An Post has launched two special stamps to celebrate the achievements of Women in STEM ifor International Women’s Day 2025 and one of them features our very own Prof Aoife McLysaght!
The stamps feature two pioneering Irish scientists, Professor Aoife McLysaght and Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who are being honoured for their advocacy work for women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.
Prof Aoife McLysaght is Chair of Evolutionary Genetics at Trinity College Dublin, one of the world’s leading genetics researchers and was the CRT co-director at TCD until taking up her new role as Government Science Advisor in Jan 225.
Aoife said ” It’s a huge, huge honour, they could have picked so many people. It’s very humbling, obviously I’m just a representation of many other great people. The whole thing of women visibility and women in careers is so important – when I was young and choosing to study science I literally knew no scientist, male or female. I knew Einstein like everyone else but he didn’t feel like an achievable role model, he was far too amazing. The idea that a scientist can be an ordinary person living on your road, I had no idea of that”
The second stamp features Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell who discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967 when she was a PhD student at Cambridge University. Notably her male supervisors received the Nobel prize for the discovery in 1974….
The stamps feature portraits of each woman alongside graphics representing their fields of expertise and achievements – a radio telescope and a classic double DNA helix with a diagram of the molecule.
It’s great to see the contribution of women in STEM celebrated with these new postage stamps and we hope it inspires many more women – and young girls, in particular – to consider a career in STEM and to follow in the footsteps of these two trailblazers!