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

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more