Rowena Fletcher-Wood: Diffraction
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2014
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As a chemistry student, Rowena Fletcher-Wood has to reconstruct the structure of chemicals, and a relationship with a friend, by interpreting complex data. Rowena Fletcher-Wood is a keen science communicator and doctoral researcher in materials chemistry at the University of Birmingham. She graduated from Oxford in 2011 and has since divided her time between research, outreach, story-writing and climbing. Help keep us going! If you love the podcast, please donate here: http://www.patreon.com/thestorycollider
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientist the... |
| 0:06.0 | It felt... |
| 0:07.0 | I was so... |
| 0:09.0 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:13.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:15.0 | ...theid... Hey everyone, I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true stories of how science has affected people's lives. |
| 0:32.2 | This week's story is from Rowena Fletcher Wood. The story was recorded in November 2013 at the Star of Kings in London. |
| 0:39.5 | The evening was part of the Spot-on London Conference. |
| 0:49.8 | My story starts when I was 18 years old. When I was 18, I was in school, and I absolutely loved school. |
| 0:58.9 | I was a massive geek. |
| 0:59.9 | I loved work. |
| 1:01.2 | I was always terrified that I would run out of work to do. |
| 1:05.7 | And I actually had a little stock of extra work to take to my lessons in case there wasn't enough work and I did run out. |
| 1:16.5 | And this all came to a head when in 2006 |
| 1:20.6 | I interviewed to read chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford. |
| 1:25.7 | This is the college where Margaret Thatcher read chemistry. |
| 1:30.3 | And Dorothy Hodgkin, who was the first female Nobel Prize winner in chemistry. |
| 1:36.0 | And I'd heard of Margaret Thatcher. |
| 1:43.0 | Dorothy Hodgkin, well, not so much so, but to explain about her, I'll tell you first about how supportive all my friends and family were of my application. |
| 1:54.8 | And they were desperate to make sure that I was as prepared as I could be for those interviews and also determined that they would be personally responsible for making me prepared. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Story Collider, Inc., and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Story Collider, Inc. and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.