Within minutes of meeting the multiple award-winning British physicist and feminist role model, Dr Jess Wade, I learn two things about her. Number one: she walks and talks fast, as if she is running out of time. Number two: she is incredibly modest. So much so that she would rather conceal from a colleague who I am and what I am doing in her lab at Imperial College London, than reveal that she is being interviewed for this magazine. As we take a tour, she pretends she is just showing me around and enthusiastically tells me all about her colleague’s work, as well as her own. Later, when we are alone, I ask why she didn’t explain that she was being interviewed by a journalist. “Because it was embarrassing,” she says, and laughs self-consciously.
We are in the bowels of the university, popping in and out of basement rooms with huge, noisy machines attached to computers and getting particularly excited at the sight of a highly precise “superconductive quantum interference device” that reveals the magnetic properties of materials. “It’s called a ‘squid’,” she tells me, almost reverently. “It’s nice.”
