Dr Jess Wade liked it here once
@jesswade
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제시카 @imperialcollege research fellow. @500womensci + @wikipedia + chiral materials + Raman spectroscopy enthusiast. She/her. Least useful doctor in my family.
Joined February 2009
Why do I care so much about getting a copy of #Inferior into all schools? Because I don’t want to just tell girls they can do anything. I want them to read it, be empowered, and join our fight for equality. #thisgirlcan
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😔 Can we stop spending so much money on campaigns (based on v. little evidence) to ‘inspire’ girls to study science and instead;.-invest properly in science education.-tackle institutional + systematic bias against women + minorities.-improve access to shared parental leave.TY💫.
This new $25 million iniative aims to attract more women to STEM by highlighting contemporary role models: By @DrAnnaPowers1.
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Everyday in 2018 I started the @Wikipedia biography of a woman, person of colour or LGBTQ+ scientist or engineer. I’m up to 450 pages so far 😁 #womeninSTEM x #HappyNewYear
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thanks to the @Wikipedia editor who spent their wednesday night tagging the recent biographies i’ve started for #WomenInSTEM as not notable enough to be included in the encyclopaedia. it’s really constructive and helpful work. 🤬😭
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every night for the past three years i’ve researched and written the biographies of scientists from historically marginalised groups for @Wikipedia. i know a lot of academics think it’s a waste of time, and sometimes that makes me sad. then you get emails like this. 🥺
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“Physics isn’t something that girls tend to fancy. They don’t want to do it. They don’t like it… There’s a lot of hard maths in there that they don’t want to do.” 🤦🏻♀️ @Miss_Snuffy, UK Government Social Mobility Commission Chair #WomenInSTEM .
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a lot of young people in the UK have had their dreams crushed by an incompetent government and an (150 page) unpublished algorithm. we have got to stop unfair tech deciding people’s futures. 🤬 #AlevelResults .
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okay, this is really happening! i wrote a children’s book about materials and nanoscience. the illustrations are by the wonderful @mv_castrillon. 🔬📚💎 .you can find out more @WalkerBooksUK: .and pre-order here: 😃
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sure, see below.
“low achieving men are both retained in and attracted to these fields (physics, engineering and computer science) during college.” .fascinating read from @JoeCimpian et al in @ScienceMagazine: #WomenInSTEM
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My most proud accomplishment of '21 is seeing the #WomenInSTEM whose @Wikipedia biographies I've written be recognised in public life: providing expert analysis to BBC News, receiving shiny awards and becoming household names. I've written 1,550 since the start of 2018 😃🥳.
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editing @Wikipedia from an IP address (without signing in) is sneaky and makes me distrustful of your intentions. if you want to keep fooling yourself that the world was created and is led by white men. have fun with that. ✊🌐 these stories won’t go untold.
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great chiral fact: 🇯🇵 Japanese Wisteria (Figure One) twist clockwise whereas 🇨🇳 Chinese Wisteria (Figure Two) twist anti-clockwise. 🤯🌀
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after 2 years writing daily biographies of women, people of colour + LGBTQ+ scientists/engineers for @Wikipedia, every time someone tells me that they’re planning an event i have an encyclopaedic knowledge of awesome speakers. i can recommend outstanding people for hours. 😄🌈🎤
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just had an uber driver who was anti-mask (my free will!) and anti-vaccine (too fast!) and after our twenty minutes together he said i had made him think differently and he’d do more reading and have his 💉. when i got home i nipped in to get his children a copy of Nano. perfect.
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😔 after eleven years of friendship, Theo has died. he was the world’s most perfect dog.
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i’m often asked for science book recommendations, so here’s a bunch i’ve enjoyed lately. they’re really, really great. 👏🔬📚
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“low achieving men are both retained in and attracted to these fields (physics, engineering and computer science) during college.” .fascinating read from @JoeCimpian et al in @ScienceMagazine: #WomenInSTEM
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today i helped my dad log into an NHS laptop so he could still help patients but not become a patient (he’s a 70 y o neurologist). to set up his VPN he had to log on to his work e-mail, which he claims not to have known the password to for ~10 years. he has 11,478 emails 🤯.
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hi, we wrote a letter to @thesundaytimes after *that* Strumia interview. all the signatories: 🔥 #WomenInSTEM
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On Friday I spoke at a CERN workshop on gender and high energy physics. I shared the work of @PhysicsNews’ Juno Award, the @1752Group and other evidence-based institutional programs. The head of theory @CERN gave a 30 minute Damore-esque manifesto against #womeninSTEM.
There was a workshop at @CERN recently: "1st Workshop on High Energy Theory and Gender". Apparently Strumia gave a talk and manages to hit every horrible idea on gender issues in STEM while demeaning his female colleagues (at CERN and everywhere else). 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️.
