Alumni Profiles
Alumni Profiles Helen Atkinson née Bavister (Natural Sciences, 1978) By Pippa Considine (Law/English, 1985) Professor Dame Helen Atkinson is wearing bright yellows and reds when I meet her on Zoom. She’s found herself a space in a room with empty desks to speak to me through her laptop, after delivering a hybrid presentation (live and online) at Cranfield University, where she is Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the School of Aerospace, Transport Systems and Manufacturing. If there is such a thing as a digital aura, hers is one of enthusiasm and wisdom. When she received her damehood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2021, it was for services to engineering and education. These twin passions were fuelled at university. ‘I feel that I owe a huge amount of who I am today to the experience I had at Girton.’ In the Buckingham Palace citation she is described as ‘one of the UK’s foremost engineering leaders’. She says, with self-deprecating charm, that the honour was ‘a delightful surprise’. ‘Dame’ is a title that, in her case, crowns a story of grit and determination, driven by a zest for life. ‘For someone from my background, with both parents leaving school at 16, and as the first in my family to go to university, it is a most amazing thing.’ It was a rare moment for Helen’s girls’ grammar school, when the mathsand science-loving sixth-former was invited for an interview at Cambridge. Her headmistress warned her that other candidates might seem more confident, but she should ignore this
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Spring 2022
and just be herself. Interviewed by the late Dr Christine McKie, then Director of Studies in Physical Sciences, Helen had not aced her subject entrance papers, but she shone on the general paper and the College offered her a place. ‘I think one of the things that Girton is—and was—really good at, is spotting people with potential from less traditional backgrounds,’ she says. ‘I could see a number of fellow Girtonians in my year, where the College had seen the potential and enabled us to have an absolutely brilliant foundation. ‘Cambridge gave me confidence. It was very challenging and I flourished in that environment, partly because of the intellectual framework, but
also because I was with a group of fellow students at Girton, from state schools, who all had high ambition.’ In the physics labs there were roughly ten women and more than 100 men. She remembers that when she and her fellow Girtonians didn’t understand something, they would keep asking. ‘We learnt, because we were prepared to admit that we didn’t understand, we plugged away and then—eventually— you’d get the light-bulb moment. We were very determined, persistent and mutually supportive as a group.’ Starting out as a Natural Scientist in 1978, the last year before the College turned co-educational, she remembers the change in tempo and practical changes when half of the new intake
