Sarah Hammond, Sedgwick Museum Administrator, tells us about improving the visitor experience for families at the museum.
In the year or two before the pandemic, the museum team had a big push to improve access for families to the museum. Our work began where our visitors start their journey – outside. We updated the imagery and added more signs to guide people from the street to the museum.
Continue reading “Transforming the visitor welcome”
It was an emotional journey. Nose pressed to the small oval of glass as London City Airport was left far below, I smiled wistfully down at the River Thames, golden in the rising sun’s first rays, as it made its final sweeping arc to meet the sea. The cut-out shapes of the Kent marshes, and the Isle of Sheppey beyond; home to a plethora of birdlife now as ever, is a place of special significance for me. Not only was it the intended destination of my first ever birdwatching trip, aged nine, but from this same London Clay Formation laid down in the Eocene, over 50 million years ago, came the first fossilised skull of a very remarkable bird. With jaws lined with bony projections of different sizes, like lobster claws, it was unlike any bird known.
Continue reading “Birds of a feather: Katrina van Grouw on art and science”
Prof Helen Williams joined the Department of Earth Sciences in 2016 and is currently Professor of Geochemistry. She reflects on her life and work with Erin Martin-Jones.
Continue reading “In Conversation with Prof. Helen Williams”
To mark International Women’s Day (8 March), we reflect on and celebrate the role of women within our organization.
International Women’s Day is a time to reflect on achievements and progress made, recognize challenges and focus greater attention on women’s rights and achieving equal opportunity status in all walks of life.
We look back over a year of research news and blog posts from women in our Department; from graduate students to lecturers and staff at the Sedgwick Museum. Through their stories, and in their own words, we hope to reveal the breadth of research and educational activities that women undertake across our organization.
Continue reading “Celebrating International Women’s Day 2022”
PART IV of our blog series explores how the Sedgwick Museum is challenging perceptions and changing experiences, continuing with a peak into the archives.
Sandra Freshney’s work aims to bring the archive closer to the public and challenge assumptions about what geology and geologists traditionally look like. Her work includes allowing quieter voices in the department’s history to be heard. Here she gives us a greater look into the work she is doing.
Continue reading “The Sedgwick: Museum on a mission – Part IV”
In this blog post, we bring together stories from women researchers across our Department to highlight the variety of roles within Earth Sciences.
To mark this day, we asked our researchers what pieces of equipment or items they rely on for their everyday research – whether they spend most of their time collecting data in the lab, field or via computer models.
Continue reading “Celebrating International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2022”
My last blog about the WACSWAIN project was in February 2020. We had just started the chemical analysis of our 651-metre-long ice core from Skytrain Ice Rise (Antarctica). The theme of this article is time – the first aspect being that a lot of time has since passed. Soon after I wrote last, our labwork was completely shut down by the pandemic, some of the team went back to their families in other countries, and we all learnt what Zoom meetings were.
Continue reading “WACSWAIN: Time and ice”
In Part III of our blog series, we talk to Sandra Freshney, Museum Archivist, about the work she is doing to bring to light women in the Sedgwick collections.
Sandra authored Women in the Archive, an online exhibition featuring documents and photos depicting the experiences of women studying geology from the 1880s until the end of the First World War. Sandra’s work challenges assumptions about what geology and geologists traditionally look like, whilst allowing quieter voices in the department’s history to be heard.
Continue reading “The Sedgwick: Museum on a mission – Part III”
