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Prof Rachel Oliver šŸÆ Profile picture
Prof Rachel Oliver šŸÆ
@ProfRachelGaN
Tweeting about the wonders of gallium nitride, the joy of microscopes and a dream of equity in science. Personal views. (She/her).
Nov 1, 2023 ā€¢ 14 tweets ā€¢ 3 min read
So, @UKRInews responded to Michelle Donelanā€™s letter last night: . Having slept on it, I want to offer some measured thoughts. Whilst I don't like the response, my thoughts have some nuance & twitter isn't a great place for nuance. Nonetheless, here's a šŸ§µ ukri.org/news/response-ā€¦
Iā€™ve seen people saying UKRIā€™s response couldnā€™t have been worse. But letā€™s face it: it could have been worse. I was bracing myself for worse. They havenā€™t shut down the Research England EDI group forever & written to the accused academicsā€™ employers demanding sanctions (SeešŸŸ).
May 20, 2023 ā€¢ 20 tweets ā€¢ 5 min read
Yesterday, the government published their new semiconductor strategy. Hear more about it on #TheContextBBC: the item starts at 49 minutes and includes an interview with me: bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodā€¦ Before the strategy was released, I recorded a podcast with @FoundSciTech about my hopes for the strategy and the needs of the semiconductor sector. foundation.org.uk/Podcasts/2023/ā€¦
I said the sector needs money, time, people and tools. Sounds simple, huh? So did the strategy deliver? šŸ§µ
Mar 8, 2022 ā€¢ 10 tweets ā€¢ 4 min read
It's #InternationalWomensDay (#IWD2022 ) & @cgl_119 & I have one thing to say:

#SmashThePatriarchy

There are a whole lot of other things I *won't* be doing today. šŸ‘‡ I *won't* be making lists of inspirational women.

It's not a lack of inspirational women that's the problem. It's patriarachal systems of oppression which prevent those inspirational women being heard, or (worse) prevent women reaching their potential to be inspirational.
Oct 14, 2021 ā€¢ 9 tweets ā€¢ 3 min read
If anyone thought the govt's war on "cancel culture" was really about free speech & not about shoring up the platform for specific right wing views, this news should shatter their illusions: @PriyamvadaGopal has had a talk to the home office cancelled because of her views. 1/n @PriyamvadaGopal I want to be very clear here. Prof Gopal has not had her right to freedom of speech violated. Her academic freedom has not been violated.
She was offered the privilege of speaking at the home office, & that privilege has been revoked. It's rude, but not a violation of her rights.
Aug 15, 2020 ā€¢ 7 tweets ā€¢ 3 min read
Applications to Cambridge these days come with a certain amount of contextual information. This lets admissions tutors know, for example, if applicants come from a school with particularly low GCSE grades or from which very few students have applied to Oxford or Cambridge before. This info is used to generate what are called "flags" on applications, to highlight students for whom this contextual information should be taken into account:
undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/applying/conteā€¦
Jul 25, 2020 ā€¢ 4 tweets ā€¢ 1 min read
An interesting analysis of the Rosalind Franklin story from @AtheneDonald, which contrasts Franklin's step-by-step, thorough analytical approach with the leaps of logic of Crick and Watson, and asks whether... "different educational practices would have enabled the needed leap of imagination for Franklin to construct the double helical structure without deriving it through detailed analysis"?
Jul 14, 2020 ā€¢ 10 tweets ā€¢ 5 min read
Excited to be attending the @UniversitiesUK webinar on Turning words into actions: Eliminating racism and racial inequality in higher education #WordsIntoAction. Powerful introduction from Baroness @ValerieAmos stressing the need for strong leadership and real cultural change to address racial inequalities. Also, the need not only to gather data but to *act* on that data, not continually demand more and more evidence.
Jul 10, 2020 ā€¢ 7 tweets ā€¢ 3 min read
Proud to have been involved in co-authoring an article for @ResFortnight imploring @PhysicsNews to show greater leadership in improving diversity and inclusion in Physics. This was brilliantly lead by @AJPrincep. A couple of key points we raised are below... Professional bodies - like the IoP - need to show leadership, and enforce good practice. Without such top-down approaches, improving diversity gets left to members of under-represented groups, who can least afford to sacrifice their time and energy to advocate for change.
May 6, 2020 ā€¢ 6 tweets ā€¢ 2 min read
Really, really glad to see @iom3 considering changing the name of the Younger Members Committee.
If you're a materials scientist please consider the needs of early career folk with a non-standard career path and vote for a name that will include them... Who might that be? Well... People who have been failed by the education system may come back to learning later in life and be early in their careers without being young.
Apr 25, 2020 ā€¢ 5 tweets ā€¢ 2 min read
The lovely husband is an NHS doctor, currently working on the COVID wards in a hospital about an hour's drive away. From 7.30 am this morning, he is expecting to be on call for the next 226 hours. (No in the hospital all the time, but continuously available to be there). I've just driven across there with a box of visors made by the lovely @vdiazucl and her team who are 3D printing PPE for the NHS. If you can help her out with some cash for materials that would be awesome: justgiving.com/crowdfunding/aā€¦
Apr 21, 2020 ā€¢ 6 tweets ā€¢ 1 min read
Today, I am giving 4 project vivas for Masters students, whilst simultaneously supervising my son's learning for the first day on which is school is attempting full on, live, remote teaching. What could possibly go wrong? Viva 1 went OK... Only two quiet visitations by a small blond human, and he contents of his maths book suggests he did something in class. Not quite sure what, looking at it, but something.
Apr 20, 2020 ā€¢ 4 tweets ā€¢ 2 min read
#TwitterDinosaurs

