The Graduates Celebrate First Plasma at MAST-U

The MAST-U team. Source: UKAEA 

 
On 29th October, UKAEA announced that after 7 years of preparations the MAST-U tokamak had achieved its first plasma. MAST-U stands for the Mega-Amp Spherical Tokamak Upgrade. Pretty self-explanatory, right? It’s a tokamak which is spherical and designed to create plasma with currents on the order of megaamperes. From the U for Upgrade, you’d assume it’s just a case of improving current equipment from the original MAST, simple right? Nope, almost 90% of the machine is new! So it’s practically a new machine, with tons more functionality than the original MAST. 

You may have heard of other non-spherical tokamaks like JET, which has set records for fusion power. So you couldn’t be faulted for asking the question ‘why make a tokamak spherical?’ Well, spherical tokamaks come with some major advantages. Due to the smaller ‘hole’ in the centre of the plasma, it’s believed we can get higher power generation at a lower cost compared to normal tokamaks. This is because the magnetic field-generating coils are closer together so the field is naturally stronger and less electricity is required! In addition, the reactors are generally lower in cost as they can be built smaller. 

The history of spherical tokamaks is longer than most at Culham. In 1990 UKAEA built START (the Small Tight Aspect Ratio Tokamak – an informative name) which was the precursor to MAST. MAST was built over the course of 3 years and operated from 1999 until 2013. The tokamak conducted key research into edge-localised mode (ELM) mitigation and the effect of high beta (the ratio of plasma pressure to the pressure from the confining magnetic field) on plasma, and its effect on the rate of fusion. 

 

The MAST-U vessel. Source: UKAEA

In 2007, MAST was operating at its engineering limits and big questions still remained for fusion research. Prime among these was how to handle the exhaust plasma produced in the reaction and how to dissipate that heat. Not to mention the ever-tantalising question of what happens if we put even more energy into it. The proposal was made and it was agreed that MAST would shut down, beginning its journey to upgrade. The challenge: introduce coils capable of higher current (130 kiloamps in the case of the toroidal field coils), raise the operational time to 5 seconds instead of 2, and add an off-axis neutral beam injector to investigate plasma current profile control and mitigation of instabilities. 

Most daunting of all, a novel divertor concept not seen anywhere in the world: the Super-X configuration. An area at the top and bottom of the tokamak capable of accepting plasma exhaust and, through the application of additional magnetic field coils, spread the plasma over a wide area to dissipate heat more effectively. Why have one configuration though when you could have many! By changing the magnetic fields, we can investigate standard (here ‘double null’), Super-X and snowflake divertor modes. These are all candidates for the plasma exhaust solution: how to dissipate heat from the 100–150 million-degree plasma without melting the bottom of the reactor.

 

Magnetic field lines for the potential MAST-U divertor modes. Source: MAST-U Research Plan, November 2019. 

 

The upgrade has experienced its fair share of hiccups during construction and commissioning. We’ll say no more about the source of the mysterious vacuum leak or the elusive earth fault (both now resolved). Big projects are bound to have problems though. Just look at NSTX-U or a football stadium. The difference being MAST-U has ~19km of cabling and fits in a 16m x 19.2m room. 

MAST-U is a testament to the dedication of engineers and scientists to build the bridge fusion desperately needs in its journey toward commercialisation. Seeking to learn more about heat dissipation in the hottest place on earth and whether a change in geometry can potentially shave acres of land off the final power plant size.

 

The MAST-U hall. Source: IOP

Meet the graduates 

The MAST-U graduates Mike, Jimmy, Sarah, Mourmour, and Ellen joined the MAST-U project in 2018 and 2019. Their work has contributed to putting MAST-U over the finish line, with their efforts in commissioning since April vindicated by first plasma this week. Here's how they've been helping. 

 

Ellen Wright, 2nd-year Graduate Electrical/Electronic Engineer: 

I started the graduate scheme last year in the Electrical Engineering department, our team works across many projects at UKAEA but most of my work has been on MAST-U and MAST-UE (MAST-U Enhancement). 

For MAST-U I have been involved in the plasma control system (PCS), I have been documenting the PCS interface, assisting with some new control algorithms and am working on converting a simulation that could be used to test the system without having to connect it to the machine. I have also been lucky to be involved in some cable termination work, a good opportunity to practise practical skills! All of this work has been very enjoyable and rewarding. 

