Last week, eleven fortunate Year 8 students attended the inaugural GDSTEM conference at Imperial College London.
Only 22% of STEM professional in the UK are women so the GDST and Imperial College planned a day to train up student STEM ambassadors as part of a drive to improve the engagement in STEM subjects across all of the Trust schools. Over 300 girls from across the country were in attendance for an inspiring day.
The keynote speech was delivered by Helen Sharman who spoke about Life in Space and the future of space travel, in particular missions to Mars.
Dr Sharman threw down the gauntlet to those in attendance to follow in her footsteps and become space pioneers.
There were three additional lectures from some of the sharpest female minds in Imperial College, Dr Stella Pedrazzini spoke about the challenges of Materials Science such as creating light weight alloys for plane engines that have very high melting points. Dr Angela Kedgley opened our girls’ minds to the world of Bioengineering such as supporting the 2.7 million UK citizens with limited hand function and how Virtual Reality can be effectively used in rehabilitation treatments. Dr Lidia Lonergan from the Earth Science department spoke about the challenges in finding oil deposits and how rock formations can give us clues to their whereabouts.
After lunch the girls heard from Dr Hannah Williams which was a wonderful mix of quantum physics and feminism. It was really encouraging to see a large number of women in STEM represented in this presentation which revolved around the principle that representation matters and a quote from Marian Wright Edelman “you can’t be what you can’t see”.
The day was finished by spending time brainstorming how our STEM ambassadors can help to promote STEM in school and they have had some very exciting ideas.