Sheilla Jones

The date — December 6, 1989 — still resonates with Canadians, particularly women in science, technology, engineering , and mathematics. On that Wednesday, a misogynistic gunman entered the École Polytechnique, in Montreal. He ordered the male students out of a classroom and shot the nine women, killing six. He then killed eight more, ranting about feminists taking jobs from…

There is something wrong with science. Promises of big breakthroughs that could fundamentally change our understanding of reality have burned brightly for a little while during the past three decades, only to quietly fade away or sputter out. Remember when mapping the human genome was going to revolutionize medicine and lead to cures for everything from cancer to…

When the number of women enrolling and graduating from physical science and engineering programs was steadily increasing in the 1980s and ’90s, it was not unreasonable to expect that those numbers would keep increasing. Or at least that they would maintain an upward track until men and women were more or less equally represented in the various fields of…

What would it take to produce another Einstein? That is a question that returns with cyclical regularity in the physics community. But there is no need for the world to wait for someone of Albert Einstein’s remarkable vision and achievement to just happen along, not when we have got an Einstein factory right here in…