The Eleanor Glanville Centre will host our first Annual Glanville Lecture 25^th of April!

This year’s speaker is Mandy Hickson – The UK’s first female fast-jet pilot promises to inspire and excite!

Mandy Hickson: Cleared for Take-Off! 

Finding a love of flying early in life, Mandy fought hard to achieve her ambition to be a Royal Air Force pilot. She was only the second woman to fly a Tornado GR4 on the front line, completing three tours of duty and 45 missions over Iraq.

Flying a multi-million pound fighter jet in hostile territory is not an everyday career, and comes with a high degree of pressure and responsibility. It’s a dream job that takes years of ambition, training and commitment, but for Mandy Hickson, it was a dream that became reality.

Find out about Mandy’s incredible journey to become one of the UK’s first female, fast-jet pilots and how she overcame many obstacles to develop the skills to succeed in such a demanding career.

Throughout her time, Mandy was the only female aircrew and later learned the lessons of juggling life as a working mother of two young children.

Now a civilian, Mandy draws on her experiences to train and inspire others, covering the core areas of human factors; decision making, communication, leadership, behaviour, workload, conflict, fatigue and stress management.

• Wednesday 25th April
• 17:00 – 19:30
• Isaac Newton Building

This lecture is free to attend but prior booking is essential – to book you tickets please follow the link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/annual-glanville-lecture-tickets-42000860705?aff=ehomecard

With conference season coming up, a very timely opinion article in the prestigious journal PNAS. It talks about difficulties parents face when trying to conciliate childcare responsibilities, with the well known career advancing opportunities that attending international conferences present. You can access the paper by clicking here, and read the first paragraph below:

“Conferences are vital forums for academic researchers. At these meetings, scientists communicate new discoveries, form research collaborations, make contacts with funding agencies, and attract new members to our labs and programs. Even with new technological advances that allow remote communication, resource sharing, and networking, face-to-face interactions are a crucial component for one’s career advancement and ongoing education. Early-stage researchers, who benefit significantly from these events, face some notable barriers to attendance. One major challenge is what we call the childcare–conference conundrum: Parent–researchers face a conundrum as they struggle to attend key conferences and further their careers while finding care for the children. Conferences face a conundrum as they assess how to better accommodate mothers and families” (Calisi and a Working Group of Mothers in Science 2018, PNAS 115: 2845-2849)