How to Change the System of Science Funding in the UK

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We have a huge amount of institutional bias in the UK. If you work in a few universities, you're much more likely to get science funding than if you work in others. So I'd change that. But more fair, more balanced. Does it give you better outcomes? People are just as innovative, just as kind of creative and just as wonderful at doing that science. We should make the proposals three pages and we should make sure everyone has the same support to be able to write those.

Jessica Wade is a physicist at Imperial College London who, while spending her day working on special carbon-based materials that can be used as semiconductors, has spent her nights writing nearly 2,000 Wikipedia entries about underrepresented figures in science. That, along with numerous other forms of public engagement—including writing a children’s book about nanotechnology—is all in an effort to actually do something productive to correct gender and racial biases in STEM.

She joined Tyler to discuss if there are any useful gender stereotypes in science, distinguishing between productive and unproductive ways to encourage women in science, whether science Twitter is biased toward men, how AI will affect gender participation gaps, how Wikipedia should be improved, how she judges the effectiveness of her Wikipedia articles, how she’d improve science funding, her work on chiral materials and its near-term applications, whether writing a kid’s science book should be rewarded in academia, what she learned spending a year studying art in Florence, what she’ll do next, and more.

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Recorded February 21st, 2023

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