Meet the ambassadors: Professor Frances Ashcroft

Professor Frances Ashcroft is the latest in the line of 18 wonderful women we’re introducing you to as part of the What I See campaign. They all have very long lists of achievements to their name… and Frances Ashcroft is no exception.

She’s a Professor of Physiology in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at Oxford University, as well as a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and Director of OXION, a research and training initiative on ion channels.

Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1999, she holds BA, PhD and ScD degrees from the University of Cambridge. Frances has won awards from the Croonian Lecture (The Royal Society 2013) to the L’Oréal-UNESCO Women in Science Award (European Laureate 2012)… to name just two.

She’s also penned several books for the non-Professors among us – the most recent being The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body, which explains the role of ion channels in our bodies by linking the latest scientific research with true stories.

This list of achievements might be enough to give you vertigo, but if you head over to watch Frances’ video contribution, you’ll find, alongside a particularly impressive video recital, a remarkably relatable story:

“What I wish I’d known when I was young, was that I should have more confidence in myself… The confidence just to believe in oneself a little bit more would have made life a great deal easier for me.
“I suppose when I look in the mirror my butterfly mind sees science and art and poetry, ideas… all these things that I love. But often what I see is the living, breathing human being. And I just think, how wonderful it is to be alive.”