Name Karimat El-Sayed | ||
Awards L'Oreal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science | ||
Crystallography in Africa: Egypt
Karimat El-Sayed is an Egyptian academic, crystallographer, and proponent of women's education. She is a professor of crystallography at Ain Shams University.
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Biography
El-Sayed's father was an Arabic teacher; her brothers and sisters are doctors and scientists. Her father was open-minded about her educational ambitions but her mother worried about the family's reputation and tried to have her married off after she studied mathematics and physics at Ain Shams University. El-Sayed completed her PhD at University College London under Kathleen Lonsdale in 1965. Under Lonsdale's guidance she had been able to correlate the atomic vibration of materials with the observed expansion of that material due to an increase in temperature. On a more personal level El-Sayed credits Lonsdale with demonstrating to her how a career and a family could be balanced.
Returning to Egypt, El-Sayed married another solid-state physicist and they have three children. El-Sayed however emphasises that a career should be a woman's primary interest and she worries about younger women whose primary aspiration is a marriage and a family. She asserts that they will be disappointed. Her postdoctoral research studied small impurities in metals which was important as the discovery of transistors had shown how these small additions to a material could radically effect its properties.
The Egyptian feminist "Huda Shaarawi was a symbol of freedom, but Marie Curie was the symbol of science that I saw. And they were on my mind every single day," said El-Sayed, who founded the women's section of the Physics Department at King Abdul-Aziz University (1975). She says she is "the first Egyptian women to travel to a conference outside of Cairo" [sic]. She was president of the International Federation of Crystals, Education Division for three years, and is the president of the Egyptian Committee on Crystallography for the 2014 International Year of Crystallography. Her awards include L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science laureate (2003). This award bestows $100,000 on leading women in each continent. El-Sayed is one of the five Arab women who won this award between 1998 and 2010.
El-Sayed has strong views about the role of women in science and cites figures that show that the majority of scientists working on materials, who create patents, are women. She lectures to younger women talking about her heroine Marie Curie and offering herself as an alternative role model.