Meet the ambassadors: Professor Valerie Gibson

It’s been a while since we last brought out a brand new ambassador – and our introduction to the wonderful Valerie Gibson doesn’t come a moment too soon. We filmed her at the Collider exhibition at London’s Science Museum (which closes on 5th May, so get your tickets while you can).

Why there? we hear you cry. Well, Professor Valerie Gibson was UK Spokesperson for the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN (that’s the largest and most powerful particle collider, to you and me) in its initial stages.

She’s one of the UK’s leading female scientists: Head of High Energy Physics at Cambridge, with a previous Physics fellowship at CERN to her name, as well as a five-year SERC Advanced Fellowship, a Stokes Senior Research Fellowship at Cambridge’s Pembroke College, and a Leverhulme Trust Royal Society Fellowship.

Wow. With all that under her belt, we don’t know how she has so much time to champion and encourage female scientists – something that earned the Women in Science and Engineering Leader award last year.

To Valerie, it’s not a choice, but rather a duty ‘to encourage younger women in their careers, and just say hey… it’s possible.’

At a time when more and more people are clamouring to narrow the gender gap in science, we’re so proud to have Valerie Gibson among our ambassadors. And for Valerie, her daughters and their contemporaries are the future: ‘They inspire me because they have open minds. So you can tell them anything and they will actually take it towards the future.’

Find out what Valerie sees in the mirror by watching her Features video… then share your story.