One of the committees that I sit on is the seminar committee. I generally like this as service work goes, because it gives me some say in what seminars I will be sitting through the next year, provides an opportunity for me to network, and doesn't actually take that much time. Usually just one meeting to go through lists of speakers that have been proposed by other faculty members, and then go to a few dinners during the seminar series. I'm OK with that, really I am!
This year when we were putting together the list of speakers, I noticed that there very few women (4/22). I brought this up to the rest of the committee and was pretty quickly swatted down. I was told that "we don't need to have ALL women", and then the conversation went on as though I hadn't said anything. Being the only untenured person in the room, I didn't really push the issue further.
Anyway, later that day I was asked to add another 2-3 folks to the list. I figured that they should all be women. Women that give EXCELLENT talks. So I went to twitter and asked the tweeps to start throwing out names of women that do kick-ass science and can rock a seminar (we used the #xxtalk hashtag). Here is the list of what we came up with*. I have included extra information that was provided by twitter.
from the #xxtalk twitter stream, in no particular order:
Anna Marie Cuervo (Albert Einstein)
Bonnie Bassler (Princeton)
Jennifer Lippencott-Schwartz
Michelle Swanson
Frances Brodsky
Rachel Green (JHMI)
Nicola Clayton (spacial memory in scrub jays)
Angela Christiano (Columbia)
Erica Rosenblum (color evolution in desert lizards)
Leslie Voshall
Anne Brunet (Stanford)
Susan Lindquist
Rebecca Heald
Liz Miller (Columbia)
Phoebe Stewart
Please add your own suggestions in the comments, and we'll make this a handy archive forever!
*I haven't seen all these women speak (yet), so I can't personally vouch for them.
Sheila Patek. For an example, see here: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sheila_patek_clocks_the_fastest_animals.html
Leslie Voshall is a GREAT speaker. Also an awesome scientist and very nice human being as far as I can tell.
I've seen Jennifer and she is awesome as are
Patricia Schulte at UBC. I've heard that Dr. Kamala D. Patel at University of Calgary (I know Canadians!) is quite good as well.
So glad to see the blog post for this- I will quite likely want to refer back to the list and twitter is a tad ephermal.
Also, I remembered that earlier this year I saw C. Sue Carter (oxytocin research at U Illinois-Chicago), who was totally awesome.
When I was soliciting keynote speaker nominations for our grad student forum (i.e. people who were inspiring and good speakers), I also got requests for Elaine Fuchs and Barbara Schaal.
Susan Mango (Harvard)
Karolin Luger (Colorado State)
I was especially impressed with Karolin Luger's astuteness in asking the important and tough questions...
Glad to see the list expanding.
Thanks everyone for adding to the list! I am hoping this will be a useful resource for me in the future!
Patricia Kuhl. Saw her speak once.
http://www.ted.com/speakers/patricia_kuhl.html
Ann McDermott (Columbia U.) recently gave a kickin' seminar at my school.
I must have forgotten the hashtag on Twitter. Heather Cameron (NIH) is a great speaker of her work on adult neurogenesis and learning and memory.
It was probably my fault-I felt like there were some missing when I was making the list. Thanks for fixing my oversight here!
What field are you in? Assuming we're talking "science" here, I suggest Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, a theoretical/computational astrophysicist at Vanderbilt.
There's also Carolyn Porco of... Institute of the Southwest? I forget. She's a lead on the Cassini Mission to Saturn.
I'm mostly a bio/biomed type. But I think that the more inclusive the list, the better. Thanks!
Xiaowei Zhuang at Harvard. Her group was one of 4 that invented superresolution localization microscopy.
Luisa Iruela-Arispe at UCLA does interesting things in vascular biology.
Katja Lindenberg at UC San Diego does interesting things in physical chemistry, and has worked on subdiffusive transport of morphogens and implications for gradient formation.
Pam Silver. Brenda Bass. Christine Jacobs-Wagner. Elizabeth Blackburn. Nancy Hopkins. Jodi Nunnari. Joan Steitz.
thanks! I've seen a few of these women speak and they are indeed awesome.
Lila Solnica-Krezel, who is now at Wash U, is an excellent speaker too!
I would have written 'Women who . . . .", rather than "Women that . . . ."
This is great! I have had the same issue when nominating people for awards, editorial boards, etc. -- people use what the psychologists call "cognitive availability" and just come up with names of people who are like themselves, or who already did something similar. When you do suggest women, they say, "Oh, yeah, I never thought of her!"
A friend has done some work suggesting that a good way to proceed is to give everyone on the nominating committee a list of names, including a diversity of gender/background/whatever, and ask them to choose. They tend to be more equitable then than they are when asked to come up with the names from scratch.
Angela Belcher, MIT. Really incredible work, and she gives a great talk.
Courtney Miller from Scripps Florida. Definitely a top scientist and a wonderful person.
I second the recommendation of Association for Women in Science (AWIS) sustaining members Elaine Fuchs and Joan Steitz and would add Donna Dean, formerly of NIH, to the list.
Hopi Hoekstra! Joan Straussman! Trudy MacKay!
Excellent suggestions. And I love the enthusiasm
I'm familiar with Erica Rosenblum's work, and saw her postdoc do a great talk on the White Plains lizards and how their (loss of color) mutation affects behavior. She's out of U of Idaho. For high(er)-profile speakers I recommend Eugenie Scott of NCSE.
more great additions to the list! Thanks
Other suggestions (neurobiologists all and in no particular order)
Cori Bargmann
Eve Marder
Gina Turrigiano
Huda Zoghbi
Rachel Wilson
non neuro
Nergis Mavalvala
Thanks, these are great!