This was an exciting time to join MAST-U in the final stages of commissioning, I am looking forward to seeing operations and everyone's hard work paying off and facilitating important research (and also all the future inevitable problem-solving opportunities!). 

 

Mourmour Man-Friel, 2nd-year Graduate Mechanical Engineer: 

I started the graduate scheme as a graduate mechanical engineer in the MAST-U operations team on September 2019. Before lockdown my role was mainly to support the activities going on in the Load assembly team; during lockdown I’ve been working on MAST-U Enhancement Chilled Coolant System (CCS) for the centre column and assisted in writing a literature review for STEP. 

The Load Assembly team is responsible for MAST-U vessel internal structures, vessel supports & coils as well as some of the supporting systems. My role varies from producing calculations and supporting documents to assembling components and inspecting the vessel for faults. I had the opportunities to do the following: leak testing on the vessel; help in producing a report on condensation levels in the block house (the room MAST-U is contained in); assembling piezo valves and leak testing them. 

I found that opportunities like this really help me to understand concepts. I’m very excited to go back onsite and to see the machine running, as well as carry out work required for MAST-UE CCS project because it is something we’ve been working on during lockdown. 

 

Sarah Parry-Wright, 2nd-year Graduate Electrical Engineer: 

I am Sarah Parry-Wright a Graduate Electrical Engineer working in the Power Supplies Group on MAST-U. I did an MEng in electrical and electronic engineering at Swansea University and started with UKAEA last April. My work here has involved the installation and upgrade of the radial field power supply, which powers the P6 coils controlling the vertical position of the plasma in the machine. I have been heavily involved in the commissioning of most of the coil supplies we have for MAST-U and am currently working in the control room with the operations team working towards getting ready for our 1st plasma. 

My work has been very exciting and fulfilling throughout my time at UKAEA and I have learned so much while thoroughly enjoying working with an amazing team. 

 

Michael Robson (Brother Nature), Graduate Mechanical Engineer: 

As a graduate mechanical engineer (with a background in physics), I’ve been working on getting diagnostics into the blockhouse (our equivalent of JET’s torus hall) and ready for operations. Working with a varied team I’ve been organising not only the mechanical side of bolting a camera to the vessel but also the electrical, networking and data acquisition of the diagnostic as a complete system. Many of the diagnostics I work on are spectrometers that separate light into its constituent wavelengths. This data tells us about what material is in the plasma (like impurities) as well as how much there is and how it’s moving. 

Alongside this work I’ve been involved in a graduate project designing a test cubicle for the electrical safety course and organising a tour of STFC Harwell’s facilities for the graduates. 

The most difficult thing I’ve encountered while helping with commissioning is the awful puns a member of the data acquisition team comes up with. 

Jimmy Measures, Graduate Software Engineer: 

As a graduate software engineer, I’ve worked on many different projects, from designing and creating data analysis tools to work on MASTU’s plasma control systems. The majority of my work has focused around writing and testing code for the Vertical Controller (or Z Controller as its more commonly known), which controls the power supply to one set of coils. This in turn changes the shape of the magnetic field and is used to alter the vertical position of the plasma and elongation. This device will hopefully enable more scientific research into the plasma’s behaviour during fusion. 

I have also worked on a graduate project to create a site-wide digital logbook. The aim is to prevent the loss of notes and make collaborating easier. On the side of working at UKAEA I also created and organised Grad’Lympics (with a lot of help from other graduates). A 5-month long competition of 14 events, from football to a quiz, to determine which out of the Oxford or Abingdon graduates were best. To find out who won please refer to previous blog posts from March 2019.

Written by Jimmy Measures and Mike Robson

Turning JET Back On

The Joint European Torus (JET) at Culham has been Europe’s flagship tokamak for nearly four decades. It holds several world records, such as fusion power produced (16 MW, achieved in 1997 [1]) and largest ratio of fusion power out to heating power in (Q=0.67 [1]). It is one of only two fusion machines to ever run experiments with a deuterium-tritium plasma. UKAEA operates JET for the EUROfusion consortium, which runs a research programme involving hundreds of scientists all over Europe.

The latest JET campaign, C38, is a precursor to next year’s DTE2: the first deuterium-tritium (D-T) experiment since 1997. DTE2 will act as a ‘dress rehearsal’ for ITER, allowing new insight into the behaviour of deuterium-tritium plasmas and testing components for ITER in more extreme conditions. With the C38 campaign resuming this month after a 3-month postponement due to COVID-19, we decided to have a look at some of the progress JET has made in recent years, and talk to some of UKAEA’s graduates who are helping to run the world’s largest and most powerful tokamak.

