survey
Susan Gathercole and Sally Macintyre discuss their journeys to the top of the academic ladder
a difference, improving the world and helping on their career as social scientist Sally Macintyre. Based at the University of Glasgow, she is director of the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit and has published widely on how health is affected by inequality. Susan Gathercole is director of another MRC research centre: the Cambridge-based Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. As a psychologist her work involves memory and its disorders, insights
Susan Gathercole
from which she shares through a range of forums, from head teacher conferences to dyslexia selfexperience. It’s never felt like a job. What more
grow.” A stint at technical college saw her aim
can you hope for from a working life?”
for stage management. Fatefully forced to take General Studies, she was hooked after a term of
Both are directors of MRC units, but they’ve met
anthropology. Margaret Mead’s work on male and
only once before. Together they chat about how they got to where they are now, and share views
serendipity. I had no plans to be a social scientist.”
on ensuring gender equality. Five out of six universities rejected her application
Serendipitous Starts
only college at Durham University. The principal specialised in ‘taking on a few wacky outsiders
Sally had an unconventional start in life in a
each year’.” The experience she found both
remote Scottish boarding school for boys where her father worked as chaplain. She was educated
not fashionable to say that,” she laughs. The social
at home until she joined a ballet school aged
18
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