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“A group of girls among researchers – we’ll stick out like sore thumbs!”.😑 😳.lol @LEGO_Group, this is an appalling script 🤦🏻♀️ #WomenInSTEM.
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hello from the sky above london this morning. 💕💙
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A little girl just spent our whole journey on the tube (🇺🇸: subway) reading all my badges. We spoke about @NASA and @NASAJPL. She especially liked @christineliuart’s “Hello World”, so I gave it to her in exchange for her promise to become a scientist. 😃 #thisgirlcan
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💻 Meet Gladys West, an 87 year old mathematician from Virginia who studied satellites from Dahlgren for 42 years. West’s work was the beginning of GPS. New @Wikipedia page: #WomeninSTEM 🛰
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🤬 for the ONE MILLIONTH TIME, girls do not drop physics for A-Level because it’s “hard” but because of stereotyping, lack of career guidance, bias and a nationwide shortage of specialist science teachers.
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Pro-tip: guess less. Read and research more 👍
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something pretty extraordinary happened ✨😌 🛰
💻 Meet Gladys West, an 87 year old mathematician from Virginia who studied satellites from Dahlgren for 42 years. West’s work was the beginning of GPS. New @Wikipedia page: #WomeninSTEM 🛰
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fyi, i’m not in any way “embroiled in a sexism row with @Wikipedia”. the encyclopaedia is fantastic, the @Wikimedia foundation is awesome, @krmaher is incredible and @wikimediauk are super supportive. my problem is with a few rogue + arrogant editors.
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hello everyone, thank you for all of your kindness. i am not worthy of this. to celebrate i’m ordering copies of @AngelaDSaini’s #superior to give to the scientists and engineers i meet this summer, and editing wikipedia to make it less sexist and racist. 💕 you all.
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Great choice for social mobility, @GOVUK. Please watch the select committee recording @DrJessicaHamer @rowsonjessica @charlesmtracy @rhys_raeng.
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great fact: a nanometre is the distance your nails grow in one second. i had my Nano nails painted 41 days (3,546,000 seconds) ago and they’ve grown ~3.5 mm (3,500,000 nm). 😃🔬💅🏻
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Lol. Literally no one took what you said out of context. When you were challenged on your outdated opinions you doubled down on the stereotypes and said you didn’t care. … and, btw, 16% of your A-Level physics cohort being women is a *long* way off ‘exact gender balance’.
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@MorgaineFee @Wikipedia meanwhile deeming cricket players from the 1930s who never scored as notable enough because they’re white men!👍🤮.
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i made this two years ago and the sentiment 💯% still holds. 🥽😷😅 #PPE.
I remade @gemmacorrell’s @guardian weekend illustration for my @Science_Grrl squad. ✌🏽 #WomenInSTEM x #SciArt
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“We’re certainly not out there campaigning for more girls to do physics. I wouldn’t do that, and I don’t want to do that, because I don’t mind that girls make up only 16% of students taking the subject.”.
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When people in positions of power in academia behave like this and retain their status they don’t only push one generation of underrepresented groups out of science, but train others that it’s ok to propagate this ideology for years to come.
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Today may be Prof Chris Jackson’s last day in academia, but his legendary legacy will never be forgotten. Soon his portrait will hang on the walls of @imperialcollege, reminding everyone to keep fighting for a better world. Thanks for inspiring so many of us, @seis_matters 😍.
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hello here are the colours over the city right now.
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Today I saw a talk buy a prof who kept introducing studies by saying ‘this is not very good because it has been done by a student’. 🤬 . If you’re not happy with data, COLLECT IT YOURSELF.
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alongside exposing the sexism and racism that is rife within academia and @Wikipedia, last night’s attempts to takedown the biographies of the superstars of #BlackBirdersWeek exposes some outdated elitism that should embarrass both communities.
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update from the UK: we’ve vaccinated no school students and teachers aren’t on any priority lists. face masks will only be mandatory ‘outside classroom bubbles’. the first places to open from our third national lockdown will be schools, en masse, on march 8. 😳.
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hello from this awesome wisteria. the first photo was taken three weeks ago, the second this morning. 🌸💕😷
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All safe now 🙃 what a rollercoaster it is fighting these techbros
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A/Prof Katie Bouman first learned about the @ehtelescope whilst at high school. Her algorithm, Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors (CHIRP), was the first to image a supermassive black hole. New @Wikipedia page: #WomenInSTEM.