Making progress

This is the 38^th experimental campaign on JET, and the total number of experimental pulses is now over 97000. While JET holds many records, most of these were set in 1997, so it seems fair to ask: what has been the point of all these JET pulses since?

The JET control room in 1997 during the first full D-T campaign (source: CCFE), and now during preparations for the second (source: EUROfusion).

The first thing to say is that fusion, and plasma physics in general, is really hard. This isn’t just the ego-stroking sentiment of a physicist but an unfortunate reality. However, this is not to say we have made no progress. A tired stereotype of fusion is that it hasn’t really gone anywhere since the 1980s which, like most stereotypes, has little grounding in reality.

Up until the turn of the century, the record for the triple-product (a measure of fusion confinement) increased at a rate even faster [2] than the famous Moore’s Law, where computer chip processing power doubles every 18 months. The achievements on JET played a key role in this. Since the last D-T campaign, work on JET has focused on testing ITER components and making important advances in plasma control [3].

What the stereotype really hits at is that we haven’t built anything closer to a real fusion power plant than JET in the last 30 years. This is being rectified by the construction of ITER, the next-generation European tokamak scheduled to begin D-T operation in the mid-2030s. ITER should surpass breakeven (more fusion power out than heating power in) and show the viability of other power plant technology, like making tritium using breeder blankets and holding plasmas stable for up to an hour. This would then bridge the gap to EU-DEMO, the hypothetical demonstration fusion power plant marked for construction sometime near the middle of this century, and other energy-producing devices.

Looking to ITER

In recent years, much of UKAEA’s research has gone towards the design of ITER. It is this role which makes JET so crucial, as it can test aspects of the ITER design in a real tokamak. In the past it was imagined we could easily just scale up small-scale fusion machines to create power plants, which has proven to be unrealistic.

The complex behaviour of fusion plasmas means that JET is one of the few places in the world which can generate data for and physically test new technologies for future large tokamaks. Good examples of this are the ‘ITER-like wall’ of beryllium-tungsten tiles installed in 2011 [4] and the Shattered Pellet Injector (SPI) installed in 2019.

The ITER-like walls in JET, coloured by material. Source: https://www.iter.org.

The SPI generates frozen pellets of deuterium and neon gas which are shattered and propelled into the plasma to suppress instabilities (bouts of turbulence which affect the plasma’s performance). These gas pellets rapidly decrease the plasma temperature, dissipating energy and reducing potential damage to the tokamak. This technology will be crucial for ITER, ensuring the much larger and more energetic plasma will not damage the machine during disruptions – sudden terminations of the plasma caused by instabilities.

Getting JET ready for D-T has required monumental effort from many people across site to upgrade and re-commission systems which have been unused for over 20 years. There have also been significant upgrades to the machine since 1997. The neutral beams recently set a new record heating power of 32 MW [5] and record neutron rates have also been broken. This all puts us in a good place to achieve excellent performance which will be invaluable for ITER’s preparations.

It has been 37 years since JET generated its first plasma but there has arguably never been a more exciting time to be involved. Here are the thoughts of some of the UKAEA graduates about what it’s like to work on JET.

-    by Tom Wilson, 1^st-year graduate, NBI Shift Leader

The graduates at JET

Matthew Magness, 1^st-year Graduate, NBI Operator:

I joined the graduate scheme in September 2019 as a mechanical engineer, with my primary work being on STEP – UKAEA’s fusion power plant design project. In November, I began training as an operator for the neutral beam injection (NBI) heating system on JET. This system provides upwards of 30MW of heating power to JET during pulses so is a really critical system to allow JET to achieve its goals during campaigns.

As an operator, my primary role is to monitor and condition the positive ion neutral injectors (PINIs), which provide the heating power, in the lead up to and during pulses, as well as to liaise with the NBI shift leader to ensure we operate at the heating power and duration required. I completed my training for this role in February in preparation for the C38C campaign, however this was delayed until July due to COVID-19, and I am awaiting my first shift of this campaign. For this campaign, I’m hoping we can continue to see reliable high heating power from the NBI system in the lead up to DTE2 in the near future.

