Message from Judith and ShelleyAt the woman in CUDOS breakfast at our annual workshop earlier this year, Associate Professor Bouhua Jia spoke about the need for women to promote and push themselves forward more. It is a barrier a lot of women face – generally speaking, many of us tend to underestimate our abilities, are more modest about our achievements and take fewer risks than our male colleagues.

In this, our second edition of Women in CUDOS, we focus on women and visibility in the workplace, starting with a profile of Bouhua and some of the key points from her talk, then list some mentoring organisations, how to deal with career gaps, interesting articles, reports and reviews of women scientists in popular culture.

With the year coming to a close, we’d like to wish you a happy holiday season and look forward to seeing you at the next CUDOS workshop at the Mercure Kooindah Waters, Wyong in NSW from 1-4 February 2016.

Shelley Martin and Judith Dawes

Note from the EditorLooking into the experiences of women who have chosen a career in science has increased my admiration for the remarkable work female researchers have achieved throughout history. I hope this newsletter provides useful information for women in CUDOS to grow their career. If there is an article or book that you have read, a website or film you have seen that you think could be of benefit to women in CUDOS for our next newsletter, I’d love to hear from you.

Jacqueline Charlesworth

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Women in CUDOS BreakfastThanks Shelley for organising this nice event and inviting me here. I think everyone appreciates the different roles that men and women play in this world. And most people are aware of the issues with women working in science. But today we want to go beyond the “increase awareness” level. We want to face the issues and find some potential solutions.

To achieve this, I think a positive attitude is very important. There are certainly positive aspects that we should be glad about. First of all, the increased awareness of this issue is important and helpful. As a result of that, many measures have been put in place to encourage females to work in science and engineering. For example, at the national level, there are various schemes and funds available for women researchers, including the gender balance consideration in major fund schemes and availability for funding to cover maternity leave and so on. At the organisation level, there are also ways of encouraging women to come back to work after starting a family.

I trust that you all work hard and love what you are doing and you want to be successful. I believe that is why you are here today. To be able to move forward, I think the first thing we should do is stop complaining, be positive and take action.

As a start, I would like to briefly introduce myself, and my family. I got my PhD in 2007. I am a mother of a two kids. My daughter was born in 2006, before my graduation. My son is only three. My husband is also a researcher in the university. And we both work full time. The reason I mention these details is to let you know that I share the same problems with you: the balance of family and career.

In 2007, I got my first job as a postdoc in CUDOS. Beside my own research, my role was acting as a Project Leader for one of the flagship projects. This role included the coordination of about twenty researchers from seven different universities in Australia and two universities overseas to work together to achieve the targeted milestones. To be honest, from a PhD to a postdoc is already a big change, and this project leader role was really overwhelming for me at that time since it involved lots of planning, communication, coordination and reporting. Plus, I had a young girl to look after. At that time I just felt that my life was a mess and really challenging for me.It was then, that I started to talk to people - those established people.

In the CUDOS team we have the best physicists in Australia. I asked them about their secrets to manage time and research. The reason I did this was because I noticed that these established researchers, they are doing various kinds of things at the same time with high efficiency. This seemed to be incredible and unachievable for me. And I wanted to know how they could achieve so much? I got different answers from different people of course. But I found there are common things that are really useful for everybody.

The most encouraging finding I had about successful researchers is that not all of them are geniuses. In fact, I should say they are clever, but they are just as normal as we are. So I think this is very good news for all of us because we all have a chance to be successful if we could manage our research right.

So the second message I would like to deliver today is everyone can be successful if you have the mindset to manage your research. And in the following are my highlights of the secrets for a successful research career that I learnt from those big guys. And I believe these are applicable for both men and women.

Swinburne’s Associate Professor Baohua Jia spoke at the Women in CUDOS breakfast at our Annual workshop earlier this year, where she was asked to share some of the lessons learnt during her career as a successful female researcher.

Among her many achievements, Baohua won the L’Oreal Australia and New Zealand For Women in Science Fellowship, the Young Tall Poppy Science Award, and was included in the 10th Anniversary Edition of Who’s Who in Science and Engineering. Here is an excerpt from her talk.

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Promote your work

• Build your profile: Update your CV from time to time and compare it to a great CV; update your website; have your name card; create a profile on social networks (Linkedin, Researchgate etc.) • Find your role model and mentor: talk to them from time to time, visit their web page to inspire you • Value all the opportunities that can help to promote your research: conference, networking, talk to colleagues. Let other people feel your passion • Try to engage with nationally or internationally leading groups: maintain your research at a high level • Don’t under-estimate yourself: keep challenging yourself and apply all the available grants and prizes: you won’t win anything if you don’t apply

Endeavour to be the best

• Conduct a significant research, solve problems and produce impact • Pursue research excellence. This is an essential way of survival because only the best researchers get funded

Research planning

This is especially important for women researchers since family duties normally occupy lots of time.

