Photo Essay Features Birzeit University Female Physics Students

Visiting scholar Kate Shaw, a researcher in the field of particle physics, and her colleague Jack Owen, a professional photographer, published a photography essay featuring women in physics at the Birzeit University physics department. The essay features the six female Physics MSc students at Birzeit, Waad Awad, Doa Hawamdeh, Suhad Daraghmeh, Worood Shadeed, Tasneem Saleem and Wesal Halaiqa.

The photo essay was exhibited last month at the WISRNet Women in Science Conference at the Royal Society in London, and will be displayed at the 37th International Conference on High Energy Physics in Valencia, Spain, in July 2014.

The full photo essay was also published online on the webpage of the International Center of Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy (see http://www.ictp.it/about-ictp/media-centre/galleries/women-in-physics-in-the-palestinian-territories.aspx).

The Elsevier Foundation, also published a relevant article at http://www.elsevier.com/connect/photo-essay-spotlights-palestinian-women-in-physics.

The work was carried out last semester when Shaw spent six months at the physics department as an ambassador to young scientists from the ICTP and taught a course on particle physics for Master’s students. She was impressed to see that six of her nine students were females and they all did excellent in the course.

Department chair and director of the master program in physics Wafaa Khater said, “We are always proud of our female and male students.”