 Peter Cooper, 2^nd-year Graduate, Viewing System Operator:

I’m coming to the end of my second year on the graduate scheme, working as an engineering analyst in the Office of the Chief Engineer. I trained as a viewing system operator (VSO) for JET about a year ago and since then I do shifts about once a week.

The VSO’s role in the control room is essentially to be the eyes for the session leader (SL) and engineer in charge (EIC). The VSO has access to both visible and infrared cameras views from inside the vessel. Some of these infrared views are also used in the vessel thermal map (VTM) which is part of the protection system and can cause an alarm, stopping the pulse if components get too hot. If this happens, it is the VSO’s job to determine if it was a false alarm and inform the SL and EIC what caused the alarm so that they can adjust the next pulse or take the necessary action.

As VSO, I review both visible and protection cameras after each pulse, looking for abnormalities. These could be a variety of things including new, localised, high temperature areas, debris flying around the machine (UFOs) or an unusual pulse termination. I log these abnormalities and if necessary, inform the SL and EIC. Depending on the experiment being performed and equipment being tested, I may be asked to monitor for specific phenomenon such as pellet injection or arcing on the ICRH antennas.

Restart pulses, like the ones going on now to prepare for the upcoming campaign, can be tedious for the VSO, but I’m looking forward to the high-power pulses to come, especially DT!

 Edward Litherland-Smith, 2^nd-year graduate, Charge-Exchange Spectroscopist:

After graduating with a degree in Physics and Technology of Nuclear Reactors from the University of Birmingham, I started as a Graduate Charge Exchange Spectroscopist; In this role I work on the KS5 core Charge Exchange Recombination Spectroscopy (CXRS) system, as well as maintaining and updating the analysis software CHEAP. This involves assisting in operation of the diagnostic and analysis of the data produced with the rest of the spectroscopy team. During the restart period before we've been working on commissioning the diagnostic ready for the campaign, involving various calibration pulses to produce useful measurements for the coming experiments. Going to higher power regimes in the new campaign will allow new and interesting physics to be explored, some of which will be for the first time!

 Hannah Todd, 2^nd-year graduate, AGHS Control Room Duty Officer:

I am a chemistry graduate working shifts within the Active Gas Handling system. The Active Gas Handling system is another vital part of JET operations. It controls the collection, processing and redistribution of the hydrogen fuel sources for JET. The system is responsible for safely processing the radioactive hydrogen isotope tritium, other hydrogen isotopes and various exhaust impurity gases. Without the Active Gas Handling System, JET could not operate experiments using the currently most thermodynamically viable fusion reaction of deuterium and tritium. 

The demands of a control room duty officer vary day to day. This week I have been involved in liquid helium system commissioning, exhaust gas discharges, deuterium fills of the JET gas introduction modules, making safe gas mixtures to avoid explosive atmospheres, safety alarm testing and a multitude of other jobs. This interaction mainly involves liaising with the operators on plant while we work the remote operating system. The shift team are also responsible for the safety of everyone within the building. We are trained in responses to certain alarms and emergency evacuations/procedures. It can be quite daunting at first but quickly you become familiar with all the sub-systems, standards ops, daily checks and operation of the control system. Being in the control room is the best place to get practical experience and gain knowledge on all the requirements of such a specialised chemical plant.

References and further reading

[1] The Scientific Success of JET,
     M. Keilhacker et al., Nuclear Fusion 41, 1925 (2001)
[2] ITER on the road to fusion energy,
     K. Ikeda, Nuclear Fusion 50, 014002 (2010)
[3] Advances in understanding and utilising ELM control in JET,
     I. T. Chapman et al., Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion 58, 014017 (2016)
[4] JET ITER-like wall – overview and experimental programme,
     G. F. Matthews et al., Physica Scripta T145, 014011 (2011)
[5] Record heating power achieved on JET (CCFE, 14/11/2019),
     https://ccfe.ukaea.uk/record-heating-power-achieved-on-jet/

- Tom Berry

Pioneering Women in Physics - IOP event

On the 4th March, a few of us graduates took the day off work and took a trip to London to the all-day Institute of Physics event ‘The Lives and Times of Pioneering Women in Physics. It was such a fun and inspiring day so I’ve put together some highlights. The first one is of course that we got to meet grand-daughter of Marie Curie – Hélène Langevin-Joliot, who has been a nuclear physicist herself. She told us some lovely personal accounts of her grand-mother’s life. We made sure to get a picture with her:

Grand-Daughter of Marie Curie (middle) with (from left to right) Alex, Katy, Ailsa and Sarah

 

As soon as we arrived at the IOP building, we noticed that all of the rooms are named after inspirational female physicists, and instead of seeing lots of typically-male pictures of Nobel-prize winners dawning the walls, we saw lots of pictures of female physicists! It seems that the Women in Physics group have a large influence.

