Tuesday 8 October 2024
Ada Lovelace Day Live, our annual ‘science cabaret’ will return once again with another fantastic line-up of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), who will share their experiences, insights and expertise, inspiring and empowering the next generation of women in STEM.
We will again be hosted at the Royal Institution in London (venue details below) and tickets for the in-person event and our global livestream will be available soon.
Our speakers include:
- Prof Anjali Goswami, a palaeobiologist who will be talking about why cats are evolutionarily perfect
- Dr Evgenia Ilyinskaya, a volcanologist who’ll be talking about the Grindavík eruption in Iceland
- Takita Bartlett, a mathematician who’ll be talking about using crafts to introduce mathematical concepts to children
- Dr Samantha Terry, a radiobiologist who’s going to be talking about the use of targeted radionuclide therapy in cancer treatments
- Dr Sarah Bearchell, a science writer, presenter and trainer who’ll be creating clouds live on stage
With more speakers to be announced. Read all about them below!
Cash bar
The cash bar was open for the hour before the performance, so we encouraged everyone to get there early, relax with a beverage, and enjoy perusing our book stall or looking around the venerable Royal Institution, where so many momentous scientific discoveries have been announced.
Organise your own event
If you can’t join us to celebrate in London, why not organise your own event? Streaming tickets will be available, so you can join us from anywhere around the world and help us raise awareness of women’s accomplishments and inspiring girls to pursue careers in STEM, shaping a more inclusive future together.
About our speakers
Prof Anjali Goswami
Prof Anjali Goswami is a research leader in evolutionary biology at the Natural History Museum, London and an honorary professor of palaeobiology at University College London. She is also president of The Linnean Society of London, where Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was first presented in 1858.
Anjali grew up around Detroit, Michigan (USA), but spent long periods of her life in India, where her love of nature was first sparked by seeing a tiger when she was 4 years old. She studied biology and beology at the University of Michigan and conducted her PhD research on mammal evolution at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History before moving to London to take up a research fellowship at the Natural History Museum. Before coming back to the Natural History Museum as a research leader, she lectured at the University of Cambridge and University College London.
Anjali specialises in the evolution of animal shape, especially skulls, and develops new mathematical approaches for reconstructing how and why animals look the way they do, now and in the past. She has led expeditions to search for fossils all over the world, especially India, Argentina, and Svalbard. She has won numerous awards for her work, including the Palaeontological Association’s President’s Medal, the Linnean Society’s Bicentenary Medal, the Zoological Society of London’s Scientific Medal, and HumanistUK’s Darwin Day Medal. She was elected to the fellowship of the Royal Society in 2024.
She is passionate about inspiring people around the world to explore, study, and protect nature and hopes everyone will get out and get their hands and feet dirty while learning more about this amazing planet we live on.
Dr Evgenia Ilyinskaya
Dr Evgenia Ilyinskaya is an associate professor of volcanology at the University of Leeds. She researches volcanic emissions of gases and aerosols, and their impacts on air quality, the environment and people’s wellbeing. She has done fieldwork in Iceland, Hawaii, Montserrat, Nicaragua and Antarctica, to name just a few examples.
Evgenia has led large international and interdisciplinary teams – for example a project on building societal resilience to volcanic air pollution in Nicaragua combining physical and social sciences; history; and visual arts. She is also involved in the hazard management of volcanic eruptions in Iceland as a scientist on the Icelandic Civil Protection advisory groups. She has published 30+ peer-reviewed papers and led and/or contributed to 4 major reports on volcanic activity and hazard, including the 2015 UNISDR Global Assessment Report on volcanic risk.
Takita Bartlett-Lashley
Working at the intersection of STEM, fashion and education, Takita 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, in addition to launching STEM in Style, an initiative which has delivered STEAM events/workshops for over 2000 young people.
Persistence to blend these passions has fuelled Takita’s 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.
Dr Samantha Terry
Dr Samantha Terry is a reader in radiation biology 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. She was inspired to work in radiobiology because she wanted to help patients with cancer, but was nervous around blood.
After completing a BSc in Cell Biology at the University of St Andrews, Samantha did a PhD in how X-rays can be used to treat cancer, followed by two years at the University of Oxford working on radioactive, injectable therapies and three years in Nijmegen in the Netherlands using radioactive compounds to image cancer. In 2015, she started her own lab group that works on determining how different types of radioactivity can be best used in the clinic.
Questions her group aims 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?”
Twitter | Twitter (lab) | Website
Dr Sarah Bearchell
Dr Sarah Bearchell is a freelance science writer, presenter and trainer based in Oxfordshire. She creates multi-sensory science activities, aiming to engage the whole audience at schools and festivals.
This Inclusive Science earned her the 2014 Joshua Phillips Award for Innovation in Science Engagement and the 2024 Beetlestone Award for Leadership and Legacy in Informal Science Learning. Sarah also writes about science for adults and children – encouraging everyone to get involved with science.
Venue
Ada Lovelace Day Live will take place in the Theatre at The Royal Institution, London. You can find information about the venue on the Ri’s website, including travel details and accessibility.
Website: http://www.rigb.org/
Twitter: @Ri_Science
Address: 21 Albemarle St, London, W1S, 4BS.