Women in STEM at Portsmouth

I'm part of the University of Portsmouth Athena SWAN committee. We're working to submit for a Bronze Award in November to this organization which "recognises and celebrates good employment practice for women working in science, engineering and technology (SET) in higher education and research. "


One idea we had to get started was a blog promoting the many women working in STEM fields at our university. So I now have another blog to run! ;) 


Here's the first post - pointing out a poster which exists profiling some of the young women researcher in science and enginneering at Portsmouth.

Including our very own Heather Campbell from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, pictured helping to install the low band antennas of the LOFAR station in Chilbolton.

BBC Stargazing at the Spinnaker Tower

It's been a hectic couple of weeks since I got back from the Christmas break, planning our department's involvement in the major BBC Stargazing Event at the Spinnaker Tower (a flagship event for the BBC South region). But it all went well last night and despite the clouds we're all left with a buzz about stargazing in Portsmouth.

I made a Storify collection of tweets about the event.

A Frenk Discussion about Cosmology

Last week Prof. Carlos Frenk visited us in Portsmouth to give a research seminar. As part of my new role as Outreach Officer for ICG I suggested we ask him to also give a public lecture. Which he did:

My favourite picture - Carlos Frenk sharing a snap of him showing Sir Patrick Moore around a dark matter detection experiment. 

The university coverage about the lecture is here: Carlos Frenk Draws a Big Crowd

And I made a Storify Story out of tweets which went out during the lecture.

As you can see the lecture was very popular, and I got a great warm fuzzy feeling for helping to educate almost 300 people about cosmology that night. :)

PS. Thanks is due to my office mate Chris D'Andrea for the blog title idea - it's a classic!

Solar Observing in Eastney

On Sunday I took one of the ICG Gallieoscopes to the Arts Cafe at Eastney Community Centre who are currently hosting a Space Themed Exhibit: "Journey to the Edge Of Space". As part of this they organized a Family Space Day on Sunday, and I agrred to go along to provide some public solar observing.

Picture of the Galileoscope set up for Solar Observing

It was a fairly quiet event in the end, and a day with patchy cloud, but I was able to show a few 10s of people the Sun through the telescope. Not helping the educational content from this was the quiet Sun. Absolutely no sun spots were visible, making the Sun appear as smooth white circle through the solar filter (I knew this in advance because I had looked it up on spaceweather.com - still disappointing). It was almost more interesting when the patchy clouds went across the disk.

ICG news article.