Athena SWAN lecture 2025: ‘3 Ps and a CSA’

On Tuesday 4 November, colleagues at the School of Science & Technology, City St George’s, University of London were delighted to welcome Professor Danielle George CBE FIET, to deliver the School’s Athena SWAN Lecture 2025.

The School uses the Athena SWAN charter as a framework to progress gender equality for all.

Professor George is the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser for National Security, and is Professor of Radio Frequency Engineering at the University of Manchester.

Her lecture spanned what she (or what originally she said her husband) described as her  ‘3Ps and a CSA’ referring to a period of her life spanning becoming a professor (the first ‘P’), at the same time as becoming pregnant (the second ‘P’) and her ‘presenting’ the 2014 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (the third ‘P’). ‘CSA’ stands for becoming ‘Chief Scientific Adviser’.

She was introduced by Professor Juliet John, Vice President (Education), City St George’s, University of London.

Loving astrophysics

Professor George began her lecture by remarking on it being a keen interest rather than lofty ability that set her off on her career:

I loved astrophysics. When I was young, I loved astronomy, physics, maths. I wouldn’t say I was brilliant at them, but I just really liked them, so worked hard at them, and then went and became a radio frequency and microwave engineer.

As a child I was also really curious about ‘why this why that’ – that’s the scientist in me, I then wanted the how things worked, the ‘how this how that’ – that became the engineer in me as well. So I turned much more to the engineering side.

There were three lectures, so I thought: I’d like to turn skyscrapers in London into a game of Tetris, I’d like to speak to an astronaut on the International Space Station, and I’d like to create a robot orchestra. They were like ‘wow, we probably can’t do any of that, but we love your ambition!’.  Thankfully we ended up doing all of those things!

Professor George discussed two further cutting-edge projects she worked on, including the Square Kilometre Array across Western Australia and South Africa, which is still in development, and which will be the world's largest radio telescope, with a collecting area of one million square metres of low radio frequency receivers.

She also discussed the ALMA project consisting of 66 radio telescopes in the Atacama Desert, Chile, which explores space in the very high radio frequency range.

Table salt from black holes?

Professor George shared a video taken from an image from ALMA, showing the ‘clock constellation’, and a spiral galaxy called NGC1433 –with a massive black hole in the middle of it. Astronomers found that black holes like this spew out sodium chloride, commonly known as ‘table salt’. She said that while we do not know why salt is emanating from these blackholes, it poses an intriguing question for scientists and engineers for the future.

A passion to inspire the next generation

Professor George is committed to inspiring the next generation to ask and answer the biggest questions about space. She remarked on a talk she gave for children:

This little girl put her hand up and said, ‘what does the cosmic background radiation actually sound like?’ and said that I had absolutely no idea, what a great question! So, I did some work with a digital signal processing colleague of mine, Professor Patrick Gaydecki, and we took a tiny amount of the 15.5 months’ data [from the Planck project] and we processed it, to hear what it sounded like – it’s a very weird sort of noise!