Women Scientists and Engineers on NOVA's scienceNOW

PBS has just made a bunch of their programs available online, including their science news show, NOVA scienceNOW. Each episode includes a profile of a scientist or engineer doing interesting research.

The segments are short and full of human interest, with "how we met" bits from the spouse, and emphasis on hobbies. There's some science too, of course, but the overall tone is light and breezy. The take home message is science is cool and so are scientists, which isn't a bad thing at all.

The women profiled in the full online episodes are:

Cynthia Breazeal, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and Director of the Robotic Life Group at the MIT Media Lab.

"A daring engineer designs robots to communicate and interact the way people do.

Watch the complete episode with the segment on Breazeal. Read the program's transcript.

More information:

• Cynthia Breazeal's scienceNOW page, where she answers viewer questions.
• Cynthia Breazeal's Website
• Cynthia Breazeal at the MIT Media Lab
  

Edith Widder, marine biologist and bioluminescence specialist, deep-sea explorer and founder of the Ocean Research & Conservation Association.

"Meet a marine biologist and explorer who has engineered new ways to spy on deep-sea creatures."

Watch the complete episode with the segment on Widder. Read the transcript.

More information:

• Edie Widder's scienceNOW profile, where she answers questions
  
• Edith Widder at ORCA: Ocean Research & Conservation Association
  

Other ScienceNOW segments are available online too, but only as Quicktime movies:

Yoky Matsuoka, neuroboticist (robotics + neuroscience) at the University of Washington.
Profile page (with video). Transcript.

Pardis Sabeti, Harvard geneticist and genomics expert.
Profile page (with video). Transcript

Bonnie Basler, Princeton biologist who studies how bacteria "talk".
Profile page (with video). Transcript.

Naomi Halas, Rice University nanotech expert.
Profile page (with video). Transcript.

Julie Schablitsky, archaeologist studying the Donner Party site and other areas important to the history of the American West.
Profile page (with video). Transcript.

Watching the videos (or reading the transcripts) of a bunch of the profiles, it's striking how much more the women profiled talked about their personal lives than the men. I don't know if that is because of the questions they were asked or not, but I was pretty surprised that Naomi Halas was asked point blank whether the reason she and her husband didn't have children because of her work. The answer: no, they wanted children, but she couldn't have them, which seems like a very personal revelation. When most the men were interviewed we don't even find out whether they have children or not, let alone whether they wanted to have kids. I realize that's likely because there is a social expectation is that "normal" women want to be mothers and are more interested in having a life outside the lab then men, but it's disappointing that the show's questions went in that direction.

Tags: scienceNOW, Cynthia Breazeal, Edith Widder

Ice Stories

The Exploratorium has collected a bunch of blogs under the heading "Ice Stores: Dispatches from Polar Scientists", which showcases scientists working at the poles. Not surprisingly the research is seasonal: scientists work in Antarctica during the Northern Hemisphere's winter (so summer at the South Pole), while research in the Arctic is going on now. A number of women scientists are part of the effort.

In the Arctic:

• Anne Jensen "lives and works in Barrow, Alaska. Anne’s field studies have taken her throughout much of Alaska for the past 25 years. Her research in human adaptation in the Arctic includes a long-term project at the prehistoric village site of Nuvuk, where the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas come together. Historic Nuvuk is also the site of a 1,000-year-old burial ground. Hundreds of gravesites are endangered there by erosion, which sometimes removes 50 feet of coastal frontage in a single storm."
• Amy Breen "has studied the impacts of climate change on Arctic plant communities for nearly a decade. She is a PhD candidate in the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska, and a member of a team of circumpolar scientists participating in the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX). In July 2008, she’ll begin blogging from the Toolik Field Station, her field site in the northern foothills of the Brooks Range in Alaska."
• Laura Thomas "is an archaeologist and full-time resident of Barrow, Alaska. As the Field and Lab Director for the Nuvuk Archaeology Project, Laura devotes her time to the long-term excavation of a 1,000-year-old burial ground significantly threatened by erosion. Born and raised amongst the rich geological history of Ontario, Canada, Laura has held a lifelong interest in prehistory and how past peoples adapted to their environments. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto, and describes her archaeological work in the Arctic as 'living the dream.'"
• Zoe Courville "studies snow and ice in polar regions. She received her PhD in material science from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in 2007. She is currently employed as a research mechanical engineer at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab in Hanover, New Hampshire. She loves working in the polar ice caps and sharing her experiences with others."