• Long-term: think about what kind of person you want to be• Short-term: monthly and weekly: to be very specific and detailed. Don’t be too ambitious and unrealistic, otherwise it’ll be frustrating and won’t work• Timely review and reward yourself with a box of chocolate if you achieve the milestones. Adjust the goals according to the performance to make them a better fit • Immediately follow up before things get forgotten• When implementing the plan, prioritise tasks: do the most important things first, not the most urgent things

Collaboration

• Don’t commit too much. If you commit, be serious, otherwise it damages relationships

• Always be ready to help colleagues and be interested in learning what they do • Opportunities/ideas might be generated after a cup of coffee together…. • Services: there are lots of things to learn, it is never a waste of time

Women in CUDOS Breakfast | 18 February, 2015

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RESOURCESMentoring“Mentoring is a mutually beneficial relationship which involves a more experienced person helping a less experienced person to achieve their goals.”

If you’d like to explore mentoring more, here are two good organisations to start your research:Mentoring Australiahttp://www.mentoring-australia.orgAustralian Women’s Network http://www.womensmentoring.com.au

Career break managementThe Institute of Physics guide for career break management. Though focused on laws and resources in the United Kingdom, there are many good strategies for anyone working in STEM on how to manage gaps in their working life. http://www.aps.org/programs/women/resources/upload/CareerBreaksIOP.pdf

EVENTSComputing at the Speed of Light8 December 2016 | 5:30 to 7:00pmSydney Nanoscience Hub| University of SydneyA chance to meet remarkable physicist, Professor Michal Lipson from Columbia University, and hear her talk about the future of photonics in communication technology, as she delivers our 7th and final International Year of Light presentation.http://www.cudos.org.au/nobelprizesForLight.shtml

Women in Tech: Evidence, data & trends15 February 2016 | 5:00 to 6:30pmExact location TBD | San Francisco, CAOrganised by SPIE: Photonics West, this session looks at data on female participation in computer science, engineering and throughout the tech sector in general. What evidence is there of underlying causes of gender imbalance? How can and should it be addressed? Why does it matter?http://spie.org/x1845.xml

REVIEWSCode: Debugging the gender gapIEEE Spectrum’s review of a documentary about the decline of female programmers, with observations about diversity, that is pertinent to all STEM workplaces.http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/reviews/a-review-of-code-debugging-the-gender-gap

Pioneering Astronomer Vera Rubin on Science, Stereotypes and SuccessBrain Picking’s short article about Vera Rubin’s experiences as a female scientist in the early twentieth century and her 1997 book ‘Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter’https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/07/23/vera-rubin-berkeley-commencement-address/

Why women in science are lonely - and shouldn’t beProfessor Marcia Bartusiak’s Washington Post review of the book ‘The only woman in the room: why science is still a boy’s club’, looking at why so few women achieved tenured positions in the ‘hard sciences’. 25 September 2015.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-women-in-science-are-lonely--and-shouldnt-be/2015/09/23/1432d846-4b4f-11e5-bfb9-9736d04fc8e4_story.html

AWARDSHere are some grants and prizes you might consider applying for now, or as your career progresses.

L’OREAL-UNESCO for Women In Sciencehttp://www.fwis.fr/en/home

Walter Boas Medalhttp://www.aip.org.au/info/?q=content/walter-boas-medal

Bragg Gold Medal for Excellence in Physicshttp://www.aip.org.au/info/?q=content/bragg-gold-medal-excellence-physics

AIP Award for Outstanding Service to Physics in Australiahttp://www.aip.org.au/info/?q=content/award-outstanding-service-physics-australia

Prime Minister’s Prizes for Sciencehttp://science.gov.au/community/PrimeMinistersPrizesforScience/Pages/default.aspx

Australian Museum Eureka Prizeshttp://australianmuseum.net.au/eureka

Australian Academy of Science’s FameLabhttp://www.britishcouncil.org.au/programmes/science/famelab

Young Tall Poppy Science Awardhttp://www.aips.net.au/tall-poppies/

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ARTICLESPioneering Women in PhysicsA celebration of women who have made pioneering contributions to physics.https://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/news/pioneering-women-physics

Gender equality in PhotonicsPublished in the March 2015 edition of Electro Optics. This is an interesting article about women in STEM careers (particularly those in Photonics), with a focus on the career of Katie Schwertz, a design engineer at Edmund Optics.http://www.electrooptics.com/features/feature.php?feature_id=274

Women working part-time are the most productive A Sydney Morning Herald Article published April 18, 2015 highlights the findings in an Ernst Young Report, showing that part-time females are the most productive of all workers. http://www.smh.com.au/comment/women-working-parttime-are-the-most-productive-in-the-workforce-survey-20150418-1mn1zz.html

