Doctor. Professor Amina Helmy, University of Groningen, Samaya Nisk, University of Amsterdam and Nakhiv, was selected to receive the Science Polling Award for Engineering and Natural Sciences. Doctor. Nissanqi and eleven other winners will be honored in an online ceremony on Monday, March 8, 2021, the tenth anniversary of the program. This will be the fifth polling science award for engineering and the natural sciences.
Ten years ago, Professor Amanda Fisher, Director of the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences, scientific journalist and author Vivienne Parry, came up with an idea to celebrate the special contributions made by female scientists in their field that were sometimes overlooked in their favor. Male colleagues. With the support of Dr. Helen Pankhurst, a women’s rights activist and granddaughter of Emilyn Pankhurst, called the awards program Suffrage Science.
On International Women’s Day 2011, the first group of eleven “voting rights scientists” from the life sciences was honored. Their prizes were handcrafted jewelry, created by art students at Central Saint Martins-UAL, who worked with scholars to design pieces inspired by research and the women’s suffrage movement. But instead of getting new jewelry designed for the following awards, each recipient chooses whom they wish to award their prize, creating an extensive “family tree” of exceptional scholars and professionals.
As the sequence progressed, new branches of the Voting Science program were developed – the Department of “Engineering and Physical Sciences” was established in 2013, followed by the Department of “Mathematics and Computing” in 2016. The family of polling sciences now has 148 members and more on Monday 8 March 2021, when The scheme is valid for ten years, an additional 12 will be added.
Researchers on the Nissan team
At the 5th Awards for “Engineering and Physical Sciences” on March 8th, host Vivienne Barry will take the theme of International Women’s Day 2021, #ChoosetoChallenge, as her starting point and with a committee looking forward to the next decade in which women will take off. Change the flag. Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, legendary astrophysicist and great advocate of diversity in science / engineering, will also be part of the committee and will also deliver a keynote speech on the Bill Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund (Institute of Physics) created with the money she received from the 2018 Special Breakthrough Award at Basic Physics.
Each previous award recipient chose who to pass the “legacy” to. Amina Helmy nominated Samaya Nisanki with the following explanation: “Samaya is an excellent researcher who focuses on a very recent topic in modern astrophysics, which is gravitational waves and what they say about the fusion of pairs of neutron stars and black holes. She was part of the discovery of the first-ever merger of two neutron stars. Gravitational waves in 2017 through international cooperation between LIGO and Virgo.
She was also part of the discovery document writing team and was responsible for coordinating follow-up observations from various telescopes. In addition to being an outstanding scientist, she is also an passionate and committed advocate of diversity and inclusion in the science and beyond. She is the chairperson of the Dutch Committee for Equality and Inclusion in Astronomy, which she co-founded.
