University of
Wollongong appoints Australia’s first female professor of Chemistry
Julius Sumner Miller might have asked why is it so that the stereotypical image of chemists and physicists remains one of grey-haired men in white coats poring over test tubes. It's a lingering perception that Australia's first female Professor of Chemistry hopes to change in order to attract more dynamic young women to the discipline.
A mother, top grant winner and master of high-tech instrumentation, Professor Margaret Sheil is trailblazing a new frontier in what has remained a male-dominated science. "There's just not been many women at high levels in Chemistry in Australia," she said. "This omission has been especially glaring since there have been many female professors of Chemistry appointed in the UK, Ireland and the US”
An
'unconscious bias towards women in science', as found by a Massachusetts
Institute of Technology study, was probably also at work in most Australian
universities, Professor Sheil said.
"But Wollongong is different, it's a lot more supportive than other universities."
Professor Sheil said the experience of having four older brothers helped her survive and excel in a male-dominated discipline. "I learned you had to speak up loudly to be heard and I'm not frightened of a fight, either," she said. "It's also helped that I am so technically-minded - I'm a techno-head and love new things."
At UNSW, where Professor Sheil was the only female PhD candidate in her cohort, she learned to program computers, reconfigure mass spectrometers and for many years held the laboratory record of the highest mass detected - a peptide of mass 2000. Now, with improvements in instrumentation, her current students can routinely detect masses up to 100,000.
Today she remains the resident computer expert in her laboratory and besides the technical officer, is the only member of her research group able to drive the data systems on older instruments.
In the past 10 years, Professor Sheil has won more than $4million in research funding, making her one of The University of Wollongong’s biggest money-spinners. Her first grant - $200,000 for one of the first electrospray mass spectrometers in Australia - was at the time the biggest ever awarded to a UOW researcher.
Furnished with more than $2.5million worth of state-of-the-art equipment, her Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry Laboratory is one of the top such facilities in Australia.
Such success has led to her selection on many committees. She is Deputy Chair of the University Research Committee: Chair of the URC Audit Resources and Allocation Committee; a member of the Standing Committee on Academic Promotions; and spent more than two years as Chair of the Faculty of Science Research Committee.
Professor Sheil said gender equity policies meant it was common for women to serve on more committees than their male counterparts, which made it difficult to fulfill research and parenting commitments. "The secret is to be strategic about the committees you serve on; to be organised and focused; and to have good help at work and home," she said. "My husband and mother give invaluable support, but even so, I go home early two days a week to pick my daughter up from school. On those days, after I've put her to bed at night, I often come back to work for another six to seven hours."
Professor Sheil said she was excited to work in mass spectrometry - an enabling technology underpinning a better understanding of the molecular processes involved in the onset and treatment of a variety of diseases. Her lab is currently leading the field in studies on drug-DNA interactions, which may in the long term contribute to better treatments for cancer.
Gender battles aside, Professor Sheil is keen to use her position as Australia's first female professor of Chemistry to help avert what she believes will be a crisis in science education. "If the next generation is to deal with the technological challenges of the coming century, it will be necessary to raise the profile of science and the basic sciences of Chemistry and Physics, in particular," she said. "It's important to get more young people into science to create that level of excitement that was there in the space age. It's there in biology to some extent with the biotechnology revolution, and it's there in information technology. It can be there in Chemistry too."
Reproduced with kind permission of Campus News (The University of Wollongong)
http://www.uow.edu.au/admin/marketing/bytes/cnews/page5.html