Physicist Athene Donald is one of five women scientists who will receive the prestigious 2009 L'Oreal UNESCO Women in Science Award. She and the other recipients, each representing a different continent, will receive the awards on 5 March 2009 at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Each laureate will receive $100,000 in recognition of her contributions to science.
The 2009 Award for Europe is given to Athene Donald for her work in unraveling the mysteries of the physics of materials ranging from ice-cream, cement and starch to protein aggregation (which may be relevant to brain disease). Her activity sits within the sector of biological and soft systems, and focuses on using the ideas of soft matter physics to study a wide range of systems of both synthetic and biological origin.
Donald is Professor of Experimental Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. She is on the Advisory Board of Springer's European Physical Journal E: Soft Matter, where some of her work pertaining to the award was published. She has also written numerous articles in the Journal of Materials Science, also a Springer journal.
Created in 1998, the L'ORÉAL-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science were established as the first international awards dedicated to women scientists around the world. More than 10 years and 57 laureates later, the program is a benchmark of international scientific excellence, and an invaluable source of motivation, support and inspiration for women in the scientific field. The laureates serve as role models for future generations, encouraging young women around the world to follow in their footsteps.