Celebrating Cambridge women
Part IV
Welcome to the final part in our series celebrating some of the female changemakers across Cambridge University.
We kicked the series off on International Women's Day and have continued shining a light on inspiring colleagues throughout Women's History Month.
From businesswomen and entrepreneurs, to Doctors inventing new brain monitoring devices. From researchers tackling AI hate speech, to experts in the global movement of humans and ideas. Cambridge women are helping to move the world forward in every area.
Here our final group of inspiring women share the advice they've learned along the way, and the songs that lift them up on those challenging days.
We've turned their song choices into a public playlist for everyone to listen to, be buoyed by and feel part of this community.
Ms Sonita Alleyne OBE, Master
Sonita is the 41st Master and first woman to lead Jesus College since its foundation in 1496.
A businesswoman and entrepreneur, Sonita studied at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, before founding production company Somethin' Else which she led as Chief Executive from 1991 until 2009.
Her career includes being a journalist and broadcaster, hosting and contributing to weekly shows for Greater London Radio, BBC Four and BBC Five, as well as a five-year tenure as a BBC Trustee, where she championed diversity and inclusivity to represent all communities of the UK .
Sonita also founded 'The Yes Programme', a unique online service helping primary pupils connect what they learn in the classroom with jobs in the real world.
She has worked extensively as a non-executive Director in both the private and public sector. Board roles have included Artsline, a disability arts access charity; the Department for Culture, Media and Sport; the National Employment Panel; the London Skills and Employment Board; Chair of the Radio Sector Skills Council; as well as newspaper group Archant.
Sonita is a Fellow of The Royal Society of the Arts and the Radio Academy, and in 2004, was awarded an OBE for services to broadcasting.
Sonita's advice
The words that have stuck with me were said by my Grandmother, Hermia Ward. She was a pivotal influence on my life. She lived in Barbados and growing up in the UK I didn’t get to see her that often. So when she spoke. I listened. She represented, as all grand-parents do, a connection to my past. She was a living reminder of what I now say to the next generation. “We walk through life powered by strong people.”
Her comment was simple, “worry is like a rocking chair, it keeps you busy and gets you nowhere”. That saying has always reminded me to embrace the idea of forward momentum in life.
When everything around you looks like an impenetrable maze of problems that see you skittering from one to the other. Pause. Take a moment and start focusing on a solution. Even a small step will get you out of the to-ing and fro-ing of the rocking chair of worry.
Sonita's song choice
'No Looking Back' by Genesis Owusu, from the album 'Smiling With No Teeth.'
Professor Jean Abraham
Jean is Professor of Precision Breast Cancer Medicine, Director of the Precision Breast Cancer Institute and an Academic Honorary Consultant in Medical Oncology.
She co-leads the Breast Programme and the Integrated Cancer Medicine theme in the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre. She is deputy theme lead for Cancer at the Cambridge National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Campus.
Jean has a particular interest in two key areas: developing innovative clinical trials in high risk and hereditary early-stage breast cancers and; using multi-modal data integration to develop predictive and prognostic tools to provide individualised treatment strategies for breast cancer patients to improve clinical outcomes. As a Clinician Scientist she finds that the conversations with her patients particularly helps to inspire and generate the questions that drives her research.
Jean is a Fellow at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where she is subject director for the Part IB biology of disease course. She enjoys teaching the medical and veterinary students and finds it helps her keep abreast of the needs of trainees in their development.
She is Chief Investigator of eight national/regional trials. This includes the Personalised Breast Cancer Programme, which delivers real-time whole genome and whole transcriptome sequencing for clinical actionability. She is a member of the NIHR Clinical Studies Group for Breast Cancer, which sets the national clinical trials research strategy and she chairs the Genomics Working Group. Jean has also advised the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence on breast cancer therapeutics and provides expert witness for the House of Commons Select Committee on Genomics and Gene Editing.
Jean's advice
I have treated cancer patients for over 25 years. I have never heard a patient at the end of their time say: “I wish I had spent another day in the office, made another mouse model, done an extra clinic" etc. Almost always their regrets and wishes centre around the time they didn’t spend with family, friends, opportunities they didn’t take or friendships lost.
Work inspires us, motivates us, pays the bills and lets us give something back to the world, but work is only part of Life. Remember that when you are stressing about how to prioritise.
Jean's song choice
Not my favourite song but somehow appropriate here and does make me want to dance - Sister Sledge 'We are family!'
