Join us at our community event on June 24th at 2pm in Skempton 307 - sign up now to be part of the conversation.
See the tabs below to find out more about our speakers and their role models.
Meet the speakers
Welcome and introduction to the Imperial Role Models – Linda van Kiempema
Keynote: Deconstructing Pyramids. Aakeen Parikh – Mechanical Engineering
Lightening talks:
- Kasia Piotrowska discussing Marie Skłodowska-Curie
- Mingke Wang sharing her role models from design and engineering
Join us and our speakers for an informal chat where you can look at the posters from the stories submitted to the project. Chat to those who submitted them and enjoy beverages, cake, and fruit.
- Roma Agrawal – Chloe Agg
- Elizabeth Garret Anderson – Iro Ntonia
- Fay Dowker – Jasmine Ajaz
- Gertrude Elion – Nessa Carey
- Shaway Yeh – Mingke Wang
- Marie Curie – Kasia Piotrowska
- Griffith Pugh – Tamlyn Peel
- Joana Atkinson – Indie Beedie
- Alan Turing – Katie Stripe
- Wang Zhenyi – Linda van Kiempema
- Mark Layton – Steven Okoli
Why stories are important, and what comes next – Katie Stripe
Keynote: Science as interweaving relationships through time and space. Fay Dowker Department of Physics.
Fay is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London, specialising in quantum gravity and causal set theory. PhD with Prof. Stephen Hawking in Cambridge 1990. Before joining Imperial College, she was a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. She completed her postdoctoral research at Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Batavia IL, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA.
Lightening talks:
- Jasmine Ajaz discussing Fay Dowker
- Tamlyn Peel discussing Griffith Pugh and Charles Darwin
The project
This project is about collecting and presenting diverse stories from our Imperial community. We want to know who inspires our community, including personal role models like teachers and family members, contemporary scientists and engineers from around the world, or historical figures who still have an impact on you today.
We are doing this for two reasons:
- To highlight the diverse stories of people who inspire our community.
- To build a database of STEMM stories that can be used to diversify and expand our teaching.
Get involved
After the success of our event on the 24th of June we are still collecting stories to add to our library.
We would love to hear stories from the whole Imperial community, from staff and students. Please share your stories with us. You can tell us about yourself and why this story is important to you or you can share anonymously if you prefer. Please email us if you have stories to share!
Explore
Below are some of the STEMM stories that we have collected already.
- Wang Zhenyi - 18th Century astronomer and mathematician.
- Maggie Aderin-Pocock - Space scientist, TV presenter, and Imperial Alumni
- Vanessa Sanchez - Fashion designer and engineer
- Imhotep - Ancient Egyptian engineer, doctor, and statesman.
- Elizabeth Garrett Anderson - Attended medical school against the odds
- Roma Agrawal - Feminist Engineer
- Professors Julie Makani and Mark Leyton - leading Sickle Cell specialists
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Maria Skłodowska-Curie - Double Nobel prize winner
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Gerturde Elion - The woman who change a whole industry
- Griffith Pugh - The reason Everest was conquered
Below are some of the stories from STEMM that made us think
- Alan Turing - War hero and computer scientist
- Hernrietta Lacks - Used by the system
- Charles Darwin - How you communicate your science is vital
Or people outside of STEMM that influence our community
- Stuart Hall - Academic, cultural theorist, and activist
Below are the stories that are personal to us, and about the people who make us who we are as students, researchers, and educators
Ellen Eliel - Survivor, advocate, grandmother
Katie Piatt - Educator, colleague, friend
Joanna Atkinson - Researcher, champion, colleague
Shaway Yeh - Business woman, change maker, colleague
Viv Maginnis - Teacher, engineer, force of nature
The women of the family - and their influence
What is a role model?
The simple answer
The term role model is actually very hard to be define but for this project we mean it in the broadest sense possible. We want stories of:
- The people that you think the Imperial community needs to know more about. Like Wang Zhenyi.
- The people whose stories have inspired you or made you think. Like Henrietta Lacks.
- The people that you want to emulate. Like Katie Piatt.
The academic answer
There is no consensus on one definition of a role model but in the literature, role models have been linked to:
- Showing the behaviour a person would like to copy or emulate (Merton, 1968).
- Modelling career ambitions (Jung, 1986).
- To show what is possible and be a source of inspiration (Morgenroth et al. 2015).
- Aspirational positions in society (Horsburgh and Ippolito, 2018).
These role models can fall into two categories. Accessible, which are those you have a personal connection to, and inaccessible, which are public or historical figures (Bird, Kuhns and Garofalo 2012).