Early Life
If you’ve heard of Jess before, you might think that someone like her would have always wanted to become a scientist. Yet, this wasn’t the case! When she was growing up, she didn’t even know that being a scientist was a real job.
Despite this, she always loved discovering new things and exploring things with curiosity. Her curiosity and desire to help others were inspired by her parents, who both worked as doctors when Jess was growing up.
At school, she enjoyed lots of subjects but especially science, art and maths! Her chemistry and physics teachers also helped with this, because she really liked them.
The biggest learning Jess took from school was to follow the things she found interesting, and this led her to study art further. She loved art, but because of the intersection between science and art, she decided to start an undergraduate degree in physics. While learning about physics, she also learnt about the ways science can create a better world, which really inspired her.
Career
Her love for science carried on, and now Jess works as a lecturer and research fellow at Imperial College London. At the moment, her research looks at new materials for optoelectronic, spintronic and quantum devices.
On top of this, she works to improve diversity in science. In 2017, Jess noticed that there were plenty of Wikipedia articles for white cis-males in STEM. This, however, didn’t translate to women or scientists of colour. Because of this, she started creating them – writing one every day! She stated that each one takes a few hours to write, and she has written or contributed to over 2,000 pages.
Not stopping there, she also raises STEM awareness in schools and helps under-represented groups share their research. For all these reasons and more, we think Jess is a wonderful STEM role model.
