Author Archives: Suw

Looking for a job in STEM?

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If you’re a woman in the UK looking for a job in STEM, whether you are a recent graduate, at an early stage in your career, or want to return to STEM after taking a break, then the Finding Ada Online Careers Fair for Women in STEM on 16 November is for you!

We understand that it can be hard to not just find a job, but find the right job, and it doesn’t get any easier when you’re looking for your second and third jobs, or if you’re returning after a break. Searching through job listings sites and posting your CV online are both tedious tasks, and you’re always at the mercy of the algorithms used to sort applicants.

A better way to find a new job is to talk to recruiters directly, to have a conversation about their company and the jobs they have available, as well as chatting about your areas of interest and the career you want to develop. Having a video or audio chat with recruiters allows you to cut through the algorithms to make a real impression, and it gives you an unparalleled chance to learn about a company before you apply for a job there.

Talking to a company’s HR representative will help you understand which companies share your values and who you really want to work for. Because every interview is a two way street, and you should be assessing each company you talk to just as much as they are assessing you.

Our online careers fair will provide women in the UK with the opportunity to talk to recruiters from around the country, and from across all sorts of STEM fields. It’s an amazing opportunity to find out more about what employers are looking for, to start to form valuable relationships with recruiters, and to find specific jobs to apply for.

So sign up to our free careers fair today, and take the first step towards your next job!

 

 

 

 

Ep 17: Medical inventions, satellite propulsion, and imposter syndrome

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Welcome to the Ada Lovelace Day podcast, highlighting the work of women in STEM. Each month, we talk to women from around the STEM world about their careers, as well as talking to women and men, about historic and modern women’s achievements, discoveries, and inventions.

In this episode

01:35: Dr Maryanne Mariyaselvam talks about how simple medical inventions can save lives, and how they get from lab to hospital.

25:07: Our Discovery of Month is the invention of the hydrazine resistojet, aka the electrothermal hydrazine thruster, by propulsion engineering Yvonne Brill.

29:22: Dr Dean Burnett discusses why role models are important, and what imposters syndrome is and how to combat it.

Our interviewees

Dr Maryanne Mariyaselvam MBBS

Dr Maryanne Mariyaselvam

Dr Maryanne Mariyaselvam read her BSc in neuroscience at Leeds University and subsequently completed medical training at the Norwich Medical School, East Anglia. She finished her Foundation Training in the Eastern Region and went onto a research post at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Kings Lynn where she led three regional patient safety projects across 11 hospitals in the East of England.

Currently, Maryanne is undertaking a doctorate in patient safety at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests are in the field of patient safety and understanding errors in the NHS, human factors and the use of innovation to design engineered solutions to prevent never events and serious adverse events.

Maryanne is a fellow on Professor Sir Bruce Keogh’s NHS Innovator Accelerator Programme and two of her safety innovations have been selected onto the programme for national implementation: the Non-injectable Arterial Connector (NIC), designed to prevent wrong route drug administration and the WireSafe, designed to prevent retained foreign objects. Maryanne is also a founding fellow of the Q Initiative and is a fellow on the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme, through which she is developing her 3rd safety innovation.

You can follow Maryanne on Twitter @mmariyaselvam.

Dr Dean Burnett

Dr Dean BurnettDean Burnett is a doctor of neuroscience and lecturer/tutor in psychiatry at the Institute of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences at Cardiff University. He also blogs for The Guardian, and sometimes performs as a stand-up comedian.

Dean’s first book The Idiot Brain, was published in 2016, and “celebrates blind spots, blackouts, insomnia, and all the other downright laughable things our minds do to us, while also exposing the many mistakes we’ve made in our quest to understand how our brains actually work”. His next book, The Happy Brain, which will be published in May 2018, “investigate[s] what causes happiness, where it comes from, and why we are so desperate to hang onto it”.

You can follow Dean on Twitter @garwboy.

Yvonne BrillDiscovery of the month

Our Discovery of the Month is the hydrazine resistojet, which was invented by Yvonne Brill in the late 1960s. It became known as the electrothermal hydrazine thruster and was, eventually, adopted as the satellite and space industry standard.

Thanks to our sponsor

This podcast is brought to you thanks to the generous support of ARM, our exclusive semiconductor industry sponsor. You can learn more about ARM on their website at ARM.com and you can follow them on Twitter at @ARMHoldings.

If you would like to join ARM as a sponsor of the Ada Lovelace Day Podcast, please email us.

Credits

Episode edited by Andrew Marks.

Our links

Ep 16: Fire engineering, Liquid Paper, and understanding memory and cognition

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iTunes | Google Play | RSS (Soundcloud) | Stitcher

Welcome to the Ada Lovelace Day podcast, highlighting the work of women in STEM. Each month, we talk to women from around the STEM world about their careers, as well as talking to women and men, about historic and modern women’s achievements, discoveries, and inventions.

In this episode

01:30: Kristen Salzer-Frost introduces us to the relatively new discipline of fire engineering.

25:05: Our Discovery of the Month is the intriguing story of Liquid Paper, invented by Bette Nesmith Graham.

29:25: Nicole George and Cordon Purcell talk about why neuropsychologist Dr Brenda Milner’s work on memory and cognition has been so influential.

Our interviewees

Kristen Salzer-Frost

Kristen Salzer-Frost is a Lecturer in Fire Engineering at Glasgow Caledonian University who started her career as a Fire Safety Engineer in Australia before moving to the UK. Her specialties include computer modelling of fire and evacuation, practical fire safety building design strategies, international fire engineering projects and fire safety design in historic buildings. She is currently completing her PhD in two-way coupling of fire and evacuation models with the Fire Safety Engineering Group at the University of Greenwich.

