Hi there! I’m Fabiana, the researcher behind this project. My personal passion for this topic as well as my own experiences have undoubtedly shaped my research, so let me tell you a little bit about myself to help you contextualize the work you find presented on this website.

My own journey into physics

I wasn’t particularly good at physics in high school, and certainly never imagined myself pursuing a degree in it. I listened to teachers, high school career officers, friends and family telling me that I was good at languages, and started studying English and Spanish teacher education. One year into my studies I found myself looking for a challenge and remember telling my peers that “I just want to try something I really suck at”. I flipped a coin between physics and chemistry, and followed the coin’s advice. 

It really was pure coincidence that I ended up in physics! Although looking back I found many early indicators of my genuine interest in the subject that had simply gone unnoticed. Finally studying it at university woke up a long dormant passion for physics that I didn’t even know I had — which is not to say that I didn’t doubt myself or almost gave up about a dozen times. Despite countless obstacles along the way, I stuck around and finished my degrees in languages, teacher education and physics. 

Myself in this project

It wasn’t until I started some initial research around the topic of women in physics that I realized: My own personal experience is not unique — the challenges I faced are not personal but systematic, and there is a decent amount of academic literature investigating precisely this experience from many different angles. Reading the publications and analyzing the statistics made me aware of many subtle and less subtle facets of the problem that I had in fact experienced myself but not even recognized as such.

From this personal perspective, my goal for this project is to provide precisely this reflection for others. For some of you, parts of this work may sound familiar or similar to your own experiences; you may feel like you recognize yourself in some of the stories, or you may suddenly realize — like I did — things you haven’t noticed before; For some of you, parts of this work may seem trivial, or perhaps unbelievable; you may wonder about your own role and perhaps reflect on your behavioral patterns or thought structures.

You can already see that I cannot separate myself as the researcher from the research itself. I am aware of my own positionality in the project and I do my very best to make it transparent, while of course adhering to academic standards in quality of research and evidence. 

If you’re curious about this connectedness of researcher and research from an academic, epistemological perspective, check out the Theory tab, especially the page about Narratives and Fictions in Education Research.