Hi there WITS, 

Welcome to our September newsletter, which is so chock full of exciting news that we’re just going to dive right in.

The Mayor of London’s office is hosting an event for young people interested in a career in programming. ‘Careers with Impact: Meet the Programmers who #CodeTheWorld’ is a webinar and Q&A held in honour of Ada Lovelace Day. Suw Charman-Anderson, founder of Ada Lovelace Day, will be chairing the panel and talking to:

• Charlene Hunter, the CEO and Founder of Coding Black Females
• Dr Sarah Filippi, Senior Lecturer in Statistical Machine Learning at Imperial College
• Treasa Davitt, Technical Delivery Manager at Transport for London
• Labake Ajimobi, Stemettes Graduate in Product Design Engineering

The webinar is on Friday 16 October 2020 at 4:30pm, and you can register for a place now.

The Mayor of London is also holding a number of STEM webinars over the next couple of months, so do make sure to have a look at their events page.

We are delighted that some of our independent event organisers are holding their celebrations virtually this year! SCiDEV in Albania is holding a wiki-a-thon to add pages on Albanian women scientists, The Pearcey Foundation in Australia is sharing information about the history of Australian women in computing, Mead Public Library in the USA have created kits for girls to take away as part of day of activities, and in the UK, The School of Computer Science (Nottingham and Cardiff) have online speakers and a treasure hunt!

If you are holding an event this year, no matter how small, please do let us know by adding it to our map!

Thank you to everyone who submitted a talk proposal for the Finding Ada Conference in November. We had an absolutely astonishing response, with 115 submissions for just 23 talk/workshop slots and 10 Ignite slots. 

The quality of the talk proposals was incredible, and it was an extremely difficult task to narrow down our list and fit them all into our schedule, but we did finally manage! If you submitted but haven’t received a notification, please check your spam folder and email Suw if you still can’t find your email.

We’ll be announcing some of our speakers, and ticket sales, soon so please keep your eye out for a special announcement!

Jan Eliasberg, a talented and prolific screenwriter and award winning director, has just released her debut novel which reimagines the life of Dr Lise Meitner and the race to build the atomic bomb. Eliasberg wanted to shine a light on women in science, and Dr Meitner’s experiences, as she feels that history has a tendency to ignore remarkable women and their achievements. Hannah’s War: A Novel is a gripping thriller and love story about an exceptional woman, and is out now.

Here is a selection of sites and articles that we have been reading this month:

• Ada Lovelace featured: Lovelace is mentioned in the National Geographic newsletter, about how we’ve not always allowed brilliant women to shine. Ada is also the name of a silk camisole in the latest collection from NATALIJA, which celebrates historical women.
• Forgotten women: Fantastic article from Women You Should Know about Janet Taylor, who was known for her nautical calculations. And National Geographic have written about Gertrude “Trudy” Elion, who was part of the team pioneering work on rational drug design, which lead to the creation of AZT, Azathioprine and Acyclovir.
• Minority scientists: Nina Chhita is honouring diversity in science through her drawings of female scientists on Instagram, as reported in Mental Floss. And The Print looks at the life of Dr SI Padmavati, the “godmother of cardiology”, who sadly died of Covid-19. SheThePeople interviews Indian female palaeontologist, Devapriya Chattopadhyay.
• Videos & podcasts: The Blacademia podcast interviews First Nation and Indigenous academics about their careers and experiences in academia.

Please sign up for our free ALD webinars, and let your friends know about our events. 

We have a lot more news to come, so keep an eye out for some special announcements over the next few weeks.

All the best, 

Suw & the ALD Team.

Dame Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell on the genesis of the Athena Swan campaign to increase gender equality in British academia at The IET on 8 October 2019.

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