Skip to main content

Laurie Winkless - Four Way Interview

Laurie Winkless (@laurie_winkless) is an Irish physicist and author. After a physics degree and a masters in space science, she joined the UK’s National Physical Laboratory as a research scientist, specialising in functional materials. Now based in New Zealand, Laurie has been communicating science to the public for 15 years. Since leaving the lab, she has worked with scientific institutes, engineering companies, universities, and astronauts, amongst others. Her writing has featured in outlets including Forbes, Wired, and Esquire, and she appeared in The Times magazine as a leading light in STEM. Laurie’s first book was Science and the City, and her new title is Sticky, also published by Bloomsbury.

Why science?

I was a very curious kid: always asking questions about how things worked. I suspect I drove my parents mad, but they never showed it. Instead, they encouraged me to explore those questions. From taking me to the library every week, to teaching me how to use different tools, they supported my hunger for learning. As soon as I found out there was this thing called 'science', I knew I wanted to get involved in it. I briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a paleontologist - I think Jurassic Park can take credit for that! - but physics and astronomy captured my imagination, and set me on my path. I loved being a research scientist, and I miss it. But now that I'm no longer working in a lab, I think my relationship to science has shifted a little - I've become much more cognisant of the wider context in which it sits, and feel a sense of responsibility to do more than just blindly cheer on research-for-research's sake.

Why this book?

When I was in the midst of writing Science and the City, I found myself thinking a lot about friction - mainly between train wheels and rails, and between tyres and the road. And despite having studied it in various courses, and even doing some friction / surface science-related work in the lab, I realised that I didn't truly understand it. I went off on a research tangent, to learn more about the fundamentals of friction. I found that while it was surprisingly complicated, it was also fascinating and could potentially house a rich seam of interesting stories. I also couldn't find any existing pop-sci books that focused on topics like that. So I started working on a proposal. The team at Bloomsbury weren't entirely convinced by my initial pitch, so I reworked it a bit. Thankfully, they liked version #2, and we signed the contract. Too many years later, Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces, has finally been published :)

What’s next?

Honestly, I'm not sure. As much as I'd love to be a full-time book author, most of my time is spent consulting with research labs and engineering companies all over the world - I develop communications plans, advise on strategy, train their scientists, and write different types of content. I also do lots of science journalism too, and some university-level teaching. I'm always juggling various projects. I moved to New Zealand five years ago, but for several reasons, I feel like I'm only just starting to find my feet here. So one big priority for me is to do more NZ-focused work. I haven't (yet) had an idea for book #3 - this one was such a huge undertaking, I think I'm still recovering from it - but I will continue to write, and see what happens! 

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Selfishly, I'm excited that people are reading my book, and are discovering that friction is interesting! I've also been getting lots of emails from researchers (everyone from a contact lens manufacturer to a dolphin biologist) happy to see that someone's written a pop-sci book on the topic.

Less selfishly, I'm excited that the scientific workforce is becoming more diverse (though it's happening very slowly) and more aware of just how important clear, open communication is. The pandemic has highlighted how damaging and dangerous mis- and dis-information can be. Scientists have a central role in challenging that.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting.  Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...
Post a Comment
Read more