A dinosaur joke from J (my son):

Q: What do you get if you cross a hang-glider with a triceratops?
A: A dino-soar! And another one (from me):

Q: What do you get if you cross a carpenter with a diplodocus:
A: A dino-saw!

#TwitterDinosaurs
Apr 2, 2020 ā€¢ 17 tweets ā€¢ 6 min read
Your weekly dose of Cambridge GaN Centre brilliance coming right upā€¦ This week Iā€™m explaining a paper involving work from @FabienMassabuau @PHGriff and @Tongtong_Zhu which is one of my absolute favourite pieces of work of recent years: aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.10ā€¦ The paperā€™s available open access, so do have a read. Or alternatively grab a coffee and follow this thread where I attempt to explain our work in simple terms.
Mar 25, 2020 ā€¢ 20 tweets ā€¢ 6 min read
Still catching up on tweeting my papers. This next one comes from the PhD work of Tom Oā€™Hanlon, now working at @EMC_PlymUni with @NatStephen. This thread is gonna explain it. Itā€™s about how to look at very small things in more than one microscope. sciencedirect.com/science/articlā€¦ To understand why this is tricky, imagine youā€™ve got a plateful of rice. One grain of that rice is special, and you need to look at exactly that grain really carefully, in its original position on the plate, today, and tomorrow and the next day. Tricky? Image
Mar 20, 2020 ā€¢ 5 tweets ā€¢ 2 min read
I won't be lecturing face-to-face @Cambridge_Uni for a while, but at home my son has built us a two-sided lecture theatre where my alter ego, Professor Zombie Frankenstein teaches two classes at once! šŸ˜ Image (P. S. Please note it is wheel chair accessible!)
Mar 18, 2020 ā€¢ 6 tweets ā€¢ 1 min read
About to attend my first "Microsoft Teams" meeting. Wish me luck. "Someone in the meeting should let you in soon".
Hmmm. Not so far.
Mar 17, 2020 ā€¢ 6 tweets ā€¢ 2 min read
Continuing posting #SomeNiceThings... And this really is lovely science. I'll try to explain... In a ferroelectric the positions of positive and negative charges don't balance one another, so there are internal electric fields within each unit cell (tiny repeat unit) of the material.
Mar 17, 2020 ā€¢ 20 tweets ā€¢ 6 min read
The people have spoken! Or at least, about 60 of my followers have voted in a poll. And the decision of that highly democratic process is that today I will be tweeting about our recent paper on X-ray diffraction (XRD), with @PHGriff as lead author. The paper actually came out just before Christmas, but itā€™s excellent to be tweeting about it now because @PHGriff passed his PhD viva last week! Hereā€™s a link to the full paper which was an Editorā€™s Pick in Journal of Applied Physics. aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.10ā€¦
Mar 16, 2020 ā€¢ 4 tweets ā€¢ 2 min read
With the #UCUstrike coming to an end, I'll be back to tweeting about work and science this week. What I won't be doing is offering any scientific opinions on the #COVIDćƒ¼19 crisis - because I'm totally unqualified to do so. 1/n Also, I think we need to try and act to prevent twitter and other social media channels from being swamped entirely by pandemic-related content. We need to be able to think about other things too, for the sake of our mental health. 2/n