For the next in our series of posts spotlighting underappreciated women in physics, we will be covering the crystallographer, computer scientist, and lecturer Rosemary Candlin, and her work at the University of Edinburgh.
Candlin was born in 1927 in Plymouth and moved around a lot during World War Two. Candlin studied physics at the University of Cambridge, which was followed by a Ph.D. in crystallography. Women were very much in the minority on her course; Candlin believes there were about 4 women and 80 men. She went on to work across the globe as a crystallographer, from the Natural History Museum to Princeton. She also worked closely with the pioneer of X-ray crystallography Helen Megaw, again at the University of Cambridge. Candlin said of her field:
“Well, I liked it; I mean, I found it quite fun; but I think the thing that influenced me most was that there was quite a sort of female mafia in that subject. There were well-known people like Dorothy Hodgkin and Kathleen Lonsdale and other people in Britain, and there were quite a few Americans. All over: there was a well-known woman in Holland; Germany. I mean, women were in senior positions; they were heads of labs and that kind of thing. It was very, very different from most hard sciences, and they encouraged their students to do the same, so there have always been a lot of women.”
Her work with crystallography involved using innovative methods of coding and programming to perform the many calculations needed to understand crystal patterns. In a detailed interview in 2001, she described working in this period of computing. She mentioned the hazards that came from using these hot, clunky machines in small wooden rooms at Cambridge University.
Her initial role at the University of Edinburgh involved working as a teaching assistant in various labs, while raising 4 young children. When the opportunity arose, she worked on the ATLAS computer, via the Rutherford Lab, which was linked to ATLAS in Switzerland by a telephone line. She then took up a position in the recently established computing department, shaping the curriculum for first-year students. She was the first permanent women lecturer, moving on to build the curriculum for advanced courses on topics such as real-time programming and parallel programming. Candlin worked at the university from 1968 to 1995, during which time she served as a director of studies and contributed majorly to the implementation of the computer science curriculum. She points out that she believes she was given the role of director of studies on account of her gender, but enjoyed it nonetheless.
After leaving the University in 1995, aged just shy of 70, she went on to work on software for ATLAS at CERN, in Geneva. She is currently 96 and lives in Plymouth.
She has seen big increases in the number of women in the field since starting in the 1940s, but Candlin observed, when working at CERN, that the UK was lagging behind countries like Italy when it came to gender equality in physics.
What was most striking from the interview Candlin gave in 2001 is the fact that little progress has been made since the 1950s in increasing the number of women in physical sciences. There has been a big increase in women making up 5% of physics students when Candlin studied at Cambridge – but it remains below 50/50 nevertheless.
There is very little information online about Candlin’s contributions to the University – something we are hoping to change. By appreciating women’s contributions to our University, and sharing their stories, we make the University more inclusive and diverse.
If you are interested, you can read Rosemary’s detailed 2000 interview here.