After coffee and biscuits the talks began with an introduction from Professor Edward Davis, Chairman of the History of Physics Group, who generated gasps of disbelief from the audience when describing a newspaper article from the previous day which described an incident in an all-boys school where a pupil had said – “Women shouldn’t be in science, they should stay in the kitchen” to a female lab-technician.  Heather Williams then greeted us and prepared us for a day with the aim “…to see how far we’ve come, and how far we need to go”. I’m going to give some of the highlights of each talk, and it’s my interpretation – so don’t quote the speakers on it!

 

Order of speakers (click on links):

 

The contribution of women to physics: a historical perspective

Dr Gillian Butcher
Grand-daughter of Marie Curie  - Marie Curie (1867 – 1934): Pioneer of Radioactivity
Prof Hélène Langevin-Joliot

Lise Meitner (1878-1968): Pioneer of nuclear fission
Prof Gerry Lander

Mary Somerville and her work in astronomy and optics, c 1820-1991
Prof Allan Chapman

Edith Stoney (1869 – 1938) : Pioneer of medical physics
Prof Francis Duck

The first female physics professors in the UK, Daphne Jackson (1936-1991) and Gillian Gehring
Prof Gillian Gehring

Women in Crystallography
Dr Kate Crennell
History’s Lessons: opportunities and challenges for women in physics today.
Dr Heather Williams

 

Dr Gillian Butcher - The contribution of women to physics: a historical perspective
When Dr Butcher told us that the first mention of a female ‘scientist ‘ was in about 2700BC in Egypt, we knew we were in for a truly historical overview. This Egyptian woman was called a chief physician. However by the time Hippocrates came around in 460-370BC, he claimed that the cause of women’s health problems and emotional instability was a ‘wandering uterus’ – which we didn’t think our Egyptian Chief Physician would agree with… There are also various mentions of women scientists in Ancient Greece, and some doing Alchemy (which was classed as science) in Alexandria.

In the Middle Ages, there was not much science going on in Europe in general, but in China, India and Arab countries, universities were beginning to be founded, and the scientific method was making an appearance. Most of the mentions of female scientists in this period are from convents, such as the famous Hildegarde of Bingen who produced scientific and medicinal writings.

Elsewhere in Europe, Italy had female students and staff, and in England there were female surgeons by the 16th Century.  However, women were more often than not getting punished for having knowledge, as shown by the life imprisonment of the Duchess of Gloucester, Eleanor Cobham, who was accused of witchcraft.  This fear of women’s intellect and sexuality had grown by the time of the Restoration in 1660, when there were many more witch trials. During the civil war the Diggers (or Levellers) argued for absolute equality for women, but the industrialisation of the country started to divide gender roles even more.
Science was progressing though, and Francis Bacon was leading the way, however he didn’t have much of an opinion of women as shown by this quote “Science is mastery of man over nature, nature as the bride is seduced, conquered and stripped of power”. The Royal Society in 1612 was more like a private Gentleman’s club. Opportunities for women in science mainly lay with middle and upper classes who could afford technology such as the telescope, microscope and printer. In 1694 Mary Astell published the lovely book below, arguing for women’s education.

 

In the 17th and 18th Century, more and more women were beginning to play a role in science, especially in Italy; however they were all from wealthy families, and only ever assistants to men.

In the 18th Century we see the rise of professional science, it becomes more restricted, women are not allowed, neither are those of the ‘wrong’ religion or class. Only in the 19th Century do we start to see more women scientists, Marie Curie, Annie Jump Cannon and Lise Meitner. In the 1870s and 1880s women were being admitted to Oxbridge and by 1919 Oxford started to allow women onto degree courses. By 1920, 14% of those earning doctorates in physical and biological science were women, however by  1960 that had reduced to 5%. At the moment we have about 15% women studying for doctorates in just physics. This shows that it’s not a linear process; it depends so much on time, location, religion and many more factors (to be explored later).
Dr Butcher took us on a whirlwind-tour of the history of women in science, and ended on a quote from Rachel Ivie from the American Institute of Physics “Even if I tried not to choose physics – it would choose me”.

