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Cynthia Longfield, Madam Dragonfly
”I find machetes so useful in the jungle, don’t you?” Cynthia Longfield, quoted in The Times, 9 July 1991 Cynthia Longfield, ‘Madam Dragonfly’, was born in London in 1896. Her home schooling there was interrupted by regular visits to her maternal grandparents’ farm in Cloyne, Co. Cork, where she enjoyed roaming the countryside. Her early love of…
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Science is for Girls: A Pioneering Computer Programmer to Inspire the Next Generation of Women in Science
This piece first appeared in the “Women’s Lives” series in the Donegal Democrat, 8 Feb. 2018. The International Day of Women and Girls in Science is on 11 February. The day was established by the UN General Assembly in 2015, with the aim of achieving gender equality in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). This…
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Agnes Mary Clerke, an Irish Astronomer in Italy and London
Agnes Mary Clerke had no formal education and, despite the gender bar of the male-dominated professional scientific world, she became one of the most important astronomers and science writers of the Victorian period, and has a moon crater named in her honour. Hear me speak about Agnes as part of the Illuminate Herstory festival at…