The Roads not Taken: Ego-Histoire or my Encounter with Three Women Scientists. (Two Nobel Laureates and a "Girl Interrupted") November 22, 2011

The Roads not Taken: Ego-Histoire or my Encounter with Three Women Scientists. (Two Nobel Laureates and a "Girl Interrupted")
Pnina G. Abir-Am
Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 12:30 p.m.
This talk examines the overlapping careers of three women scientists by reflecting on how their careers and lives in science relate to the unfinished gender revolution of the 1970s, to each other, as well as to this historian author, who happens to share key biographical features with all three subjects. Two of these scientists are members of the first ever team of women Nobel Laureates in 2009 (for the discovery of telomerase and the role of telomeres in replication, aging, and cancer) while relating to each other as Ph.D. adviser and advisee. The third scientist was their predecessor, and actually the first woman to be hired in the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-1970s, prior to becoming part of the “leaking pipeline” of women in science. The essay concludes by highlighting the under-utilized synergy between the interests of wo/men scientists and wo/men historians in making both science and the world at large a more robust space of gender equality.
Location: Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall, Women’s Studies Research Center, Epstein Building, Brandeis University
Contact: Rosa Taormina, taormina@brandeis.edu, http://go.brandeis.edu/wsrc