Nicole George and Cordon Purcell

Nicole GeorgeNicole George is currently completing her Master’s of Neuroscience at McGill University, after graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in Kinesiology from the University of Windsor. She is currently studying the pathophysiology of chronic pain. You can follow her on Twitter @nicgeorge5.

 

 

 

Cordon Purcell

Cordon Purcell is a Registered Music Therapist (MTA), who graduated with a Bachelor’s in Music Therapy from the University of Windsor. She is currently completing her Master’s degree in Music Therapy at Concordia University, where her research involves a self-heuristic paradigm, investigating her relationship to music. You can follow her on Twitter @cordonpurcell.

The Superwomen in Science podcast discusses “the past, present and future of women in science, highlighting a wide variety of scientific endeavours as well as issues facing women in science”. You can listen on Soundcloud or iTunes, and can follow them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

 

Nicole and Cordon were talking about Dr Brenda Milner, whose work with Patient HM over the course of three decades “established that people have multiple memory systems, governing different activities like language or motor skills, opening the way for a greater understanding of how the brain works.”

 

 

 

Discovery of the month

Our Discovery of the Month is something definitely of its time: The invention of Liquid Paper by Bette Nesmith Graham in 1951, and her development of the Liquid Paper Corporation into a multimillion dollar global business.

Thanks to our sponsor

This podcast is brought to you thanks to the generous support of ARM, our exclusive semiconductor industry sponsor. You can learn more about ARM on their website at ARM.com and you can follow them on Twitter at @ARMHoldings.

If you would like to join ARM as a sponsor of the Ada Lovelace Day Podcast, please email us.

 

Credits

Episode edited by Andrew Marks.

Our links

Update to Dr Mae Jemison crochet pattern

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If you downloaded the Dr Mae Jemison crochet pattern, then you’ll want to download the new, corrected version before you get started!

Dr Mae Jemison PDF pattern – UK
Dr Mae Jemison PDF pattern – US
Dr Mae Jemison Ravelry page

The new pattern fixes a problem with Jemison’s neck, which as previously written turned out to be a little bit floppy. Unfortunately, this didn’t get picked up in testing, and I had thought that the reason my own test version was a bit floppy was just that I’m not an expert crocheter. But when I was designing Dr Eugenie Clark I made her neck quite a bit thicker, 18 stitches instead of 7, and that made it much more robust.

The differences in the pattern are the last two rounds of the head, and rounds 6 to 20 of the body (and both collar options).

Ep 15: Life as a tech reporter, automotive safety features and WWII metallurgy

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Welcome to the Ada Lovelace Day podcast, highlighting the work of women in STEM. Each month, we talk to women from around the STEM world about their careers, as well as talking to women and men, about historic and modern women’s achievements, discoveries, and inventions.

In this episode

00:28: Zoe Kleinmann talks about life as a tech reporter for the BBC.

26:40: We explore the contributions that women have made to the automotive industry, including safety and comfort features that we now take for granted!

30:55: Dr Paul Coxon from the University of Cambridge on the fascinating work of metallurgist Constance Tipper.

Our interviewees

Zoe Kleinman

Zoe KleinmanZoe Kleinman is a high profile BBC journalist and broadcaster, regularly seen and heard across BBC radio, TV and online.

From cybersecurity and hacking to artificial intelligence and driverless cars, Zoe brings tech and business stories to a mainstream global audience of millions across international radio, TV and online outlets including Radio 4’s Today programme and BBC World News.

She travels the world in search of the Next Big Thing – flying selfie-taking drones in the Nevada desert, spending the night in a house full of robots, being turned into a human beatbox, climbing Mount Everest (using virtual reality, in a hotel room in Las Vegas)  and trying to survive for 48 hours using only Bitcoin on the Isle of Man – where she discovered it was easier to buy beer than breakfast.

Zoe is also a mum of two children and as a result can build pretty much anything out of Lego.

You can follow Zoe on Twitter @zsk.

Dr Paul Coxon

Paul CoxonPaul Coxon is a physicist in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge. His research focusses on new materials for sustainable energy generation and battery devices. He is currently developing extremely black nano-surfaces to improve PV cells by increasing their ability to trap the full spectrum of the sun. He is a keen science communicator always eager to engage the public in the wonders of materials science. Frequently appears on radio and TV, and regularly contributes to popular science magazines and blogs on renewable energy, solar photovoltaics, energy materials and storage. He can be found on Twitter at @paulcoxon.

Constance TipperPaul was talking about Constance Tipper, a metallurgist, crystallographer, and the first woman to be appointed to the Department of Engineering at Cambridge. She was interested in metals and how the crystalline structure affected their strength and mechanical properties. She made her name in helping understand why the all-welded “Liberty Ships” which fed Britain and Europe during WW2 kept failing and splitting in two.

Discovery of the month

We talk about some of the inventions that have made our motoring lives safer and more comfortable, including the windscreen wiper, turn and brake signals, and the car heater.

Thanks to our sponsor

This podcast is brought to you thanks to the generous support of ARM, our exclusive semiconductor industry sponsor. You can learn more about ARM on their website at ARM.com and you can follow them on Twitter at @ARMHoldings.

If you would like to join ARM as a sponsor of the Ada Lovelace Day Podcast, please email us.

Get in touch!

If you’d like to send us feedback about the show, or if you’d like to take part, please email us. We’re especially interested in hear from men who would like to talk to us about the women in STEM who have influenced them, especially those women who are less well known.

Credits

Episode edited by Andrew Marks.

Our links