Event Details

The Department of Chemistry at Lancaster University in collaboration with the Department of Mathematics & Statistics and Lancaster University Women's Network are pleased to host this panel event to address the issues of inequality in science and what needs to be done to improve it.

Inspired by the 'Picture a Scientist' film screening our panellists will be discussing the themes raised in the film and offering an open discussion around why the current system we have in place to support diversity in science isn't working and offer suggestions on what we need to do to change it.

We hope that this event will contribute to current discussions around inequality and underrepresentation in the academic environment.

Event host: Professor Joe Sweeney, Chair in Synthetic Chemistry, Head of Department

Confirmed Panellists:

Professor Christina Hicks, Lancaster Environment Centre

Christina is an Environmental Social Scientist interested in the relationships individuals and societies form with nature; how these relationships shape people’s social, environmental, and health outcomes; and how they create sustainable livelihood choices. Christina is a professor within the Political Ecology group at Lancaster University’s Environment Centre. She gained her PhD in 2013 from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University; after which she held an Early Career Social Science Fellowship at the Center for Ocean Solutions, Stanford University. Christina main source of research funding comes from an ERC Starting Grant: FAIRFISH, and she was awarded the 2019 Philip Leverhulme Prize for Geography. Christina’s work is global with particular field sites on the east and west coasts of Africa and in the Pacific.

Dr Sarah O'Connor, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Sarah O’Connor received her degrees in chemistry from the University of Chicago (BS) and MIT (PhD), and performed her post-doctoral work at Harvard Medical School. She has been a Professor and Project Leader in Biological Chemistry at the John Innes Centre since 2011, and became Director of the Department of Natural Product Biosynthesis at the Max Planck Institute of Chemical Ecology in summer 2019. Her research interests focus on the natural products of plants, with a particular interest in the iridoids and alkaloids. Her research group takes a broad approach to understanding plant biosynthetic pathways, ranging from gene discovery, mechanistic enzymology, and metabolic engineering.