Alumni Spotlight Series: Stefanie Lewis

STEFANI LEWIS Class of 2005 Interviewed by Michelle Noble | March 2016

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his week we are celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women for International Women’s Day, and

we are honoured to feature 2005 alum, Stefanie Lewis, who completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow in the male-dominated field of experimental nuclear physics. Her doctoral work involved developing novel software for data analysis in high-energy physics, and she has now joined HGF’s Glasgow office as a Trainee Patent Attorney in the Electronics group. We had the chance to catch up with Stefanie to find out how she strives for gender parity in the workplace, the struggles she faces, and how she has learned to overcome them.

It’s great to catch up with you, Stefanie! What motivated you to

What was the male/female split while studying for your PhD in

move to Scotland to study physics?

nuclear physics?

I was really interested in the Celtic culture, and being accepted to the University of Glasgow offered the perfect opportunity to study physics and enjoy the culture.

During my PhD, there were three female students (myself and two others) in my research group and 11 males. I think this is a fairly typical split.

Why nuclear physics?

We were interested to hear that you are also an Irish Dancer.

My project was heavily computational, and I was keen to have

When did you first begin dancing? How often do you dance?

a strongly mathematical project for my PhD. My project was focussed on an area of nuclear physics where the behaviour of subatomic particles is still not well understood, and it was very interesting exploring such a field.

“Things that are difficult tend to be more rewarding.”

Since nuclear physics and computing are known to be maledominated industries, we are curious to see how you have found your experience so far in this field. Has it been challenging to stand out, fit in, or have your voice heard, or is this gender stereotype becoming a thing of the past?

I think the situation is improving, but I have definitely had some sexist comments and behaviour directed towards me. During my PhD, there were quite a few events that addressed sexism and gender stereotyping, and for the most part, they showed that a lot of gender stereotyping is subconscious. There was one event in particular that highlighted this: In a meeting, a woman voiced an idea, and it was largely disregarded. Five minutes later, a man voiced the same idea, and it was met with a much more positive response. I’ve had similar experiences, but there are more and more women in science these days, and I think that there is at least some improvement.

On the other hand, there is still a considerable amount of misinformation being distributed. There was another instance at a physics conference where women were told to, “not wear dresses or skirts because men won’t take you seriously,” and, “use a black

I started dancing when I was 11, but I took a break from it during my PhD. After I had completed my PhD and was settled in to a job, I took it up again. When I was training for the Dancing World Championships last year, I was at dance classes for about 11 to 15 hours a week.

I competed and ended up placing 6th.

That is a huge accomplishment - congratulations! As a PhD student, your project combined nuclear physics with Bayesian statistics, computer programming and data parallelisation. What exactly does this mean?

Bayesian inference is an alternative to ‘normal’ statistics (frequentism). It is often used in situations where there isn’t a vast amount of data from experiments, such as astronomy where it’s difficult to repeat experiments or get a large dataset. The experiments that I was involved in for nuclear physics were very expensive to run, time consuming to set up, and usually the data wasn’t ready to be analysed for several years, by which point the experiment had been dismantled. It was important to get as much information out of the data as possible, and that’s the benefit that Bayesian inference provided. Unfortunately, the algorithm I used was quite slow, and in order for it to run in any sort of realistic time, I had to parallelise it using various programming methods.

What was your biggest misconception about studying nuclear physics?

pen instead of a blue one because it’s more masculine,” and other

It’s not about nuclear war! I think the name suggests nuclear

nonsense like that. Essentially, the message was to “be less of a

weapons or nuclear fusion/fission, but that’s only a subset of

woman and people will treat you better,” which does nothing to

nuclear physics (and not at all the field that I studied).

solve the problem.

ABOVE: Stefanie at a dance competition.

How has a PhD prepared you for your training to become a patent

Find an all-encompassing undergraduate physics programme, and

attorney?

then find a project that interests you. Also, make sure you get on

My PhD has taught me how to read highly scientific and technical documents. It also taught me that things that are difficult tend to be more rewarding. Doing a PhD in Physics especially teaches that if there is something you don’t understand, take a step back and approach it ‘from first principles’.

Can you describe ‘A Day in the Life’ of a Patent Attorney?

If I get a new case to look at, I’ll usually spend

well with your supervisor(s), ideally before you start. It makes all the difference.

It’s hard to believe your Class of 2005 just celebrated their 10-year

“Be confident and be assertive. If your ideas aren’t heard the first time, keep trying.”

a few hours reading the application and other

reunion in the fall. Is this where you thought you would be ten years after graduation? Where do you see yourself in another ten years?

I don’t think I had any concept of where I’d be ten years after graduation! In another ten years, I hope I will be a fully qualified patent attorney!

What skills or tools can women work to have

relevant documents. Then I’ll go through the response from the

in order to thrive in an industry with such a small percentage of

patent examiner and try to argue over his/her objections, which

women?

is quite time-consuming but involves a fair amount of problem solving, which I really enjoy.

What do you miss most about Vancouver?

The Grouse Grind and Purdy’s chocolate!

What advice would you give to students interested in studying nuclear physics?

Be confident and be assertive. If your ideas aren’t heard the first time, keep trying. And probably most importantly, try not to worry about how others perceive you. It turns out, it’s none of your business, and it usually reflects more on them than it does on you!

Stefanie Lewis, March 2016