First graders gather in a classroom on the third floor of the Lycée Pyrenees, enjoying the moment. Since September, on the initiative of two SVT Schools (Life and Earth Sciences) Elise Jolly and Laurie Bouchard, the high school girls have carried out a long-running research project on women in science. A priori, nothing could be easier, except … one question suffices to pose the problem: give the names of several famous women scientists. Only one nickname automatically comes out of the hat: Marie Curie. Besides, you have to strain your mind. Are women therefore absent from the scientific fields? Therefore, the Nobel Prizes are only for men. “Last year, Elise Jolly explained, I read a magazine article about these unrecognized women.” It didn’t take much for an SVT teacher to propose and build a real educational project…not without hesitation on the part of some of her male colleagues. With their roadmap, high school girls and teachers have gone fishing, just to show that women are not far absent from scientific fields.

On Wednesday morning, the project’s response impressed Julie Batout, a researcher at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) in Toulouse. Joy also engaged Amandine Maima, a robotics doctor.

And when we mention Emmanuelle Charpentier, winner of the 20-20 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on the molecular mechanisms of the bacterial immune system, Julie Batut was radioactive. “I was moved to see Emmanuel’s name on one of these plates and remember that the scientist, who had trained in France, was ‘left to do her research in Germany, due to a lack of support.'”

work on zebrafish

For its part, Julie Duck operates on the olfactory system of the zebrafish. Why is this instead of a goldfish? “Simply because the zebrafish embryo is transparent and can therefore be easily studied under a microscope,” she explains. And how neurons migrate to the olfactory organ in the future and specialize. He said like that, obviously!

Amandine Mayima practices on a completely different track. The researcher develops algorithms that allow robots to make decisions in the context of collaborative tasks with humans. On the way to the world of tomorrow. And for those who fear science or because we’ll unconsciously set ourselves up for failure, Julie Batut concludes: “Science isn’t complicated, it’s that we explain it poorly to you.”