Dr Stefanie Ullmann
Stefanie is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).
Her work researches what can be done about hate speech and harmful online content, along with the inequalities and biases built into Artificially Intelligent (AI) communications technology such as Google Translate. How do we regulate these systems so that they don’t promote racism or sexism, without restricting freedom of speech?
Stefanie is tackling these challenges as part of the CRASSH project, Giving Voice to Digital Democracies: The Social Impact of Artificially Intelligent Communications Technology.
She is also part of a team that has developed a quarantining tool that detects hate speech and treats it like a computer virus, putting it into quarantine and protecting the user from immediate exposure to harmful content.
Stefanie's research also includes ways of improving the automation of 'counterspeech', a potential solution to hate speech that uses a diplomatic approach of responding with empathy instead of aggression. She is the editor of an upcoming anthology on counterspeech, which will be published in the Routledge Studies in Science, Technology and Society series.
She collaborates with the Hrant Dink Foundation’s Media Watch on Hate Speech and is a member of their international network on fighting Hate Speech and Disinformation.
Stefanie's advice
It may sound very simple and a little cliché but there’s only one you. And you are enough as you are. That’s one of the most important things I’ve learned as a person and as an academic.
I am a woman working in an area in academia that is still dominated by men, i.e. tech and AI. But this is good, because we need more women in every sector. And I work in academia while also living with multiple chronic health conditions. I battle chronic fatigue daily and it has made me re-evaluate and partly reject the relentless work ethic that is implicitly expected from (especially) young academics. The end result counts and it doesn't matter if it takes you 10 or 2 hours to get there.
I am convinced, and I want others to believe this too, that being a successful disabled female academic is possible. Create your own support system, find mentors and advocate for yourself!
Stefanie's song choice
One of my favourite songs to listen to and that lift me up is 'Free Woman' by Lady Gaga because it reminds me that I fought and worked hard for where I am now and I have every right to be here!
Professor Jenny Mander
Jenny is Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, and Fellow and Director of Studies at Newnham College.
A member of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, she is a specialist in literary and cultural history of the eighteenth century, focusing on the movement of people and ideas, and exploring the dynamics between labour migration, tourism and other types of mobility and immobility.
Jenny has recently completed a collaborative critical edition of the abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes – arguably the first major example of a world history, probing the social, economic and political consequences of European overseas commerce and colonialism.
Her current work concerns the place of storytelling in the theory and practice of hospitality in the context of early globalisation and international relations. She is particularly keen to connect historical perspectives and arts-led thinking to 21st-century challenges as framed by the UN SDGs and Global Compact for Migration.
To this end, Jenny has, amongst other projects, been interpreting Voltaire’s famous line: ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’ in partnership with local community projects, working with artists, musicians and other local stakeholders.
Jenny's advice
In any day, however rough, there will always be at least one insight or idea that emerges in the middle of the flurry. I've found that hanging onto just the one idea and pondering it in the bath or on the run (in my case that doesn't mean 'out running'!) is always enough to connect the dots and, more importantly, connect teaching and research to 'life'.
Really savouring the one (almost) good idea is often better than staying up late to read yet another article.
Jenny's song choice
The song for endurance and plodding along that I turn to is 'I'm Gonna Be (500 miles)' by The Proclaimers...It's always good to know that there are folk who care for us and would walk the extra (thousand) miles to pick us up!
And something more flamboyantly female and French: 'Non, je ne regrette rien' – although we never really start again from scratch, but new beginnings are always possible!
Dr Gemma Bale
Gemma is the Gianna Angelopoulos Assistant Professor in Medical Therapeutics within the Department of Engineering and Department of Physics.
Gemma leads the Neuro Optics Lab, a multidisciplinary group developing new, non-invasive brain monitoring techniques for the measurement of cerebral oxygenation and metabolism in areas where traditional brain monitoring isn’t possible, such as the intensive care unit or in a real-world environment.
Gemma currently focusses on near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS)-based methods to perform in-vivo monitoring of metabolic markers such as haemoglobin oxygenation, mitochondrial function and blood flow. She is interested in pioneering tools and techniques to monitor relevant physiology for both basic science and medical applications, particularly focussed on dementia. Her work is highly translational and she work closely with clinical partners in Addenbrooke’s Hospital to deliver technologies that progress medical therapeutics.
