cambridge University Press, Mastercard, THIS Institute, and University of Cambridge amongst others. Sarah has also had the pleasure of working on notable events such as the London bid for the 2012 Olympic Games and is involved in interesting public engagement projects, including cohosting the Gin and Topic podcast with her stepdaughter.

Ticket sales are now closed.

Mentoring program survey

We want to find out how widespread mentoring programs for women in science, technology, engineering or maths (STEM) are, and to learn more about how effective programs are organised, and the barriers to creating long-lasting and successful mentoring programs.

Please complete this survey if you have, within the last five years, been involved in planning, organising or running a mentoring program for women, regardless of whether the plans came to fruition or whether the program was seen as a success. We especially want to hear from you if you have tried to create a mentoring program but were ultimately unable to get it off the ground.

We’d like to hear about mentoring programs that were or are intended to serve women, ie with very few men participating. These women can be in any role that requires STEM expertise, regardless of industry, for example, investment banks employ a lot of programmers, so could run mentoring schemes for women in tech roles that would qualify for this survey.

If you have run more than one mentoring scheme, please complete this form once for each program.

The survey is anonymous, but if you’d like to be emailed with the results you can share your email address with us at the end, or you can email Suw and ask to be sent the results when we have them.

If you’d like to hear about the results from this survey without giving us your email address, follow us on Twitter @findingada, or Facebook @adalovelaceday or subscribe to our newsletter.

GDPR Notice

If you provide your email address, you consent to receiving email from Y Ffynhonnell Ltd for the purposes you indicate. We will process your data in accordance with our Privacy Policy, which can be found on our website at https://findingada.com/privacy-policy/. You may withdraw this consent at any time by emailing us at suw@findingada.com.

ALD21: Alice Ball, Chemist

Alice Ball

Alice Ball

Alice Ball was an American chemist who developed the first effective treatment for leprosy, or Hansen’s Disease, which until then had a very poor prognosis and was highly stigmatised. 

Born in 1892, Ball was the first woman and first African American to earn a master’s degree from the University of Hawaii, and was also the university’s first African American chemistry lecturer. 

Since the 1300s, leprosy had been somewhat ineffectively treated using chaulmoogra oil, made from the seeds of the Hydnocarpus wightianus tree. The oil was sticky and thick, making it unsuitable for topical application. When injected, it tended to form blisters under the skin which could develop into abscesses. Its awful taste frequently caused vomiting when it was taken orally. 

Ball developed a method to process the raw oil, via saponification, acidification and finally purification to produce ethyl ester compounds which were water soluble and thus more easily absorbed by the body, whilst maintaining the oil’s therapeutic properties. In 1915, she was made head of the chemistry department. 

She died a year later, aged just 24, before she had a chance to publish her findings. Her master’s degree advisor, Arthur L Dean – who was also a chemist and later became president of the University of Hawaii – mass produced the chaulmoogra extract and treated some 78 patients at the Kalihi Hospital, each of whom recovered sufficiently to be released. He published his results and named the process after himself, without ever mentioning the work that Ball had done. 

Despite an attempt in 1922 by Harry Hollmann, an assistant surgeon at a leprosarium in Honolulu, to gain recognition for Ball, her name is still not widely known, although her process is now known as the Ball Method. The University of Hawaii has named a scholarship for her, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has added her name to its iconic frieze, along with those of Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Florence Nightingale, joining those of 23 male medical innovators. 

Further reading

Ada Lovelace Day webinars

Ada Lovelace Day is just a month away and we have three awesome webinars lined up for you. All three will be streamed live on our YouTube and Facebook pages, plus you can sign up for each one on Eventbrite and we’ll send you handy reminders so you don’t miss out!

Frontiers in Engineering

In partnership with STEM Wana Trust, we invite you to join Sujata Roy, system planning engineer at Transpower, Renée Young, associate mechanical engineer at Beca, Natasha Mudaliar (right), operations manager at Reliance Reinforcing, and Victoria Clark, senior environmental engineer at Beca, for a fascinating conversation about the challenges and opportunities of engineering.

13:00 NZST, 12 Oct: Perfect for people in New Zealand, Australia, and the Americas.

Fusing Tech & Art in Games

The technical artist is a relatively new kind of role in the games industry, yet the possibilities for those who pursue this career path to create and merge art and technology together are endless.

Ada Lovelace Day and #RaiseTheGame invite you to join Kristrun Fridriksdottir (right), Jodie Azhar, and Emma Roseburgh for our tech art webinar. This panel will discuss what kind of work the tech artist does, the cutting edge of tech artistry, and how tech artists are pushing the boundaries and creating new experiences for players.

13:00 BST, 12 Oct: Perfect for people in the UK, Europe, Africa, Middle East, India, for early birds in the Americas and night owls in AsiaPacific.

Register now or watch on:

The Science of Hypersleep

Prof Gina PoeHypersleep is a common theme in science fiction, but what does science have to say about putting humans into suspended animation? What can we learn from hibernating animals? What’s the difference between hibernation and sleep? What health impacts would extended hypersleep have?

Ada Lovelace Day and the Arthur C. Clarke Award invite you to join science fiction author Anne Charnock, Prof Kelly Drew, who studies hibernation in squirrels, and Prof Gina Poe (right), an expert on the relationship between sleep and memory, for a discussion of whether hypersleep in humans is possible.

19:00 BST, 12 Oct: Perfect for people in the UK, Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

Register now

or watch on:

Apply for our new mentoring scheme

We are offering a year’s free access to our Finding Ada Network mentoring program to women in STEM. We will provide you with access to our mentoring platform, where we will match you with a mentoring partner, as well as our online content covering careers, professional development, soft skills and more. We’ll also support you with webinars about topics like goal setting, being a good mentoring partner and how to create good habits.

We will give priority to women from who are from a low-income background or are the first in your immediate family to study or work in STEM, and who are in the UK, but thanks to some generous donations we are opening up this scheme to all women in STEM.

We are particularly keen to hear from mentors who can help undergraduates, graduates and PhD students to understand their career options, whether that’s in academia or industry, and to take their next steps. We have students in chemistry, biology, physics, neuroscience, maths, astrophysics, engineering and computer science/programming who are looking for mentors. So if you’d like to improve your leadership skills and give back to the community, please apply to become a mentors now.

You can expect the mentoring program to take up around 1 to 2 hours a month for mentors, and 2 to 3 hours a month for mentees, although obviously in both cases you get out what you put in, so you may choose to devote more time to your mentoring partnership.

To apply, please complete the form below and we will get back to you as soon as possible. And don’t forget, the more money we raise in our GoFundMe, the more women we can help!

Applications are now closed.