Talat Yasmeen

Marie Curie – the first person to win Nobel Prize twice, is my female inspiration. With a difficult childhood, education wasn’t easy for her. Armed with an insatiable curiosity, she discovered polonium, radium, and their medicinal purposes. Unhindered by personal tragedies, a failing health, and almost near blindness, she overturned established ideas in Physics & Chemistry and had an equally profound effect in the medical field. Yet she refrained from patenting the radium isolation process to let the scientific community conduct unhindered future research reflecting her innate humane approach to knowledge and science.

Her death was brought on due to the exposure to high energy radiation that she suffered while pursuing her work in radioactivity. Marie’s devotion to work has spawned a future generation of scientists as they stand now on her shoulders.

When we feel included, we get a sense of belonging. Being viewed or treated as an ‘outsider’ does not inspire any loyalty or commitment. Inclusion helps us interact better with each other and enables us to work more collaboratively. It is only when we feel included, we think as a whole and solve complex problems that require innovative and out of the box solutions.

We are fortunate to live in times where there is already much respect for women and awareness of their rights. The society and businesses have come a long way in recognising contributions of women. Resultantly, opportunities have increased for us in every sphere. My frequent advice to fellow women colleagues is: while progress can be measured in terms of how much has been achieved, the true measure of opportunities we have and the impact we will create, will come only from noticing what remains to be done and the legacy that we will leave behind for our future generations.