News

First female Head of Chemistry appointed at Durham University

(26 September 2006)

Professor Judith Howard, CBE FRS, first female Professor of Chemistry at Durham (1991), has been appointed as the new Head of Chemistry at Durham University. This makes her the first woman Head of a Five Star Research Rated Chemistry Department at a UK university.

Professor Howard is a leading international scientist in her field of crystallography and well known amongst the global scientific community for her dedication to interdisciplinary science. Since 1989 she has brought in £14.5 million in research funding, written over 900 articles and authored or edited a number of books. She is regularly invited to speak at many worldwide meetings, seminars and lectures on science and holds a long list of honours and prestigious appointments including three honorary degrees, a CBE, a recent term as Vice-President of the Royal Society and she is currently chairing a Royal Society working group on the future of science education in the UK – Science Higher Education – 2015 and beyond. On her plans for her term as Department Head Professor Howard said: “Durham University has the best Chemistry Department in the UK north of Cambridge. I see my new role as a major responsibility and plan to boost the profile of the department internationally, through sustaining and developing research excellence, involvement in and hosting of international conferences, whilst building on our multidisciplinary nature through collaborative work with other departments, universities and research institutes. It is equally important to enable the continual development of our staff from junior to very senior members, sustaining high morale, avoiding complacency and encouraging people at all levels to collaborate and to develop their key strengths, whether these are in teaching, research, technical or administrative posts, to make sure that we continue to deliver excellence in teaching and research.” On science education Professor Howard commented: “I am a firm believer that science education in the UK needs investment. A good science education starts at primary level; also at this age and throughout school life there should be a firm grounding in mathematics as a major key for the deeper understanding of science and the benefit of society.” Professor Howard is a leading light in her area of research, X-ray Crystallography, which involves discovering the details of molecular structure using diffraction techniques. Crystallography is used by a vast range of scientists from chemists and biologist to physicists and engineers to underpin their own specific areas of research. Among her current projects in collaboration with colleagues in Oxford, her team is developing new, modern crystallographic software. She is also developing in Durham advanced X-ray diffraction instrumentation for studying materials at very low temperatures combined with high pressures, enabling researchers to explore structure - property relationships of new ‘smart’ materials and to begin to explore dynamics in the solid state. As a child Judith Howard became interested in science through her father, who left school at the age of 13 and learnt about science at night classes. A young Judith soaked up science through the books on physics and chemistry that would litter the house. Born in Cleethorpes, “140 years after the battle of Trafalgar,” Professor Howard began her long list of chemistry qualifications with an Honours Degree from Bristol University and then moved to Oxford where she studied with Nobel Prize winner, Professor Dorothy Hodgkin, OM, who had started her own painstaking work of unlocking the structure of compounds of biological interest, such as penicillin, Vitamin B 12 and insulin, in the 1930s when the subject was very different from today’s world of crystallography. Judith received her DPhil from Oxford University in Chemical Crystallography using neutron diffraction techniques and returned to Bristol as a Research Fellow. She was awarded her first DSc from Bristol in 1986 and subsequently has been awarded three Honorary Doctorates of Science from the Open University (1998), Bristol (2004) and Bath (2005). Judith was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 2002. Professor Howard succeeds Professor David Parker FRS as Chair of Chemistry at Durham University.