Erasmus Robert Darwin was an English physician. One of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, he was also a natural philosopher, physiologist, slave-trade abolitionist, inventor, and poet.
Serendipity is an unplanned fortunate discovery. Serendipity is a common occurrence throughout the history of product invention and scientific discovery.
Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. The discovery eventually earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974; however, she was not one of the prize's recipients.
Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author, known for her poetic explorations of migration, both animal and human, and her involvement with classical music, wildlife conservation and Greece, ancient and modern. She is Trustee for conservation charity New Networks for Nature, has served on the board of the Zoological Society of London and was Professor of Poetry at King's College London from 2013 to 2022.
Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton was a British engineer, mathematician, physicist and inventor, and suffragette. Known in adult life as Hertha Ayrton, born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society for her work on electric arcs and ripple marks in sand and water.
Lisa Anne Jardine was a British historian of the early modern period.
Simon J. Schaffer is a historian of science, previously a professor of the history and philosophy of science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and was editor of The British Journal for the History of Science from 2004 to 2009.
Lydia Ernestine Becker was a leader in the early British suffrage movement, as well as an amateur scientist with interests in biology and astronomy. She established Manchester as a centre for the suffrage movement and with Richard Pankhurst she arranged for the first woman to vote in a British election and a court case was unsuccessfully brought to exploit the precedent. Becker is also remembered for founding and publishing the Women's Suffrage Journal between 1870 and 1890.
Jameel Sadik "Jim" Al-Khalili is an Iraqi-British theoretical physicist, author and broadcaster. He is professor of theoretical physics and chair in the public engagement in science at the University of Surrey. He is a regular broadcaster and presenter of science programmes on BBC radio and television, and a frequent commentator about science in other British media.
Angela Saini is a British science journalist, broadcaster and the author of books, of which the fourth, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality, was published in 2023 and was a finalist for that year's George Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Saini has worked as a reporter and presenter for the BBC and has written for a number of publications including The Guardian, New Scientist, and Wired UK. She has also produced and presented several radio and television documentaries, including a BBC Radio 4 documentary on biofuels and a BBC World Service documentary on the impact of climate change on Indian agriculture. Saini's writing and reporting focus on how science interacts with society, especially on how it affects marginalized groups, and she has been acclaimed for her work by a diverse range of organizations and institutions.
Ray Strachey was a British feminist politician, artist and writer.
Vivienne Mary Hunt Parry is a British science journalist and author, currently employed as head of engagement at Genomics England. She is most well known for presenting BBC Television science programme Tomorrow's World and Panorama. She is also a regular contributor to The Guardian newspaper's online presence.
Dame Margaret Ebunoluwa Aderin-Pocock is a British space scientist and science educator. She is an honorary research associate of University College London's Department of Physics and Astronomy, and has been the chancellor of the University of Leicester since 1 March 2023. Since February 2014, she has co-presented the long-running astronomy television programme The Sky at Night with Chris Lintott. In 2020 she was awarded the Institute of Physics William Thomson, Lord Kelvin Medal and Prize for her public engagement in physics. She is the first black woman to win a gold medal in the Physics News Award and she served as the president of the British Science Association from 2021 to 2022.
Martha Annie Whiteley, was an English chemist and mathematician. She was instrumental in advocating for women's entry into the Chemical Society, and was best known for her dedication to advancing women's equality in the field of chemistry. She is identified as one of the Royal Society of Chemistry's 175 Faces of Chemistry.
Dr Samantha George is a Senior Lecturer in Literature in the Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities Research Institute at the University of Hertfordshire. She completed a PhD at the University of York in 2004, then taught in the Department of English Literature at Sheffield University till taking up her post at Hertfordshire in 2007. She is known for her research on eighteenth century literature and science with a particular emphasis on the role of women and botany.
Elspeth Frances Garman is a retired professor of molecular biophysics at the University of Oxford and a former President of the British Crystallographic Association. Until 2021 she was also Senior Kurti Research Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford, where she is now an emeritus fellow. The "Garman limit", which is the radiation dose limit of a cryocooled protein crystal, is named after her.
Samaya Michiko Nissanke is an astrophysicist, associate professor in gravitational wave and multi-messenger astrophysics and the spokesperson for the GRAPPA Centre for Excellence in Gravitation and Astroparticle Physics at the University of Amsterdam. She works on gravitational-wave astrophysics and has played a founding role in the emerging field of multi-messenger astronomy. She played a leading role in the discovery paper of the first binary neutron star merger, GW170817, seen in gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation.
Emily Fleur Shuckburgh is a climate scientist, mathematician and science communicator. She is Director of Cambridge Zero, the University of Cambridge's climate change initiative, Academic Director of the Institute of Computing for Climate Science, and is a fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. Her research interests include the dynamics of the atmosphere, oceans and climate and environmental data science. She is a theoretician, numerical modeller and observational scientist.
Jessie Helen Elizabeth Lilian MacLeod Georgeson was a Scottish engineer who was the first woman to graduate in engineering at a Scottish university, the University of Edinburgh.
Janette Gilchrist Dunlop was a Scottish physicist who studied X-ray scattering. She later became a teacher and lived most of her life in Edinburgh.