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🚀wooohoo! Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock is the first Black woman *in history* to win a gold medal in the @PhysicsNews Awards. Aderin-Pocock was awarded the 2020 William Thomson, Lord Kelvin Medal for being awesome. Read about why: #BlackInPhysics #IOPAwards20
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Today is #ShutDownSTEM / #Strike4BlackLives day, so let’s talk about what’s going so wrong in UK physics. Of *all* the physics academics in the UK, 𝟬.𝟭% are Black. (IOP, 2012)
Today we #Strike4BlackLives. Organised by physicists including @iamstarnord & @IBJIYONGI this is a day to #ShutDownAcademia & #ShutDownSTEM in solidarity w Black colleagues, Black students & Black people who are excluded from academia (📸: shutdownstem) 1/
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Nano has been selected as one of the Washington Post's best children's books of 2021 !!! 😃🥳🔬
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lol, got it. women should NOT pose w/ cool cars. btw F8TFB is a polymer sometimes used as an interlayer in OLEDs. 😅
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It would be awesome if everyone could make a pledge to celebrate a scientist from an underrepresented group in 2019: whether it’s writing a @Wikipedia page, nominating them for @TEDTalks or prestigious prizes, or supporting them with a fellowship application. 🙌🏾.
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I can’t believe this still needs to be said, but if no Black physicists attend your physics conference, the answer is not to suggest ‘they’ organise a conference for Black physicists. It’s to reflect and act upon why they weren’t there in the first place.
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i *love* the new @nounproject ‘redefining women’ icon collection ! . they’re all in the public domain, so you can use the graphics for whatever you like, royalty-free. 😃 . explore:
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“His readiness to put his head above the parapet” without questioning a single claim or referencing any of the @PhysicsNews research into the structural barriers/institutional bias that ends women+minorities’ careers in physics, @thesundaytimes remind us how bad journalism can be.
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Thanks to @TheLabAndField for the heads up on this catastrophic @CommonsSTC meeting. Watch it for yourself from approx 10:20.
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hello #physics twitter! please stop arranging public events/ TV/ radio shows where you only feature white male ‘experts’. if you need advice, reach out! there are heaps of us trying to change the out-of-date image of physics that you’re reinforcing.
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@Savanna___94 @GilesPalaeoLab @Wikipedia oh, i won’t stop editing. this behaviour only makes me more committed!.
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hello. for my 4 y.o. next door neighbour i had a little gingerbread house (left) made of her house (right). it’s so unbelievably perfect. 🏠🌲
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198 year ago Louis Pasteur was born. Pasteur proposed that vaccines could be used to treat all virulent diseases, and developed attenuated vaccines for rabies and anthrax. Today, the European Union launched their mass COVID19 vaccination programme! 🇪🇺💉.
#OnThisDay 1822: Chemist and biologist Louis Pasteur was born. He is considered the founder of microbiology
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today my dad turns 70 🥳.we can’t have quite the celebration that we had planned, so instead we had our neighbours decorate their windows with messages he could see on his daily walk. 💜💓💙 #LondonTogether
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last week my (triple vaccinated) mum tested positive on a lateral flow. thanks to the vaccines her symptoms are mild, and thanks to our access to tests she has avoided being a risk to others. so (i) get vaccinated! (ii) keep your mask on! and (iii) test regularly, even if 💉-d.
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“science didn’t defeat eugenics. Science created eugenics in the first place, it created the scientific racism of its day. These ideas still live on in present-day science, and I think that’s the thing some scientists don’t want to accept.”.Angela Saini in the @guardian
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Also, I didn’t write this out for retweets or new followers. I’ll probably get in trouble for it and be asked to take it down. But no one in that audience can because their career directly depends on someone who thinks they’re there due to tokenism, and that makes me 🤬.
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hello science twitter please remember this wonderful advice from @danpfeiffer 🙏🙂.“Quote tweet your friends, screenshot your enemies”
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💕 Yesterday I got an email from a schoolgirl who has just finished reading #Inferior. Here’s why the crowdfunding was important. why we all need to help challenge the stereotypes and misconceptions that influence young people’s choices. Thank you @AngelaDSaini 💫 #womeninstem
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🙌🏾 We did it twitter family! Next year there will be a copy of #Inferior in every library of every UK secondary state school. I love you to the 🌕 and back. Thank you to all who supported us, to @AngelaDSaini for the epic 📖 and to @4thEstateBooks for matching our 💷. 😅
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👋🏽 Hi there science friends, it’s #WorldBookDay 📚🌎. Here are some great books on science, scientists and society. 💫
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if you’re in the UK looking at the US and thinking ‘we’re not like that here’, you’re mistaken. racism was central to the creation of much of Britain, and impacts almost every aspect of modern day society. read Angela Saini’s eye-opening book Superior:
If you’re really committed to helping dismantle racism, the first thing we all need to do is to understand how racism works. You can’t fight the monster until you see what it is. I recommend SUPERIOR by Angela Saini, which charts how scientists have constructed racist mythologies
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😮 We just made £15 k from 612 people in 11 days. I guess everyone is tired of the stereotypes that are holding girls back. Here’s to a more equal world 💕🌎 Thank you for coming to my TED talk. #inferior x #womeninSTEM
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they changed the headline 😃🥳
fyi, i’m not in any way “embroiled in a sexism row with @Wikipedia”. the encyclopaedia is fantastic, the @Wikimedia foundation is awesome, @krmaher is incredible and @wikimediauk are super supportive. my problem is with a few rogue + arrogant editors.
