History of Science
Herstories: building a membership history repository for the lnternational Network of Women Engineers and Scientists
Professor Graeme Gooday
Women's achievements in science and engineering are still not as systematically recorded as they are for male scientists, and hardly anyone outside the engineering industry could name a female engineer. This poses a practical problem for recruiting to these crucial professions: engineering worldwide especially faces a skills shortage compounded by the difficulty of retaining women employees. While in China, Western Europe, Japan, and North America employment rates are as low as 13-16%, recruitment is much stronger in Eastern Europe, and some regions of Africa and Asia the gender balance approaches 50/50 - yet even there, women's career stories are not systematically recorded.
In this project Graeme Gooday and Emily Rees are working with the International Network of Women Engineers and Scientists (INWES) based in Canada: the key organisation with global reach willing to take on the challenge of remedying this imbalance in recording of lives in STEM. Gooday in particular is advising INWES on developing new policies and practices to enable it to record shareable stories of its own members' careers for INWES's 'Herstories' project.
Thus far Gooday and Rees have set up an oral history toolkit for INWES members to use: this was successfully trialled at the INWES conference in Auckland, NZ in 2023. An updated version of this will be deployed by Gooday and INWES in co-produced records of teams of women in STEM at the upcoming INWES conference in the Philippines in August 2026 (and ethical review request for this to be submitted early in 2026). The INWES Herstories page hosts the toolkit here: https://www.inwes.org/herstories/
Reshaping understandings and experiences of health through heritage
Professor James Stark
Collaboration with the Thackray Museum of Medicine, the UK’s largest independent medical museum, has resulted in a step-change in the museum’s preparedness for creative public engagement. Through an intensive six-month residency period from January 2025 Professor Stark worked directly alongside staff at the Thackray to advance their skills and capabilities for creative storytelling of health narratives. Supported by a Wellcome Research Development Award project, LivingBodiesObjects, the culmination of the residency was a major six-month exhibition on personalisation and choice in medicine. “You Choose” (July 2024 – January 2025) brought local community organisations, including the Brunswick Centre yOUTh Groups and Harehills Creative Women, into creative dialogue with the Thackray’s historic medical collections to integrate everyday lived experience of health and wellbeing into the exhibition. Through co-produced exhibitions, national conference panels, and advisory roles, Professor James Stark has embedded historical insight into sector-wide practice—enabling professionals and volunteers to confidently address sensitive health narratives. His research has catalysed new funding models, digital engagement strategies, and collaborative frameworks that foreground lived experience and material culture.
Enhanced energy history tools for heritage organisations
Professor Graeme Gooday
Heritage organisations play a key role in helping the wider public understand the long-term patterns of energy consumption that have led to the sustainability crisis facing our global technocracies. As leading historian of science & technology with a major specialism in the history of electricity, Graeme Gooday has collaborated with two UK heritage organisations to co-develop their use of digitized collections so as to enhance their audience's engagement with energy history.
The Institution of Engineering and Technology Library and Archives (London) and the Discovery Museum (Newcastle upon Tyne) were both key partners in the energy history strand of the Science Museum's AHRC Congruence Engine Project (2021-2025) for which Gooday was the responsible Co-Investigator. Working closely with project research fellow at the Science Museum, Daniel Belteki, Gooday has overseen the developing of digital tools using appropriate AI techniques to ensure that both the IET Archives and Discovery Museum have rigorous and user-friendly access to digitized heritage resources on energy generation and consumption.
Following the completion of the Congruence Engine project, Gooday and Belteki are now developing those digital tools into publicly accessible forms, particularly focusing on i) new means to articulate the global impact of the high-efficiency Parsons steam-turbine and its successors, and ii) the role of British women in shaping electrical forms of domestic energy consumption.
Honoring the complexity of genetics: exploring how undergraduate learning of multifactorial genetics affects belief in genetic determinism
Professor Gregory Radick
Geneticists long ago rejected the idea that genes are our destiny - an idea rooted in an over- simplified view of Mendel’s historical experiments on peas. Yet in both education and social media there lingers an exaggerated belief in the determinative power of genes. Professor Gregory Radick’s historical and philosophical research has challenged this ‘genetic determinism’ by exploring how reliance on the historical scientific authorities of W.F. Raphael Weldon would sooner have brought ‘epigenetic’ insights on how much environmental factors instead mould heredity. Radick’s campaign for alternative emphasis on genetic effects as contingent on internal and external environments has had educational impacts on university students in Leeds, and secondary-school teachers in Brazil, India, New Zealand and the UK. A freely available university-level resource drawing on Weldon’s insights co-authored by Radick is available from York University, Canada here. International interest in taking up Radick’s new approach to genetics to wider public audiences has come from Canada and the USA, for example the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco now hosts a closely-related resource on what it calls the phenomenal genome project with an associated teacher’s guide. Prof. Radick is often invited to give talks to biological/biomedical audiences, for example to the Presidential Symposium at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Nov. 2024 and the 2025 Metabolism Day in Copenhagen.
Helping organisations adapt to changing cultural values.
Colleagues in the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science have secured a large number of AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Awards to help partner organisations including the British Library, the Science Museum Group, The Royal Society, The Institution of Engineering and Technology and the National Archives, and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany to investigate their own histories in order to make more effective use of the lessons of the past in meeting the challenges of the present and future.
Projects include a history of the stethoscope in Britain with the Science Museum and a study of biologist John Maynard Smith in collaboration with the British Library.
Rethinking the role of Mendel in the teaching of genetics.
Professor Greg Radick of the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science has been testing alternative ways of introducing themes in genetics, questioning whether our belief in the power of genes stems from established teaching practices.
Helping organizations adapt to changing cultural values.
Colleagues in the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science have secured a large number of AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Awards to help partner organisations including British Telecom, Action on Hearing Loss and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany to investigate their own histories in order to make more effective use of the lessons of the past in meeting the challenges of the present and future.
Projects include a history of the stethoscope in Britain with the Science Museum and a study of biologist John Maynard Smith in collaboration with the British Library.
History and Philosophy of Science in 20 Objects.
Our innovative public lecture series ran throughout 2016 and 2017, drawing on collections in the Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine to explore how scientific ideas and practices have shaped and been shaped by the world in which we live.