Women in STEMM (WiSTEMM)!
Tegan Stettaford, Olivia Carroll, Kaylee Slater, Natalie Wall & Catherine Dawson
If you’ve ever found yourself scrolling the UNSA Clubs directory, you have probably come to realise just how many student clubs there are at UoN. Joining university clubs provides really exciting opportunities for student engagement, learning, connection, and fun! I myself, am a huge advocate for student clubs; I am a member of many and on the executive of a couple. One of the clubs I am on the executive committee of, is the Women in STEMM club (WiSTEMM) as the club secretary.
WiSTEMM is a newly established (we became officially affiliated with UNSA just a couple of months ago) club that hopes to foster a supportive and empowering community. This club hopes to promote career development, social and professional networks, while bridging the inequality that is often experienced for women in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine) based fields. Our focus is to support and promote postgraduate students and early-career researchers within these areas. However, we welcome absolutely anyone to join our club and hope that our events will be of value to a range of people.
So, who are we? Let me introduce you to the executive committee for 2022:
- President: Natalie Wall is a PhD candidate focusing on using psychometric assessments, eye tracking, and EEG to develop and test the feasibility of an iPad game aimed at supporting autistic children to better understand facially expressed emotions. Natalie is also a provisional psychologist!
- Vice-President: Rosemary Patrick is a PhD candidate, and her thesis focuses on the effect of metals on the behaviour of aquatic invertebrates, with a specific interest in looking at its effect on the sexual relationship of Crabs.
- Treasurer: Catherine Dawson is a PhD candidate studying interactions between the bacterial pathogens Acinetobacter baumannii and Klebsiella pneumoniae. These two bugs can co-infect which leads to worse outcomes for patients. Specifically, it focuses on investigating how they might be interacting on a molecular level, which will ultimately lead to better treatment strategies.
- Social Media Officer: Kaylee Slater is a PhD candidate looking into the cardiovascular disease preventative services for women after a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy, specifically focusing on primary care (GPs). Kaylee is the gem behind all the fantastic social media posts you will start seeing on our Instagram (wistemm_uon) and Twitter (WiSTEMM_uon) accounts.
- HMRI Liaison: Olivia Carroll is a PhD candidate investigating the role of female sex hormones in asthma. Her passion is in understanding how our hormones (estrogen and progesterone) can influence our immune and inflammatory responses. Olivia is primarily based at HMRI, and is excited to engage the HMRI community in more events.
- Secretary: Tegan Stettaford is a PhD candidate working on a large cluster-RCT with NSW Health with the aim to improve the physical health inequity experienced by people with a mental health condition. Her thesis focuses on the clients’ perspectives, experiences and outcomes of this trial.
Our first WiSTEMM club event was on the 31st of August where we officially launched the club with a speaker and networking event, and heard from some fantastic Women in STEMM. Face-to-face attendance was completely sold out; a huge thank-you to everyone who made this happen! If you were unable to attend the launch event but are interested in joining the club, we invite you to email us at uonwistemm@gmail.com or follow us on social media (@WiSTEMM_uon) for more information!
Hello! My name is Tegan and I joined the Opus team in 2021 as an outlet to escape my PhD writing. I am yet to find my niche category, but you can probably expect pieces about postgraduate life, creativity, psychology, literature and all things cute and fuzzy. Outside of Opus and my PhD, I am also a peer mentor, team leader, tutor, and sessional academic (so you might just see me in class sometime!).
