Becky Penhale-Jones, NuNano Inspection Engineer, introduces our 2024 Women in AFM celebration by sharing her experience of being a woman in science and how she came, a little later in the game, to AFM.
There was never a question in my mind as to whether I could do science or not. My mum was a woman in science - she did engineering in the 80s before going on to become a maths teacher. Growing up in our house, STEM was what women did.
The gender shift didn’t become apparent for me until Physics A-level. We had two small classes. For the first year I was one of three girls, by A2 I was the only girl in our class. I’d had a really incredible physics teacher for GCSE who made it exciting but by A-level, it was a different story. My A-level teacher was always telling me how hard physics was and that I couldn’t do it. He predicted me a C grade and his behaviour towards my ability was upsetting, using essentially quite bullying tactics. It ground a level of determination in me to show he was wrong – which I did by getting a B grade.
After A-levels, I thought I’d left physics behind forever. I went on to study engineering at Leeds. I was studying Chemical and Energy Engineering which had the largest cohort of female students of all the engineering courses – with a whopping 20 of us in a course of 200 students.
That I ended up doing a physics PhD is something I still think my 17-year-old self would be shocked and horrified about. After my Masters I went into the real world for a couple of years and worked as a renewable energy consultant. I think that experience helped when I started the PhD. I already had a 9-5 working mindset, unlike many of my peers who came straight from university. Our supervisor was always busy and difficult to get hold of and that meant we had to be self-disciplined and driven. Whereas my peers would take the day if there wasn’t anything obvious to do, I took the initiative and wrangled my supervisor into weekly meetings. He did tell me at one point that I was very good at managing upwards but if I hadn’t been the one to say, I want meetings, and if I hadn’t had things prepared in advance nothing would have happened.
I came to AFM relatively late in the game –I hadn’t used one before my PhD. The project was similar to my master's – looking at thin films of titanium dioxide and the links to green energy applications. I used self-assembly and Langmuir-Blodgett deposition of thin films that are thermoelectrically efficient. The AFM I did was topographical and conductive. I imaged first to see if I had a monolayer and, if I did, then to measure the conductivity of the film.
The AFM was quite an intimidating instrument at first. I came in on a Bruker multimode which is one of the most manual AFMs there is. I’d never used anything as complicated before. In fact it was another woman in AFM Sophie Au-Young, a fellow female PhD student, who taught me how to use it.
I made all the usual mistakes any new starter is likely to do – I crashed the probe, lost the laser, that sort of thing. I crashed so many probes in the beginning Sophie said I couldn’t have any more! For a while, she did the tweezer work for me and had me practice with a broken box of probes until I got better at it. Suffice to say my skill with tweezers has improved dramatically since then!
After my ‘crash’ start I became a big fan of AFM. There’s a steep learning curve but then it’s quite intuitive and you want to use it for everything. It’s also the hardest microscopy instrument to master which makes, for example, coming to work on the SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) at NuNano feel like a walk in the park in comparison.
I was the only woman in my research group after Sophie left. Being in a minority is something you’re always aware of, albeit not necessarily consciously. It can be just a moment of recognition, for example, that you’re the only girl at the Christmas do, or when you find yourself scanning the room at a conference looking for the handful of other women to connect with.
Then there are the physical tacit ways in which the environment tells you it’s not been designed with you in mind. When I worked as an engineer the hi-vis coats didn’t quite fit and at university, my options were either to wear a lab coat that didn’t do up properly or one that was too big.
My main message to any girl or woman interested in science is that perseverance is the main thing – you can do it! (And also that biology is still a science – and not the ‘soft’ science it’s made out to be!). I’m all for celebrating International Women’s Day and for celebrating women in science. Those connections and friendships that were forged with other women at university, often occurred automatically because we were so few. We were either thrown together intentionally in the classes or we sought one another out, quickly finding the similarities in our experiences. In many senses that made us sisters-in-arms, united through adversity. Many of those women are still some of my best friends now.
I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to introduce the 2024 showcase of women in AFM. The diversity of the work these scientists are doing is brilliant to see and incredibly inspiring. The women here range from being PhD students to laboratory directors and department chairs. Their work is in biological sciences, nanomechanics and materials sciences. Their work is happening in the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, France, Spain and Germany. Their stories are unique and they are unified by their commitment to using AFM to push scientific boundaries and discovery through their work.
Click the images below to read about each researcher’s work and their career.
If you know of any women, or other marginalised and underrepresented people that are doing amazing work with AFM, who might be interested in being included in our future profiles please do get in touch with us community@nunano.com