Dr Karimat El-Sayed: 'When you educate a man you educate an individual. When you educate a woman, you educate a family, a nation' A scientific struggle Profile by Yasmine El-Rashidi

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It would be hard not to stereotype Karimat El- Sayed if one were to see her on the street. She is diminutive and somewhat grandmotherly looking, with her soft face and turban-adorned head. But façade's are simply that.

Dr Karimat El-Sayed is a groundbreaking scientist; a woman who has conquered not just the barriers imposed by social norms, family expectations and cultural divides, but also the facts and figures and equations that make up the blueprints of solid state physics.

As the world turned towards the Middle East to monitor the bombardment of a city, a few people turned towards a distinguished group of women -- scientists being recognised by the UNESCO/ L'OREAL Women in Science Committee. Among the five distinguished laureates honoured for their work in the field of the material sciences -- selected from 71 nominees -- was Egypt's Karimat El-Sayed, thereby achieving a first for Arab women.

"Many professors my age have stopped pursuing science," El-Sayed says. "But I am still doing it because I love it, and because I believe that all women should be working women. This young generation", she continues, "they disappoint me. They're very family oriented. They want to finish university and marry, have children and stay home. They no longer want to work. They are losing a lot, and in the future they'll find it's a mistake."

She pauses. Three of what becomes a stream of men and women pop their heads in her open office door at Ain Shams University. One by one they congratulate her .

She is momentarily dazed, seemingly uncomfortable with the attention and praise. She pauses again.

"Every woman must work," she continues, emphasising each word.

El-Sayed is strikingly firm in her beliefs for a woman of her generation. At a time when it was not the norm for women to pursue university studies, she did much, much more. For a start, she decided to dream. Not about the ideal man, family, and home, but about a career, in an arena -- one must add -- reserved for men.

"It was a struggle," she begins of the path she chose. "I had to struggle to go to university against my family's will," she continues. "Thankfully my father was relatively open-minded. He was an Arabic teacher and understood the importance of education. My mother was the one that was strongly against it, because she worried about what her relatives would say. It was actually shameful at the time."

But the times and norms and expectations were not enough to halt the young girl's dreams. She was eager and captivated by science and physics, as well as the energy of a woman by the name of Marie Curie -- the Frenchwoman who discovered the chemical element radium and went on to become the first scientist to receive two Nobel Prizes.

"She changed my life," El-Sayed says. "I was attracted to her in secondary school, and since I was good at mathematics and physics -- and didn't want to dissect -- I decided to go to the Faculty of Science. My mother tried to have me married when I graduated, but I had ambitions in my field, and I wanted to travel and study abroad."

Well aware that marriage at that point would force her to put aside science, El-Sayed firmly held her ground.

"Hoda Sha'arawi was a symbol of freedom, but Marie Curie was the symbol of science that I saw. And they were on my mind every single day."

And in turn, she has become a symbol in her own right.

"I was the first Egyptian women to travel to a conference outside of Cairo," she says. "And others followed," she smiles. "You need a symbol to take such steps. Mine was Curie."

For others, El-Sayed is their inspiration and role-model.

Accepting one of several fellowships, El-Sayed travelled to the UK as a 20-something to pursue her PhD. There, she learnt not just about science, but also about life.

"I was studying under a great lady there," she recalls, fiddling with her pen and the corners of a pile of papers seemingly overflowing with equations. "She had been a housewife, and then later a mother and scientist. She taught me how to balance the three roles, because she discovered that she was looking after her children much better when she was working. When you work, your time with your children is limited. So it becomes quality time. You stop taking their day for granted and you want to know every detail. You want them to fill you in on what you've missed."

And in return, they miss out on nothing either.

"The children of a working mother do better in life. A working mother gains experience. She learns what life is about and learns to deal with the challenges one faces. Children, in turn, learn to accomplish many things and juggle responsibilities and activities because their mother passes this experience on to them. A working mother works at the office, works to take care of her children, works to take care of the house, and works to take care of her husband -- who is also like a child."

She laughs at this then takes a moment to point to the collection of photographs pinned on the cork-board behind her.

"My grandchildren," she says.

El-Sayed graduated from her programme in London and returned home to honour the commitments of her fellowship.

"That was a struggle too," she laughs.

While the cold of London did not particularly please her, neither did the Cairo heat.

"The materials I needed weren't available here," she says. "It was a real struggle to do research."

She persisted.

"I had to travel a lot," she says. "To be a good researcher you have to interact with advanced countries," she adds of her time at Cambridge and other major institutions around the world. "And I made sure I married another solid state physicist."

She laughs at this knowingly.

"He understands the requirements of research, so he's not like the other husbands who tell their wives that they can't travel," she explains. "He used to look after the children with the help of my mother and mother-in-law," she says of her three children, now grown with children of their own, and incidentally, all scientists.

She talks about her children briefly, then about her brothers and sisters -- also well-known doctors and scientists in their own right. She then shifts course, to shed light on the sphere that forms a significant part of her life.

"Think of a human body," she says. "As humans, we have cells. They are repeated in everyone, but with individual arrangements. These individual arrangements give us our characteristics." She pauses.

"God created materials similar to the way he created humans," she continues. "Think of a fingerprint," she says again. "Every material, every substance, has a fundamental structure -- its unit cell. This structure is made out of atoms, which are arranged in a certain way. This arrangement," she goes on to explain, "gives each material its characteristics. So each material," she breaks it down, "has a fingerprint. And no material is similar to another, so each has its own fingerprint."

