Ada Lovelace Day: Professor Jane Davidson, Director of Solar Energy Laboratory at the University of Minnesota

Today is Ada Lovelace day! from the call for contributions:

"Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women's contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements." I signed the pledge, and here is my post.

Here is the mash-up list of all the Ada Lovelace Day posts so far.

It is also, coincidentally, the day that the University of Minnesota is holding its annual Ada Comstock lecture honoring an outstanding woman academic. Today's speaker is Professor Jane Davidson, of Mechanical Engineering.
I found an article about her by Pauline Oo. She attended an all-girls high school and was encouraged to go into engineering by her high school chemistry teacher; she was the only girl in her class in college in 1968. I had a roommate at UC Berkeley who was one of only four women in mechanical engineering in 1978; the Dean of the College told her she didn't belong there and was taking the place of a man. Although the article about Jane Davidson's accomplishments doesn't talk about how she dealt with that kind of attitude, I think it's safe to say that she was a pioneer in her field at the time simply by showing up and finishing her degree. But she has gone on to become a pioneer in her field, the study of solar energy.

"Davidson will speak about how to use solar energy to make fuels in "Solar After Dark: Going Green at Night" at 4 p.m. Tuesday, March 24, in Cowles Auditorium in the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute.

"The idea is that you can make the fuels during the day when the sun is shining, and then you can use them whenever you want, including at night," says Davidson, whose current research focuses on solar systems for buildings and solar thermo-chemical cycles to produce fuels. "[Solar power is] the most abundant source of energy that we have on earth. It's clean, and it doesn't produce CO2 and greenhouse gases."

She began to work with one of the pioneers in solar energy early in her career, and is now the Director of the Solar Energy Laboratory at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Technology. She has received numerous awards for her research, but she is also recognized as a teacher and a mentor for women in the field:

"Over the years, though, Davidson has been involved in a number of outreach programs at multiple universities across the United States. Closer to home, she and U colleague Sue Mantell codirect a National Science Foundation-funded research experience for undergraduates in mechanical engineering. Each summer, they bring about 15 outstanding students from all over to the Twin Cities campus.

"They work here for 10 weeks with faculty mentors," says Davidson. "We've had a 50-50 mix of men and women every year, and it's very exciting to see how that works. It's unique to engineering to have that mix. In fact, almost all of the women have gone on to graduate school."

(excerpts from the article by Pauline Oo).

The future of energy independence will be alternative energy technologies, including solar energy. I look forward to learning from her talk this afternoon!

In searching for information about women scientists at the U of MN, I also came across the story of botanist Josephine Tilden, the first woman scientist to work at the U of MN. Her story is both fascinating and frustrating; she did brilliant work, but faced indifference and opposition at her home institution at every stage. I'm glad to see that some things have changed for the better, but my own experience as an academic (not in the tech fields) shows that we still have a long way to go before the university world is completely open, supportive and equitable in its treatment of women faculty.