Four myths about why women aren’t getting the top jobs in universitiesHighlighting the issue of gender imbalance at the higher management levels at universities. Published in The Guardian 22 June 2015.http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/jun/22/four-myths-about-why-women-arent-getting-the-top-jobs-in-universities?CMP=share_btn_tw

Boost to gender equality in scienceA Sydney Morning Herald opinion piece by Professor Brian Schmidt about gender equality in Australian universities. Published 16 September 2015.http://www.smh.com.au/comment/sage-pilot-scheme-primed-to-boost-gender-equity-in-science-20150915-gjmput.html

Half of Australian universities sign up to SAGE gender-equity program16 September, 2015. Sydney Morning Herald article about a new pilot program addressing gender imbalance in STEMM. http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/half-australian-universities-sign-up-to-sage-gender-equity-program-20150915-gjn018.html

12 badass scientists…who also happen to be women – TED FellowsProfiles of twelve women from across the globe who are working in different fields of science. 8 October, 2015. https://medium.com/ted-fellows/meet-12-badass-scientists-who-also-happen-to-be-women-ace8d797bcad

Shinning a light on Prof. Michal LipsonThe daughter of a professor of cosmology, Michal Lipson knew from a young age that she wanted a career in the sciences. Lipson, who was born in Israel and moved with her family to Brazil at the age of eight, says that her father spoke with passion about his work and frequently took Lipson and her twin sister to visit telescopes.

“My parents made it very clear that physics was the most beautiful thing you could do,” Lipson says. “My father was in love with his work. He’d talk about how great it was to have a job where you get paid to find out how the world works.”

Lipson’s sister grew up to be a space physicist and Lipson combined her physics background with engineering to be an innovator in the burgeoning field of silicon photonics, which aims to replace some traditional electronics, such as electronic wires, on a silicon chip with optics. Lipson was the first to demonstrate a micron-size electro-optic modulator on silicon, which had previously been considered an inferior photonics material due to its lack of electro-optic properties.

The merging of electronics with photonics will shape the computing and broadband communications technologies of tomorrow, Lipson explains. “In the future, computers will be run by lights on computer chips,” she says. “Optics could alleviate some of the power problems in today’s computers, making them faster and allowing them to operate without getting so hot.”

Lipson, who has two [teenage] sons, is very active in mentoring and advising women interested in pursuing careers in science. “There are few women in science and engineering, and even fewer who have a family,” she says. “It’s important to send a message that it is possible to do both. There is no reason why men can have a career and a family, and women can’t.”

*Article by Leslie Taylor. Originally published in the New York Academy of Science, 21 October 2010.

Professor Lipson will be giving the final CUDOS International Year of Light talk on Tuesday 8 December at the Sydney Nanoscience Hub.

If you are unable to come to Sydney for the talk, we dug up two of her media appearances, offering wonderful advice and insight into navigating a successful career in science.

For Women Scientists – Career Advice from a Certified GeniusProfessor Lipson’s advice for young women following in her footsteps. ‘Career advice from a certified Genius’ was published in Optics and Photonics News in 2010.http://blogs.osa-opn.org/BrightFuturesBlog/post/For-Women-Scientists-Career-Advice-from-a-Certified-Genius

CUNY Women in Science 2015: Navigating a Successful STEM CareerMichal Lipson is part of a three person panel talking about their personal career path in an excellent hour long discussion, focusing in depth, on women working in scientific research. September 2015.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGz1PZIO6uM

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UPDATESTwo researchers featured in the first Women in CUDOS newsletter, published in 2013, have since made impressive strides forward in their careers:

Dr Shaghik Atakaramians

Dr Atakaramians was awarded an ARC Discovery Early Career Reasearcher Award (DECRA) in 2014 on ‘Terahertz metamaterial waveguides’.

In 2015, she successfully won an ARC Linkage Project funding for ‘a novel scintillating optical fibre array for cancer imaging and therapy’ totalling $288,170.

Dr Isabelle Staude

Dr Staude took up a prestigious position at the Abbe Centre of Photonics, at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, earlier this year.

She joined the Institute of Applied Physics in July 2015 to establish a junior research group on functional photonic nanostructures and is teaching a course on Nano-Optics at the Master’s degree level.

Before moving to Jena, Dr Staude was a Research fellow at the Nonlinear Physics Centre at ANU and Deputy Project Leader of CUDOS’ Nanoplasmonics team.

Address:CUDOSThe University of SydneySchool of Physics, A28Camperdown, NSW 2006Australia

Contact the EditorJacqueline Charlesworthjacqueline.charlesworth@sydney.edu.au(02) 8627 4420 | 0407603905

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