Ada Lovelace Day 2010

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, commemorating the 19th century British Countess who became one of the pioneers of computing. The first Ada Lovelace Day was held last year, as an international day of blogging about inspirational women in science and technology. I read some really great pieces last year, so decided I’d make a bit more of an effort too this time round.

When I started my PhD at University College London, I joined the astronomy department’s instrumentation lab. Not many astronomers knew where to find us, we were way down in a dark windowless basement. At the time the group was in the final throes of building an instrument for the 8-m Gemini South telescope. Behind my tiny little desk in our large office was a much larger cubicle with a desk, and on, under and all around it was truly the largest amount of paper I have ever seen. Somewhere buried beneath was a computer, and judging by the muffled but incessant ringing, a telephone. That was the desk of the scientist who was managing the project, and that person was Maggie Aderin-Pocock.

I didn’t really know Maggie back then. She was the incredibly busy lady who managed this very exciting project, and who ran through the door every now and again and added more papers to the chaos on her desk. Invariably someone would crack a joke about the fire hazard, and she’d laugh. So there were two things I knew: her desk was like a document graveyard, and she always smiled. She’s without a doubt the smiliest project manager I’ve met.

A few years on, I got the chance to tag along on the commissioning run for the instrument Maggie’d managed, that the UCL group had built in our basement lab – the bench-mounted High-Resolution Optical Spectrograph, or bHROS (although I hadn’t actually contributed to the project). Commissioning is when the instrument’s performance is checked out on sky before routine science operations begin. What I learnt on this trip, is that even outside of office hours, even after long winter nights at the telescope, problems with the instrument etc, Maggie stays cheerful and smiley. She’s also something of a celebrity in La Serena, where the Gemini sea-level offices are – well, I suppose she’s something of a science celebrity in Britain now as well, but at the time that wasn’t the case. We noticed that loads of people would wave at her and say hello, they all seemed to know her. It turned out that Maggie’d discovered during a previous 6-month stay in the town, that many of the locals had never seen a black person before! And so she’d become instantly recognisable.

While astronomy is generally a friendly field, the business of building instruments tends to have a more rigid, corporate approach – for good reasons, mind you. But it’s always heartening to meet people who, like Maggie, manage to inject some fun and enthusiasm into this sometimes rather hard-nosed world. Every now and again, when work gets me down, I remind myself that this is possible.

Having moved back out of academia after delivering bHROS to Gemini, into the space industry, Maggie told us in Chile that she’d also started to do some science communication work, together with her husband – that she wanted to give something back. Together they have a science communication company, Science Innovation Ltd. After appearing on programmes such as Channel 4′s Fame Lab, she’s done a lot of great work in making science more popular with schoolkids, and in society in general. It’s great to see her name popping up more and more in the media.

Her background is unusual in that she’s moved between industry and academia throughout her career, actually starting off in the defense industry. There aren’t many industry-based scientists, certainly not from defense, who become such enthusiastic and visible advocates of science in society. Maybe a good reminder as well that despite the portrayed evilness of large defense companies, they actually do great science and engineering work – in astronomy in particular we’ve benefited lots from it.

Maggie received an MBE last year, and just a few weeks ago was a guest on Radio 4′s Desert Island Discs. The Royal Society has named her one of its top-10 women trailblazers of today. She’s one very cool lady, and an excellent multi-disciplinary scientist – so today’s virtual toast is to her.