The (Damaging) Power of Silence
Athene Donald's Blog
by Athene Donald
3w ago
There are many strategies for dealing with an overfull inbox, not all of which are helpful to the person who sent the email. I have weeks where I feel more or less on top of things and other weeks where too many slip through the cracks. Then I find myself, weeks later, sending an email saying ‘I do apologise for not replying sooner but….’ After that beginning I can try to find some plausible excuse along the lines of the dog ate my homework. However, these days I tend just to say ‘I’m afraid it got lost in my inbox’, which is usually the truth. Along these lines, I was amused to read a decade ..read more
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Hunstanton Sand
Athene Donald's Blog
by Athene Donald
1M ago
I’ve just started reading a book called The Spirit of Enquiry by Susannah Gibson, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, an interesting society of which I was once a committee member (as well as a prize-winner). I am struck by the fact that the building where my GP’s surgery now hangs out, was actually purpose-built for the Society, something I had not appreciated before. The room where I’ve sat around waiting for Covid vaccinations was once their Reading Room, at a time when that was quite a novel concept (the College Libraries were only available to current ..read more
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New Year, New You
Athene Donald's Blog
by Athene Donald
2M ago
We all know New Year’s resolutions tend to last no longer than the first week or two, but it does no harm to reflect at this time of year what might improve body and soul as well as output and all the other drivers of an academic’s life. I am conscious, as full-time (formal) retirement beckons at the end of this academic year when I step down as Master of Churchill College, that I need to be sure I stay fit and active. One of the consequences of the pandemic from my perspective, is the loss of casual exercise in the form of cycling between meetings. Far fewer meetings, held outside the College ..read more
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Being Exceptional
Athene Donald's Blog
by Athene Donald
3M ago
One of the books I read over Christmas was the 2023 book by Kate Zernike, The Exceptions. It is a story about that committed band of sixteen female scientists at MIT, led by Nancy Hopkins, who built up the evidence base to show just how real – and substantial – the discrimination against women scientists in their institution was. It is a sobering read. I was very familiar with the outcome of their investigations, which were reported in 1999, but the stories of disadvantage spanning many years prior to the report were new to me. Gripping and dispiriting reading. I am almost exactly 10 years you ..read more
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Not Being in the In-Crowd
Athene Donald's Blog
by Athene Donald
3M ago
Recently I was preparing a talk about work scientists may do that is not simply research and it has provoked me to think about when I fell into doing policy work, or at least moving out of the lab itself. The first role I took on was not exactly policy: it was sitting on a grant giving board (with fixed membership) of what was then the AFRC (Agriculture and Food Research Council), a predecessor of BBSRC. I was still, to my mind at least, an early career researcher. I can have only been in the second year of my lectureship and I can date the occasion fairly precisely, because I know I was still ..read more
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Skills and Post-16 Education
Athene Donald's Blog
by Athene Donald
4M ago
In his Anniversary Day address to the Royal Society’s Fellowship last week, the President, Adrian Smith, drew attention to the state of our education system, recognizing that the Prime Minister’s intent to “reform the education system to include some form of maths to 18 for all – [is] very much in line with the Society’s arguments for a broader school curriculum and in particular our work on rethinking what is needed for maths education.” The so-called gold standard of A Levels in England is out of line with our competitor nations in terms of its breadth of disciplinary coverage, and the abi ..read more
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Conversations in Amazing Libraries
Athene Donald's Blog
by Athene Donald
4M ago
Remarkably, I have been in three magnificent rooms of books in the last week, starting off with the Wren Library in Cambridge’s Trinity College. The first photo (which I admit I have taken from Diane Coyle’s Bluesky feed) gives an impression of its massive shape. It’s very high ceilinged and consequently, as we discovered, also very cold. Equally, it’s extremely long with, apparently, 80,000 books still in situ and a wonderful smell of ancient leather tomes which greets you as soon as you walk into the space. I was there, along with Tabitha  Goldstaub, Director of Innovate Cambridge, and ..read more
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Talking to Strangers
Athene Donald's Blog
by Athene Donald
4M ago
I was struck by an article in the Guardian written by Catherine Carr about the pleasure she derives from talking to strangers, which forms the basis of her podcast ‘Where are you going?’ (disclaimer, I’ve never listened to it or, indeed, come across it before today; perhaps I should). Conversations with strangers, she opines, “are perhaps a cross between the confessional ….. and the last few ticks of the clock in the therapy room. Interviewees are always anonymous and – after we chat – we go our separate ways. Even though the conversation can become intimate very quickly, it is also only a bri ..read more
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Being Festive about Women in STEM
Athene Donald's Blog
by Athene Donald
5M ago
Last week I attended an event at Murray Edwards College, a Women in STEM Festival. Dorothy Byrne, their President though not herself a scientist (she studied Philosophy at Manchester), had done a fantastic job in bringing together a wide range of speakers to discuss the thorny topic of the lack of women across the STEM disciplines. Should pride of place go to the discussion she chaired between the Vice Chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge? For the first time both are women, and both come from a science background. Irene Tracey is Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience at Oxford (as well as forme ..read more
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Voice: Finding Yours
Athene Donald's Blog
by Athene Donald
5M ago
Last week I was the protagonist in the curious ritual called a ‘post-prandial’ talk at my College (Churchill). In other words, after the whole Fellowship had met for the formal governance activity known as ‘Governing Body’, and after dinner (prandium is actually the Latin word for the midday meal, but somewhere along the way this name for the after-dinner seminar has stuck), I had to give my talk. The last time I had to go through this particular ordeal was as part of the interview process for the job of Master at Churchill, when I was asked to talk for about 20 minutes to a general audience o ..read more
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