Throughout her career, Gemma has been passionate about communicating science outside of academia. During her PhD, she was awarded the UCL Provost’s Engineering Engager of the Year (2015) award for her work in communicating science to the public in many forms – from stand-up comedy to teaching in schools.
She led an award-winning public engagement platform called MetaboLight at UCL. In 2018, she undertook a Media Fellowship – working as a science journalist for BBC Radio 2, and in the same year was awarded the 'Isambard Kingdom Brunel Award for Engineering, Technology and Industry' by the British Science Association, as part of its prestigious Award Lecture series.
Gemma's advice
My ‘advice’ is not to take anyone else’s advice too seriously, especially if it is negative. For example, a senior academic told me not to apply for my current job because I wasn’t experienced enough – I’m so glad I didn’t follow his advice!
Gemma's song choice
'Fight Song' by Rachel Platten.
Dr Hannah Bower
Hannah is a College Teaching Officer and Acting Director of English Studies at Churchill College.
She specialises in late medieval literature and her research focuses on the boundaries, overlaps, and exchanges between literary writings and other, apparently practical or scientific texts.
Hannah's current work investigates the representation of human-made marvels in all kinds of medieval and early modern writings. In it, she is exploring how human-engineered spectacles—performed by bodies and formed (or re-formed) in text—might function as fecund sites within medieval writings for intersections between different written and dramatic genres, literary forms and inhabited spaces.
She is also working on a second book project provisionally entitled 'Representing Rupture in Domestic Literature, 1300–1700: Tearing, Splitting, Cutting'. It explores representations of tearing, fragmenting, and dividing in literary and instructional writings connected to medieval and early modern households, tracking the way that this violent imagery changed across manuscript and print versions of works. The study contends that this recurring imagery was used by writers and readers to ask fundamental questions about the precarities and strengths of domestic relationships.
Hannah's first book, Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500 was published in 2022 and is available via open access. It is the first in-depth book-length study of Middle English medical recipes.
Hannah's advice
My mum has always said to me that, careerwise, little is irreversible and nothing is ever wasted - take a chance with something and, if you don't like, there will be ways of changing it in the future. You'll always gain something from it that you didn't have before. I've found that really helpful advice when worrying about whether I'm going down the right path or not or whether I should say yes to a new opportunity at work.
Hannah's song choice
I'm a big fan of Tracy Chapman and 'She's Got Her Ticket' seems like a good pick in this context!
Dr Kelly Fagan Robinson
Kelly is a Leverhulme and Isaac Newton Early Career Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology, and a Fellow and Postgraduate Tutor at Clare Hall.
Her research focuses on the senses, disability, communication and social access. She foregrounds the ways that social relations contribute to constructions of categories of personhood, and how these definitions inform knowledge-making particularly within the arts and in public systems of care.
Kelly conducts research into why embedded perceptions of difference contribute to inequalities, as well as how dominant communication modes influence knowledge-making processes and understanding.
Her work on the CRUK project, 'Elusive Risks', has helped to re-contextualise the category of 'hard-to-reach’ populations within the contexts of cancer, risk and care. It has worked to facilitate greater understanding of various seldom-heard peoples' concerns about screening and other early detection programmes.
Her Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship project, Communication Faultlines on the Frontlines (2021-2024), will chart and analyse the ways that individual experiences, bodies, and moral judgments contribute to specific definitions of ‘worth’, ‘effects’, and ‘support’ at the coal-face of British benefits assessments.
Kelly's advice
The most important lesson for me, one I have to re-learn every day, is that you can only be where you are. As someone who came to postgraduate study after spending ten years in a totally different career, I often felt I was ‘behind’ my peers. It’s easy to lose sight of what you bring with you when you begin something new, whether it’s moving to a new country or starting a new role, project, area of research, or in becoming a partner, a parent, a reliable friend and colleague.
Learning that to each beginning we bring with us everyone we have ever been is quite a powerful thing to know. It has helped me to be more open to not knowing and not being embarrassed by not knowing. Our embodied experiences inform the ways we meet new challenges while remaining curious and open to understanding what is new.
Kelly's song choice
Joan Jett and the Blackharts had digs in my hometown. Jett’s attitude, lyrics, vocals and guitar particularly on ‘Bad Reputation’ are still an inspiration and an instant power boost.
Thank you for reading the final article in our 'Celebrating Cambridge Women' series. There are so many incredible women across Cambridge that we haven't been able to include - this series has highlighted just some of them and we hope has been inspiring for readers. You can meet more in earlier parts of the series:
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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