In the Antarctic:

• Cassandra Brooks "is a graduate student in Marine Science at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (MLML) in California who has studied Antarctic marine resources for the last four years both at MLML and with the Antarctic Marine Living Resources Program (AMLR). Cassandra’s work focuses on life history and population structure of Antarctic toothfish. Her goal is to provide information on their age, growth, and spatial distribution in order to facilitate sustainable management of this important Antarctic species."
• Christina Riesselman "has traveled to Antarctica three times in pursuit of fossil diatoms that can unlock the secrets of past climate change. She's a Ph.D. student at Stanford University's Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences and a member of the international team of scientists working on the ANDRILL sediment coring project."
• Nadine Quintana Krupinski "studies the dynamics of ice sheets and the waterways that exist under glaciers. She's a glaciology Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and enjoys working on isolated glaciers in the world's polar regions."
• Maria Vernet "has been a primary investigator on thirteen research cruises off the Western Antarctic Peninsula, exploring one of the coldest marine ecosystems on earth. She's a marine biologist from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California. During winter 2008, she studied the ecology of phytoplankton and its role within the marine ecosystem at the Palmer Station Long-Term Ecological Research Network (LTER). From May 31 to June 20, 2008, Maria is on board the Nathaniel B. Palmer icebreaker in the northwest Weddell Sea, collecting plankton samples from under and around large free-floating icebergs that have broken off from the Antarctic Ice shelf."
• Kathryn Schaffer Miknaitis "dreamed of becoming an artist but fell in love with physics in graduate school. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago's Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and pursues questions about the origin and history of the universe on the South Pole Telescope team. She arrived at the South Pole in November 2007 and blogged about her work on the telescope until she left in February 2008."

If you click on the scientists' names, you'll not only get to their blogs, but you can learn more information about the projects they are working on. It's an interesting glimpse into doing scientific research under extreme environmental conditions.

Tags: women in science, Arctic research, Antarctic research, blogs

Women Bring New Perspectives to Archaeology

The Bend Weekly News reports on the new book The Invisible Sex and gender bias in the interpretation of archaeological finds.

"I think it's perfectly obvious that the whole man-is-the-hunter idea, while not necessarily totally wrong, was formed from a completely male perspective," said Sarah M. Nelson, a professor of archaeology at the University of Denver.
[snip]
Perspectives didn't really start to change until the 1960s, when a few female archaeologists began to argue that existing science was based upon faulty premises.

"Some women archaeologists finally just got up and said, 'Wait a second, you're full of ...'" said Nelson.

The typical Natural History Museum diorama showing a male carrying a spear is largely based on the imagination of male archaeologists, not science.

Specifically, they asserted that tool use doesn't necessarily reveal the identity of the tool user. [James M.] Adovasio offered the Clacton tool as a case in point: It is a 300,000-year-old fragment of wood found in 1911 near the town of Clacton-on-the-Sea in England. The standard interpretation is that the tool is a spear point fashioned by a Paleolithic male. Adovasio says this assertion goes too far, given the limited evidence. The Clacton tool, he suggests, might be a fragment of a digging stick once used to unearth edible roots. Or perhaps it was both a spear and a digging tool, used at different times for different purposes by both males and females.

More to the point, Adovasio and colleagues write, "whatever the Clacton tool was (and it probably was a spear point), who is to say that females 300,000 years ago did not make spears and use them to help feed themselves and their offspring?"

I'll confess that I always just assumed there was a substantial basis for the "man is hunter, woman is gatherer" dichotomy. The article is well worth a read.

Related:
• "Neanderthal Women Joined Men in the Hunt" New York Times, 5 December 2006.


Tags: archaeology, women in science, Neanderthals