 

Professor Gerry Lander – Lise Meitner (1878-1968): Pioneer of nuclear fission

Professor Lander gave a nice overview of Lise Meitner’s work and life; he started off with what is written on her gravestone “A physicist who never lost her humanity”.  She had a very difficult career, having to deal with many prejudices and barriers. When she first started her job in Berlin she was not even allowed in the front door of the university, she had to go in the back entrance. Being Jewish, she also faced difficulties being in Nazi Germany and had to escape in 1938. She was still in contact with Hahn, her previous supervisor, who had detected (what he thought was) radium for the first time after bombarding uranium with neutrons.  Living in Copenhagen and working with Bohr, they persuaded Hahn to check the chemistry of the radium and he discovered that it wasn’t radium at all, and was actually barium. Meitner and her nephew Frisch, also a physicist, took a walk in the woods and whilst talking about this discovery realised that the cause must have been nuclear fission. They published this discovery in Nature, but took too long, and Hahn had already published his paper using the term fission. It was soon after this that the Manhatten Project was started.  Meitner was asked to work on it but refused, and was horrified after Hiroshima. In 1945 it was announced that the Chemistry Nobel Prize was going to Hahn alone, which is generally considered a great injustice. Hahn never acknowledged Meitner publically but did share the prize money with her.

Lise Meitner - Pioneer of nuclear fission

 

Professor Hélène Langevin-Joliot, Grand-daughter of Marie Curie  - Marie Curie (1867 – 1934): Pioneer of Radioactivity
Before Professor Langevin-Joliot’s talk we learned that they have 5 Nobel prizes in their extended family! Professor Langevin-Joliot gave a lovely personal account of Marie Curie’s life which was amazing to hear first-hand. She affectionately called her ‘Marie’ for the talk so I will too! Marie had a very difficult life, but had a huge love of science, she worked very hard for her achievements and said once “I have a sort of hope that I shall not disappear…into nothingness”. She was considered ‘just an assistant’ to her husband for a very long time.
Marie and Pierre met in 1895, just when she had been given a grant for her research and Pierre was to help. After one afternoon of talking about physics with Marie, he apparently changed his mind about women and fell in love. Pierre wanted to get married, but Marie had to go home, and he convinced her to return by his letters. She ‘chose Pierre and the Scientific Dream’. They had very different personalities – ‘Pierre was as dreamy as Marie was organised’, but they had the same dream about society. They were married in the same year they met and Marie was allowed to work at the school where Pierre was a professor. In 1897 they had their first daughter (Professor Langevin-Joliot’s mother). They were doing research into a ‘spontaneous reaction’, which was very surprising and unexplained at the time. Becquerel had given up trying to find the cause of this, but Marie had persevered, looking at other materials for similar behaviours (e.g. Thorium). It was her decision to investigate the mineral Pitchblende (uraninite) which led to the discovery of radium. She signed the paper and coined the term ‘radioactive’, but Pierre got the prize in the end…  They continued their huge success working in ‘The Shed’ – their lab, until Pierre tragically died in 1906. In Professor Langevin-Joliot’s words ‘it broke her life’. Marie took over from Pierre and became the director of the lab, the first woman in this role. A feminist victory, but Marie was very depressed, and was still writing to Pierre – ‘some fools congratulated me’ on her new job.
She finally got the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 for the discovery of polonium (named after her country of birth).  She claimed the two most important qualities for success are self-confidence and diplomacy. After that Marie became more interested in the medical application of her discoveries, as Pierre had been. She travelled to America in 1921 to set up “The Curie Foundation”, and she became vice-chair of the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation. In a letter to her daughter she said “I have given a great deal of time to science because I wanted to, because I loved research”. She has become a mythic figure, and caused a shift in the field of nuclear physics. So many outstanding achievements for an outstanding woman, who overcame many struggles.

