This month’s WiPA Woman of the Month is Dr Claire Max, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. Max is currently the director of UC observatories, and is known for her work in adaptive optics which revolutionized observational astronomy by removing atmospheric blurring from data. You can read about her, here.
The women of WiPA had the honor of meeting Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell during her visit to UCI this week! Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967, and won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018, among many other impressive achievements.
This month’s WiPA Woman of the Month is Dr Willie Hobbs Moore. A theoretical chemical physicist and engineer, and pioneer in physics, Moore is the first African American woman to ever receive a PhD in physics, paving the way for African American women in the field. Read more about her, here.
This month’s WiPA of the Month is Grete Hermann, a mathematician and physicist guided by Emmy Noether for her PhD. Learn more about her, here.
January’s WiPA Woman of the Month is Fabiola Gianotti, experimental particle physicist at CERN! You might remember her as the physicist who announced the discovery of the Higgs Boson. She became the first woman appointed Director-General at CERN in January 2016, and was listed as one of the top 100 most influential women by Forbes in 2013. Read more about her, here.
WiPA’s woman of the month is astrophysicist Meg Urry, Director of Yale Astronomy and Astrophysics. Urry studies active galactic nuclei, which are supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, and their evolution. In 2010, Urry won the 2010 Women in Space Science Award from the Alder Planetarium for her efforts to increase the number of women in fields of the physical sciences. You can read more about her here.
Join us this Saturday (11/17/18) for our yearly weekend hike! We’ll be hiking to Top of the World Park in Laguna Beach and having lunch at the top, before hiking back down.
If you’re interested in coming email us at wipa@uci.edu
This upcoming department colloquium with WiPA guest speaker President Elizabeth Hillman will take place in RH 101 on November 29, 2018 at 3:30 PM. Don’t miss it!
Donna Strickland has become the first woman in 55 years to win the Nobel Prize in Physics! The prize was shared among Strickland, Arthur Ashkin, and Gerard Mourou for their groundbreaking work in lasers. This is a huge step in the right direction for women in physics!
Read more, here.
Last week, Alessandro Strumia gave a talk at CERN that caused an outrage among academics in physics, as he presented destructive and scientifically incorrect notions about women in the field. You can read about it, as well as his subsequent suspension, here.
The department has written a letter repudiating the notions Strumia presented. This is a very important step on the part of the department to show that it is committed to diversity and inclusion.
