1. Athene Donald was Professor Emerita of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge, and former Master of Churchill College, Cambridge.
20 Facts About Athene Donald
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Athene Donald was educated at Camden School for Girls and the University of Cambridge where she was an undergraduate student of Girton College, Cambridge.
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Athene Donald earned a bachelor's degree in Natural Science, followed by a PhD in 1977 for research on electron microscopy of grain boundary embrittled systems.
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Athene Donald's research has applied microscopy, and in particular environmental scanning electron microscopy, to the study of both synthetic and biological systems, notably protein aggregation.
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Athene Donald carried out important work on lyotropic systems, including a synthetic polypeptide, studying its gelation and phase diagram.
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Athene Donald was a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge from 1981 to 2014, when she became Master of Churchill College.
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Athene Donald was a member of the ESPCI ParisTech scientific committee during that time.
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Athene Donald is an honorary fellow of both Robinson College and Girton College.
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Athene Donald chaired the Scientific Advisory Council of the Department of Culture, Media and Sports from 2015 to 2017.
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Athene Donald was the first chair of the Institute of Physics biological physics group from 2006 to 2010, and coordinated the writing of lecture notes in biological physics.
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Athene Donald is currently very involved with their policy work, including around skills.
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Athene Donald has been an outspoken champion of women in science.
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Athene Donald sat on the BIS Diversity group, and serves the Equality and Diversity Board of Sheffield University and the Gender Balance Working Group of the ERC; she is a Patron of the Daphne Jackson Trust.
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Athene Donald regularly writes on the topic of women in science in both mainstream media, and on her personal blog.
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Athene Donald is the author of Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science, published in 2023.
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Athene Donald was awarded the UKRC's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011, a Suffrage Science award by the MRC in 2013 and her portrait by Tess Barnes hangs in the Cavendish Laboratory.
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In 1999 Athene Donald was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
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Athene Donald is distinguished for her work relating mechanical properties to the structure of polymers.
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Athene Donald showed that polymer crazing could not be understood without reference to the entanglement network, and showed that two processes are involved, chain scission and chain disentanglement, depending differently on temperature and molecular weight.
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Athene Donald pioneered studies of thermotropic liquid crystalline polymers via transmission electron microscopy, revealing the ubiquity of banded textures after shear flow in these materials.