Marie-Curie - Pioneer of radioactivity

 

Professor Allan Chapman - Mary Somerville and her work in astronomy and optics, c 1820-1991.
Allan Chapman, a prominent historian (just look at his Wikipedia page!) has written an entire book on Mary Somerville, so he knows his stuff. He gave a hugely entertaining and very interesting talk. We got an instant feeling about what kind of person Mary Somerville was with Professor Chapman’s first fact – she lived for 92 years and died correcting proofs at her desk! We also learned that she was a big character with a ‘racy tongue’, she was ‘no prude!’ and ‘could swear like a British trooper’. Basically she had a tremendous personality, was a strong feminist and from a young age was fascinated by the strange symbols in maths textbooks. Her father thought that reading these books would soften her brain so he confiscated the books, but she memorized the pages. Her first husband had similar opinions, but when he died, she was still in her late 20s and started to pay for private classes in physics and maths (since she wasn’t allowed to attend university). She became bored with the maths of the UK – it seemed to her to be behind it’s game, so she bought books from France by Euler and Laplace and started corresponding with them, and started to get interested in crystallography and astronomy.
Luckily her second husband encouraged her intellect and was actively proud of her pursuits. By then it was the end of the Napoleonic wars and suddenly she had the option to visit France. It turned out she was already quite famous there from her correspondences, even considered one of England’s finest mathematicians. Her husband William became a fellow of the Royal Society and Mary subsequently met Faraday and Herschel and soon started doing research. She published the first paper by a woman in the Phil.Trans journal and went onto write several more distinguished pieces. At age 90, she was living in Italy and her Nephew comes along with an ironclad battleship. She was so curious that she went to visit and boarded it, insisting that they fire the guns for her!
Professor Chapman finished his talk by showing us a picture he has drawn of her telescope, which they are reconstructing for Somerville College in Oxford. She was and still is an inspiration to many women; they have even named a crater of the moon after her!

Mary Somerville

 

Professor Francis Duck - Edith Stoney (1869 – 1938) : Pioneer of medical physics

When Edith Stoney wanted to attend university, having already been privately educated, she had limited options. The local Dublin universities did not accept women, so she went to the Royal College of Science for Ireland, science was the only option.  By the time she had finished her studies there, Cambridge was accepting women but not issuing them degrees, but she went to study maths there. She then became a maths teacher at Chaltenham Ladies College and then a physics lecturer at London School of Medicine for Women where “her lectures mostly developed into informal talks”.
England was particularly slow at that time to realise how important physics was to medicine. Edith and her sister Florence were pioneers of medical physics and set up the first radiology service at the Royal Free Hospital. Edith was a suffragette and political activist. When war broke out Edith and Florence offered to go to the front line with their equipment but were rejected. Florence went anyway with the Women’s Imperial Service League and got an OBE for her efforts.  Edith joined the Scottish Women’s hospitals through the Suffragists. She ran X-Ray services under the French Red Cross. They had a hard time during the war, Edith was working in Serbia, changing gas in the X-ray tubes, treating gangrene and foreign bodies, doing electric bath treatments. Of course, there was no radiation protection then, and the women were getting radiation burns.
In all of the reports from the time she is judged for her appearance rather than being praised for her knowledge and skills “Grey uniform, grey hair, pale blue eyes”, “a mere wraith of a woman”. Edith earned herself 5 war medals in the end. At the end of the war she got a lectureship at Kings College, she could not get a medical physics job since she had no formal qualifications. In her retirement, she studied the effects of UV and vitamin D on osteomalacia. The first woman in medical physics, and a physicist to the end.

Edith Stoney - Pioneer of medical physics

 

Professor Gillian Gehring – The first female physics professors in the UK, Daphne Jackson (1936-1991) and Gillian Gehring
The next speaker was a true role model for physicists everywhere. Gillian Gehring, you just have to read her blurb on the University of Sheffield’s webpage . The second ever woman in the UK to hold a professorship, and talking about her mentor Daphne Jackson, who was the first. I was particularly inspired by Professor Gehring and her subject, because not only was she talking about two physicists with very important and interesting research, but also who have taken hugely important steps to help women stay in physics, while allowing them to have a family life as well.
Daphne Jackson was the first female professor at the young age of 36, and the youngest ever IOP fellow. Almost half of her papers were on science on society, and most of the rest on medical physics. She was always concerned about the lack of women in physics and called it ‘an appalling waste of talent’. Her own experience of caring for her own mother with dementia, and getting no support from social services spurred her onto setup the ‘Women Returners to Science and Engineering’ Fellowship, and this turned into Daphne’s hobby. She hoped it would be taken over by a public body. She lobbied, wrote articles, raised £400,000 from donors and got 132 applicants. The idea is that the selected fellow works part-time for 2-3 years and undergoes a re-training programme, allowing them to gradually enter back into their professions. Daphne took a major role and acted as a councillor to the follows. Unfortunately Professor Jackson died young, aged 54, she had tragically and ironically contracted Breast cancer while studying it. Now her legacy lives on however, and is now called the ‘Daphne Jackson Trust’ and has helped over 250 women restart their careers, and now also helps men as well. Gillian still helps with the trust, which struggles to get enough funding for the number of suitable applicants. Hearing Dr Gehrings enthusiasm on the scheme, and hear her talk about this amazing friend of hers who set it up was really inspiring.

