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The thing that inspired me to study science at university was;
I was always a very inquisitive child
and I always wanted to know how things worked.
And what's great about this is, when you do a job in science,
you never need to stop learning.
I've always found the environment of the Science faculty,
being a woman, to be very supportive.
I've never noticed any differences because of my gender,
I've never found any problems because of it.
In fact, I feel, on a day-to-day basis,
I'm just treated as a scientist, which is essentially what I am.
The challenges I've faced have been more to do with my science -
rather than to do with who I am, it's more about what I do.
I think that
the atmosphere is hopefully changing
to encourage women to become involved in the sciences.
I still think we've got quite a long way to go, however,
certainly within the University,
there are things in place to support people in their early career
and I think that's where it really matters to women,
and to make sure they get the encouragement to go forward
and to become future world leaders in science.
The ways on a personal level
that I like to encourage potential future scientists
is by doing schools outreach. I've spent the last week going to schools,
I've talked to 1,500 school kids over the last five days
and told them why it's cool to be a scientist,
what's fun, what gets me out of bed every morning
and, even if it only gets through to a few of them,
if we can encourage students who may not have considered doing science,
and this particularly applies to girls when they're at school,
if we can show them that science is great, science is fun
and that, hopefully,
they can see that women do science
and women have great careers in science,
it might spark something in them that encourages them
to go on and think about a career in science as well.
I think early-career support
is important for all scientists,
but it maybe has a special place in women's careers.
Within the department of Physics,
we've put together an early-careers forum.
The idea is that we meet to talk about issues to do with teaching, research,
things that we can all share
and experiences we've had so we can learn from each other
and then we have one coherent voice
to go and talk to people
higher up in the faculty
and share our concerns and do something
practical and positive.
This year, quite unusually,
we have a first-year training course,
the Bristol Centre for Functional Nanomaterials first-year course
for the PhD programme - our doctoral training centre -
and we've got a cohort of ten students
of which five are female students, five are male students.
So it's fantastic actually to see
that kind of gender balance coming through.
And it's really the sort of thing that I hope we'll see becoming more normal
as we go on recruiting students - that we're bringing in
the best female students that we can.