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I spoke at Brighton Cafe Sci last night. Making this post mostly to keep a record of the link to the page about my talk , which has some feedback (as below).

Yesterday I attended the Opening Doors Conference , run by the Institute of Physics. Here are some of my notes on the conference.  One headline - the plan is that this will be the first of an annual series of conferences, and I would certainly encourage people to attend in the future as it was a very interesting day. The main theme of the conference was opening up gender non-conforming opportunities to post-16 children (e.g. girls doing traditionally "male" subjects as well as boys doing traditionally "female" subjects). The Institute of Physics have just published a report "Opening Doors" ( download here ) which follows a series of reports on the status of physics education at post-16 in the UK.  Peter Main from the Institute of Physics kicked off the programming presenting the new report and the background research which led to it. He motivated this by pointing out the different trends seen in Maths and Physics A-level participation since 1985. Maths A-l...

This year for Ada Lovelace Day I'm delighted to announce that my essay on Mary Somerville, now titled "Mary Somerville and the Mechanism of the Heaven's" has finally been published, as part of a new eBook, " More Passion for Science: Journeys into the Unknown ", edited by Suw Charman-Anderson. It's available for £1.99 (in support of the work of Finding Ada) from Amazon . I also wrote an accompanying blog post for the Digital Science Blog talking about why I picked Mary Somerville to write about. I was delighted to attend Ada Lovelace Day Live in London and enjoy the science cabaret. I'm completely biased, but I thought Jen Gupta's set on astronomical spectroscopy and Margaret Huggins was the best. For more on that see this ICG News Item: ICG Celebrates Ada Lovelace Day 2015 .

On Friday 2nd October, I was a guest panelist for an event hosted by the Mulberry School for Girls. More than 100 secondary school girls participated in a day of discussion on the theme of women in science, technology and finance. I participated in the third and final panel discussion of the day on the topic of innovation. The panel was Chaired by Kirsten Bodley, CEO of STEMNET UK, and the other panelists were Dr Dominique Allwood, a medical Doctor and Expert in Public Health and Miranda Lowe, Senior Curator at the Natural History Museum.  We were given the questions to think about in advance and here are my notes made in preparation. What is innovation?  I think of innovation as new solutions to old problems. It's looking at the world in a different way. It's something where having a diverse group of people is really important - we need a diversity of perceptions and life experience to develop the best innovative solutions.   Is it true that women working in science face...