 

Daphne Jackson

Dr Kate Crennell: Women in Crystallography

Dr Crennell, a crystallographer herself gave a nice overview of various women in crystallography. She set up a biographical website for these women which gives a nice historical overview of their lives and works . We learned about the pioneers of crystallography – Dorothy Hodgkin, Rosalind Franklin, Kathleen Lonsdale, Helen Megaw, and Louise Johnson.  Rosalind Franklin did breakthrough work on the structure of DNA, and may have just missed out on the Nobel Prize if she hadn’t passed away so young (aged 37). Instead Crick, Watson and Wilkins (who worked in the same laboratory as Franklin- and who allegedly showed Crick and Watson her data before she had published it), were awarded it in 1962.
Kathleen Lonsdale- “Housewife, mother, Quaker, scientist and teacher” was so promising to Bragg, that he found her funding for childcare so he could do research with her (we need more of that now!).  She famously discovered that the Benzene ring was planar. She was a strong pacifist and when the war broke out she refused to pay her fine for not doing civil defence duties and went to prison for a month. One structure of diamond is named after her ‘Lonsdaleite’.
Dorothy Hodgkin, a student of Somerville college, and who supervised Margaret Thatcher, was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel prize. She was also president of the Pugwash organisation (physicists for peace) – another pacifist like Lonsdale.

 

Dr Heather Williams – History’s Lessons: opportunities and challenges for women in physics today
Dr Williams, co-founder and director of ScienceGrrl gave an informative evidence-based talk (just what we scientists like!) – pointing out that we’ve come a long way, but there is still a long way to go. She started by highlighting that the lack of women in science is actually a culturally specific problem – the numbers of women in science roles varies hugely country to country.
All of the data she gave however, showed fewer than 50% women in science in each country. Interestingly, the number of women doing science subjects at GCSE is approximately 50%, but as soon as you look at A-Level students, it drops to about 25%, which stays approximately constant when you go to Undergraduate and Postgraduate. Then you hit Researcher and it starts to drop, again for Lecturer positions, and by the time you get to professor level it’s shockingly only about 5% women. There is a similar trend in all subjects, although the baseline is higher (~50% at the beginning, dropping down to ~20%). 
Heather highlighted some of the issues affecting women as they progress in their careers, including gender expectations in relation to child care and housework, lack of affordable childcare or flexible working arrangements, difficulties in progression after periods off from work , job insecurity, the ‘two-body problem’ (explained very nicely here),  and unconscious bias. She showed the figures for % of female entry into A –level subjects. The lowest was computing at a mere 7%, physics was 21%, maths at 39%. The highest were performing arts (88%), art and design (75%), psychology (74%).  However, interestingly Heather showed some figures showing that once females have decided on a science subject they tend to stay in that field, but fewer of them finish their degrees it seems.
Heather then went back to the problem of culture and showed some examples of the terrible gender stereotyping that crop up all over the place in our society. She also highlighted the huge impact these seemingly trivial gender biased toys, confectionary, cards, books, journalism (etc) have with a  quote from Gina Rippon, Professor of Cognitive Imaging at Aston University –“ The brain is much more plastic than early neuroscientists ever dreamed, it is hugely  permeable to society’s influences. Life’s experiences can (literally) be brain-changing  - and any talk of hard-wiring is to misunderstand neural development. Until social factors are controlled for, it is impossible to say any differences are solely due to gender. Our brains reflect the society we live in” – quite scary really when you watch kids adverts for toys.
What is also scary is that even at home males tend to be encouraged to be engineers, scientist and tradespeople, where girls are not. Heather finished off by encouraging us, the audience to do more – complain about gender stereotyping in adverts and shops, don’t be afraid to be a role model and educate others about the misconceptions about science. We left feeling enthused and determined to make a difference.

 

The day was a delightfully cheering account of some hugely inspiring female role models by some great characters, and a good excuse to go to the pub in London afterwards 