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“I want to get every audience member to commit to adopting one woman and making sure her @Wikipedia entry is correct or commit to inputting a new person,” 😃 awesome idea @sanditoksvig
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How great is this! a designer @ LEGO wanted something that reflected him to make his new office feel more like home, made an LGBTQIA+ minifigure set, everyone @ LEGO loved it, and now the “Everyone Is Awesome” collection is available 🌎-wide from June 1.🏳️🌈.
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“Racism is a reality for ethnic minority researchers… Currently, out of 575 professors of chemistry in the UK, only one is Black – and in his 15 yrs as a professor he has every one of his funding proposals rejected.” @BBCPallab for @BBCNews .@BlackInChem.
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I remade @gemmacorrell’s @guardian weekend illustration for my @Science_Grrl squad. ✌🏽 #WomenInSTEM x #SciArt
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😃 happy summer science friends 👋🏼 . here are some awesome books that will teach you facts + make you angry + make you laugh + make you cry and, most importantly, make you think. (PDF w/ links to buy; HMU w/ more recommendations) #ScienceTwitter
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"One of our biggest frustrations over the past year is that we knew enough to act early on". the fantastic @ScienceMagazine article on prof @j_g_allen (10.1126/science.373.6555.612) includes this great graphic on how to improve ventilation and make buildings healthier.
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hello. in just over two months Figure 1 will become Figure 2. 😌❄️😷 stay safe
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Woohoo! Me and Prof Julia Dshemuchadse (@JDislistening) were awarded an @imperialcollege – @Cornell seed fund to create open source materials science educational resources. Expect awesome things in 2023! 🥳😃.
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In 12 days you all donated enough to get a copy of @AngelaDSaini’s #Inferior in every school in the 🇬🇧 and 🇮🇪. Thank you for helping to empower young people to challenge bias. Thank you @4thEstateBooks. I don’t have the words to express how grateful I am, so. 😅💕
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The handedness of circularly polarised light is reversed when it hits off a mirror, so left-handed light becomes right-handed + vice versa. You can see that by looking through 3D cinema 🕶s at the light reflected off beetle shells reflected in a mirror. #ChiralCrew @ExRdFestival
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today my parents have been married for 44 years!! they met exactly 50 years ago at medical school. coolest kids in town ✌️💕
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“A rising tide, but not for Black students,” .1/3 of US physics departments graduated zero Black majors between 1999 and 2020. This week’s @ScienceMagazine explores how physics excludes Black researchers: .
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UK academics: @UKRI_News have a call for proposals to improve the access of Black students to postgraduate research. Projects can be up to £400k and last for up to 4 years. Don’t just tweet platitudes.
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i really hate complaining but (like many) i’ve had a very intense few weeks/months giving online talks + workshops. they take ages to prepare + so much energy to deliver. i cannot tell you how upsetting/ deflating it is when the organisers don’t send a message to say ‘thank you’.
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👋🏽 Twitter fam, I need you! This is Clarice Phelps, possibly the first African-American woman to discover an element (117, Tennessine). I’ve started her Wikipedia page ( but NEED MORE REFERENCES. Can anyone @ORNL/ @UTAustin/ @UTKnoxville help?
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🧬🧪Meet A/Prof Jen Heemstra (@jenheemstra), superstar of self-assembly, boss of biosensing and mentor to the #sciencetwitter massive @EmoryUniversity. Heemstra develops nucleic acid aptamers for small molecule detection. New @Wikipedia page: #WomenInSTEM
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cool picture of the 2021 @lorealuki @4womeninscience shortlist. it was inspiring to be surrounded such phenomenal women. 😃
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the representation of girls in A-Level physics (< 25% in England) has barely changed in ~ 30 years, despite good intentions + endless outreach campaigns. we *really* need to invest in quality physics education, train career advisors + tackle stereotypes beyond science classrooms.
Many girls are told that some subjects are more suited to boys. One of these subjects is physics. Did you know that in 2020, only 2.6% of girls chose A-level physics in England compared to 8.6% of boys?. This needs to change. 1/2
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