At a very early age my natural curiosity was an indicator that science would be a very interesting career path for me. During high school, I joined a school group to learn about astronomy as an extracurricular activity. I competed in the national Olympics for astronomy during my final year in high school and participated in image analysis of near-earth objects and main belt asteroids.
These opportunities allowed me to familiarize with other young people who shared similar passions, ambitions and experiences as myself.
My interests later converged to Physics, hence I decided to pursue a Physics undergraduate degree at the University of Coimbra. Things were drastically different from my expectations.
Women accounted for fewer than 25% of my class. Most professors were men. I found myself ‘fitting in’ by suppressing my personality and hiding my honest thoughts. This was my coping mechanism of avoiding sexist jokes or not being put on the spot. As the years went by I started to realize how intelligent and capable were my female colleagues, and slowly I started to push back, working as hard as I could to prove myself I could be successful and started to question people’s ‘small jokes’. Small jokes can accumulate and bring along years of oppression; it is scary the ease with which this can manifest itself in society. Language itself hints on the superiority of men: masculine pronouns in books, pictures of predominantly male scientists, major discoveries are attributed to men. A subtle feeling that women don’t belong in these spaces grows amongst all of us. The realization that women were never given the same opportunities at all. Once I realized this, I started to dedicate myself to change my perspective on things. In my last year of undergrad, I applied and was awarded a scholarship to do research for a year. I worked on a computational implementation of a mathematical model of angiogenesis to describe the vascular growth in system of tumorous cells in the presence of inhibiting agents in nanoparticles and got to see my work being published for the first time.
After my graduation, I started a Masters in Particle Physics. My dissertation project focused on the study of the compatibility between the Kinoshita–Lee–Nauenberg theorem and Implicit Regularization scheme using an effective field theory to describe the decay of the Higgs boson into gluons. During this time, I had an amazing supervisor, who not only guided me in my work but had a significant role in my growth as a person. She would address me in a way that no other peers had before: she would be completely direct with me, talking to me as an equally competent researcher, always respecting my ideas and supporting me in my choices. A very empowering experience to have someone who looked like me, who also had faith and respect in myself; cementing the belief that I could be a researcher. I accomplished publishing a paper and presented my work at a conference for the first time. This was one of the most rewarding challenges I completed.
I am now pursuing a PhD in Theoretical Physics at the University of Liverpool. My current work focuses on the evaluation of higher-order loop electroweak corrections to semi-leptonic decays using Effective Field Theories. The decay rates of these processes are proportional to the modulus square Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa (CKM) matrix element. The computation of these quantum corrections will provide a vital precision test for the Standard Model. Currently I am the only female PhD student in the Theory group, as such I fell a responsibility to communicate the importance of diversity in science.
When we throw away any expectation on how someone should look or sound to be a scientist, we free ourselves to find the most brilliant minds and ideas. I believe the only way we can make a change is through intentionally educating ourselves. The past cannot change, but we should acknowledge it, such that we can grow and evolve as a society. We all should be educated - women and other minorities to understand that they are capable of pursuing any career path they wish and a focus men to deliberately accommodate anyone in spaces dominated by them, because intelligence, ideas and creativity don’t have a gender.