Nicky Athanassoupoulou

Dr Nicky Athanassopoulou spent twelve years in high technology companies before joining the IfM Education and Consultancy Services (IfM ECS) as an Industrial Fellow. She has held a number of roles in project management, new product development, technology and business development.

I am a curious person. I see curiosity as a driver for moving things forward and I think it’s incredibly important to work things out for yourself instead of accepting existing norms.

I must get that from my dad who considered Plato’s dialogues and Einstein’s space-time concept perfectly normal topics for dinnertime conversation with his twelve-year-old daughter. Before long I was improvising electrolysis experiments on the kitchen floor and taking apart my first watch to figure out how it worked.

Being a good all-rounder at school I was not sure what to study until a new physics teacher turned up. His first lesson was on how super fluid Helium-3 can crawl unaided from its container. At that moment I knew that I should study physics. The wonder of the natural world seemed unimaginably beautiful to a teenager growing up in a small village in rural Peloponnese.

“I kept asking questions and reminded myself of Eleanor Roosevelt’s words, ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.’”

A few years later I came to Cambridge to do my doctorate. I didn’t mind that most of the students in the lab were men, although I did wonder what had happened to all the women. During my undergraduate course in Greece there had been an almost equal balance of men and women. Cambridge was a steep learning curve. It was not only the science, but also the culture and the language. Most people were very helpful, especially my fellow students. As I had come here to learn, I was not afraid to say ‘I do not know’, even if this occasionally led to comments like ‘women are not capable of studying physics’ and ‘women are not good at maths’. But they did not worry me unduly and they certainly did not reduce my confidence or my belief in my own abilities. I remember thinking that if I knew everything I wouldn’t need to study, so I kept asking questions and reminded myself of Eleanor Roosevelt’s words, ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.’

After completing my PhD I was keen to continue in physics while other students fled to the City. But I had been so focused on my doctorate that I hadn’t spent much time understanding how the academic system really worked. Other people seemed to know how to get research grants, secure support from well-connected supervisors or get help in finding suitable posts. I don’t think this was a gender issue, just a lack of the right support at the right time.

When my first postdoc finished and I was looking for a second,I realised that to stay in academia would mean moving countries and forgoing any personal life for some years. At that point I opted to move into industry instead.

Since then, I have learnt the importance of actively networking and having an informal network of advisors and mentors. This is particularly important for a woman working in a field like physics, which is still very male dominated in the UK. In academia, many aspects of selection, recruitment, retention and promotion need overhauling for the twenty-first century so we don’t continue to disenfranchise half our human capital. We could, for example, be more imaginative about sourcing references from postdocs or students about how much someone motivates and supports them. We could run selection committees more objectively. We could stop expecting academic women to produce the same number of publications as men despite many having careers affected by maternity leave. The latter is a real issue in industry too. There are still negative attitudes about women taking maternity leave or becoming less flexible in their working hours after they return.

But ultimately, we need to start increasing the female student numbers in physics and related disciplines. Some girls are put off sciences from primary school here. My six-year-old daughter came back one day and said, ‘Mum, maths is hard.’ Where did that come from? It runs deep in society and that’s sad. I’m not saying everyone needs to be a scientist, but good education should be focused on generating options for both boys and girls and not limiting them.

“People define success in different ways and it’s good to know as early as possible what is important to you.”

Generating options, being curious and continually pushing onwards are my criteria for success. This can be as simple as reading a challenging piece of work on a completely different discipline right through to travelling up the Amazon. It’s about pushing boundaries, having an appetite to explore the world and yourself. It’s about striving to be a better person and having meaningful, supportive relationships with other human beings.

But people define success in different ways and it’s good to know as early as possible what is important to you. Then you make sure you don’t compromise on that. Maybe ultimate success comes from the Greek saying my dad used to tell me, ‘Γνωθι σεαυτον’, which can be loosely translated as ‘know thyself.’