Bonnie Dunbar - Astronaut
Dr Bonnie Dunbar is an American Astronaut and engineer and was made a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2001. She talks here to Linda Somerville from the Scottish Resource Centre for Women in SET about what inspired her in her career path, the perceptions people have of women working in engineering and gives advice to young people starting out.
Who or what inspired you in your career choice?
Well, there were many people that helped me along the way, but my situation is one in which I was pulled by the subject matter and the subject matter was space exploration. Wanting to be a participant in that led to the coursework in school and starting at a very young age into math for example. I had a teacher tell me I needed algebra, geometry, trigonometry and math analysis and chemistry, physics and biology. I didn’t really know what those topics were before, but I was told I needed to know those to eventually go on to college. I went to the University of Washington and studied engineering. So it was really a pull by the desire to become involved in something that I thought was exciting and really great for humanity.
It's something from a very young age that you had seen and read about…
Yes, I was eight years old when Sputnik was launched and I was also born and raised in a very rural area where in summer time we seldom went into the nearest town but we had what was called a book mobile. This was a small bus that would go around to all the farms and ranches like a library and you check out as many as 10 books in a month. We didn’t have TV, and we didn’t have the shopping malls and so I read! What I read were great books that should be familiar to many young people here in Scotland, you know HG Wells and Jules Verne and even Arthur C Clarke who was writing short stories and other works at that time. So that combination along with growing up in a rural area with very clear skies and being able to see the Milky Way, those things all sort of coalesced. Also, for some reason I had some natural resonance with the subject matter.
Having someone with such a unique career, how do you feel it has made any difference to you, if it has at all, being a woman working in this career?
From my point of view, from the inside out, I don’t look at the fact that I’m a woman when I make my career choices. I made my career choices the same way my friends did, and a lot of them were male. My grandparents were from Scotland, they emigrated to America because they didn’t have opportunities in the place they grew up and families. My parents homesteaded after World War 2 and education was considered an important part of developing for the future. No one put any constraints on what they thought I should be or not be
Engineering is often something that doesn't often appeal to young women. Do you think there are some barriers there around how it’s marketed or how it’s given to us?
Absolutely, I’ve talked to young girls about Madame Curie who was won a Nobel Prize in Physics and Chemistry and doesn’t get very much attention in school or the texts. I have friends who say they couldn’t possibly be an engineer they don’t like math but when I question them about the things they do, what they’re designing or the problems they solve, they actually do these things but they’re frightened of the labels and that perception is built by society and the media. When I visited Schlumberger in Cambridge, I met a young woman Turkish engineer there who told me that in her classes about 50% of the students were female. I found that really remarkable because I had a stereotype of what was happening in Turkey. But then on the other hand, we run these robotics classes - they are competitions in the United States called First Robotics - and we just hosted two teams from Turkey that were composed of both boys and girls. So, I think it’s really the external expectations that lead to these perceptions.
As somebody who has excelled in your career and very much so in your field, do you feel that you can offer something unique to offer from the fact that you have also taken part in space missions and you've been an astronaut?
Maybe some women have something unique to offer - I don’t! If I have anything unique to offer it is as a human being not as male or female. I don’t know what it means to be a female engineer – I only know how to be an engineer and solve problems
If you were to give some advice to people today who were thinking about getting involved in science or engineering – what would your advice be for them?
Well I think the advice I’d give to them is that they need to take their academics seriously: they are the platform to university and then beyond, so take as much math and science as they can. Even if they don’t go into science and engineering, many of the political issues we deal with, the problems we deal with, require a literacy in science and engineering and if you can’t make good decisions, because you don’t have good information and don’t understand it, that is a tremendous impact on society, so we ought to understand the world around us. At one time people thought that the earth was flat. That lead to terrible misconceptions about our planet. You have to know the science and engineering to make good decisions.
Technology has changed enormously during your life. What do you think has been the most positive impact of the technological advances that we have had?
Looking at the space programme and going to the moon – when we went to the moon, there was no such thing as a communications satellite, a weather satellite, a remote sensing satellite. We probably wouldn’t know some of the changes happening to the earth now if we weren’t in space observing the earth. Many people don’t understand that but exploration has lead to a greater understanding of the place that we started exploring from. I think that the quest for exploration in space has really done so much for society in the last hundred years and I think we need to continue.
Linda Somerville works with the Scottish Resource Centre for Women in SET. To find out more visit their new website
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