Jess Wade

Jess Wade (born October 1988) is a British physicist in the Blackett Laboratory at Imperial College London, specialising in Raman spectroscopy.Her research investigates polymer-based organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs).Her public engagement work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) advocates for women in physics as well as tackling systemic biases such as gender and racial bias on Wikipedia.

Quotes

• My background is in experimental solid state physics, in particular characterization using different kinds of spectroscopy. A bit of microscopy too, but it’s less fun for these materials as the features we are looking at are much smaller than you can resolve with visual light. I’m also interested in the molecular structure through the whole organic film, and microscopy can typically just tell me about the surface. Spectroscopy is my most favourite thing. And, actually, speaking about my favourite thing, we have this beautiful exhibition of Leonardo’s drawings at the Queen’s Gallery at the moment. There is a whole section on spectroscopy, how it was used in curating and restoring the artwork. I love the application of spectroscopy in understanding renaissance masterpieces.
• Sure, the LEDs that we create will be for future television and mobile phone displays. Inside the LEDs there is a very interesting arrangement of molecules, so understanding how to optimise that is fundamental to getting these structures into devices.
• Before physics I went to Chelsea School of Art where I studied maths, sciences and art. My parents are both medical doctors, so I knew that I’d do something scientific, eventually, but I studied art for one year and I really enjoyed it. But I missed structure and I missed maths – I think that I always knew that I was going to do physics. In the year in which I studied art I went to live in Florence – it was incredible. Being in the epicenter of the Italian renaissance emphasized how successful people could be as both scientists and artists. Then I started studying physics at Imperial, and found myself in a really nice research group where I worked on solar cells. I slightly changed for my postdoc, now I’m working on different devices – LEDs, not OPVs – but the techniques are the same.
• It is not counter-intuitive when you think about the bias and stereotyping and all ridiculous things young people have to face at high school. I think the challenge that we have in this country, in the UK and probably everywhere is that we have very few physicists teaching physics so the majority of people teaching in schools do not have a degree in the subject – sometimes they don’t even like physics. It makes teaching it in an inspiring way really difficult. So if you end up at an independent school you’re much more likely to have a physicist teaching you physics.
• In education and in academic culture the change has to come from the top. I don’t think we will change education policy unless the government really commit to paying teachers properly.
• I think Athena Swan is important – you’ve got to have something that rewards efforts made by universities, a systematic way of evaluating your progress and a means to learn best practice. But then you also need to have that linked to research funding or else people aren’t going to take it seriously.
• The way for the university sector is to show that if you have gender balanced and diverse teams of different ethnicities then the research is more productive, more efficient, of higher impact and more effective.