She takes carbon atoms as an example.

"Do you know hibab [soot]?" she asks. "Soot is made up of carbon atoms. Diamonds are also made of a chain of carbon atoms," she explains. "The only difference is in the arrangement of those atoms."

Sounds simple enough.

"My interest is in looking at those differences," she says. In more specific terms, "the detection of impurities in materials relevant to industrial metallurgy and semi-conducting materials." And her thesis, which was highlighted during the presentation of her award, "correlated the thermal vibration of each individual atom in a structure with the thermal expansion of the studied material." In laymen's terms, how heat/energy, affects the arrangement of atoms in the structures.

"You can design materials like you design clothes," she says, making it sound deceptively simple -- even appealing. "You make a model and synthesise your materials."

El-Sayed fiddles with some papers again, then points to a glass cabinet in her office -- also adorned with papers bearing important looking symbols and numbers.

"Like those."

They are wire structures held together with arrangements of tiny, coloured bead-like things -- reminiscent of the atomic structures depicted on the cover of most secondary school physics textbooks.

"In theory you could make diamonds," she says, as if to read my mind. "But they require very high temperatures and extreme pressures to synthesise the specific graphite that forms them. The diamond that you find in the ground was formed under extreme pressures and temperatures. Volcanic. You can't recreate that in a lab."

But back to the facts.

"Materials are like humans," she says. "Substances become ill too. And when they are sick, their properties change and they become deformed -- their character changes. And the substance as you knew it -- with its particular properties -- transforms, changes, and dies. If you try to compress, or heat, or put a material in unfriendly conditions, it transforms to another material. Its fingerprint changes. If you were burnt, you would change too."

A rather unpleasant thought, but she laughs and one can't help but smile.

"All these things, I do in my lab," she says. "I categorise materials by using X-ray de-fraction and electrical de-fraction. I'm primarily interested in semi-conducters and magnetic materials."

It sounds like Chinese when its not explained, but with the patience and passion of Dr Karimat El-Sayed, the hours and hours and years and months that she pours into her research make perfect sense.

"Every single thing that we use in life is a material," she says. How, quite rightly, can that be boring or unimportant?

The problem, unfortunately, is that scientists' hours of enigmatic research remain incomprehensible to most citizens, and the importance of such work remains significantly, she says, outside of the national grasp.

"In Egypt, my research is not used to help the country," she says. "We're not like abroad. Abroad, research is used to address a specific problem, to develop it in a certain way. Take India," she continues. "The only research they do is for the purpose of development. I do research because I love it, but if we used it for the country, we would be in a very different place."

She points to the example of India's prowess in the global software industry.

She now has the lab that she wants, and no longer struggles to do the research of her choosing or acquire the materials she needs. Rather, she can focus her energies on the research itself, on her growing family, on the handful of international organisations and committees and unions that she chairs and holds positions in. And she puts much effort too, into educating, encouraging and inspiring female scientists in Egypt and abroad.

"Women are naturally suited to research," she offers. "Women like details, they notice them, their eye falls across them. The success of women in science -- in particular material sciences -- is universal. Our concern in this field is mapping the arrangement of atoms three dimensionally [crystallography]. That's depth. Women can see things in three dimensions much better than men. The pioneers of the field, the Nobel Prize winners, are women."

Women, she says, without the edge of argument, but in a matter-of-fact tone, are better observers.

"We notice the details; in homes and in science. We are also more intuitive and far-sighted. We sense things. That helps us see the depth in the structures and look for the three dimensional element to them." According to UNESCO, 12 research centres in France, Asia and America, approximately 2,700 scientists are responsible for the registration of hundreds of patents annually. About 55 per cent of those scientists are women.

"In the material sciences and in biology, women are particularly successful," writes Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, 1991 Nobel Prize winner in physics and chairman of the jury for this year's award. "There is an American expression 'green thumb', describing the ability to make plants grow. Like gardeners, women researchers have this ability; they know how to make a colony of bacteria grow, how to extract a protein cleanly; they have a heightened sensitivity to living things." They see not just the life in elements, but also the depth.

"We must work together with men," El-Sayed says, dispelling any suspicions that she is anti- male. "God created both to be integrated in the world. We need to capitalise on the individual skills and talents and God-given gifts to fully exploit this integration."

And that, among other reasons, is why she believes fervently that women should work.

"Women who don't work are dependent," she says. "They can't do anything for themselves, or for their kids. We learn from our experiences, and we pass that knowledge on to our kids. Suzanne Mubarak is trying to do a lot for women today, but she needs their help. She needs their commitment to life and career and bettering themselves. If not for their own sake, then for the sake of their children."

"The government needs to be a part of this process of educating women and letting them move ahead in their fields," she says. "To start with, they need to provide nurseries in the workplace. They need to have laundromats and ready-to-go meals. They need to make it easy for women to run both a household and career. The poet Ahmed Shawqi said 'A mother is like a school. If you know how to let her do her job in that school, you will educate a nation'," she says. "Its very much like the African proverb that when you educate a man you educate an individual, but when you educate a woman, you educate a family, a nation."

For her part, El-Sayed makes a point of travelling around the country giving lectures and workshops and encouraging girls to invent for themselves the life they want to live.

"I make sure that girls with an interest in science have access to me," she says. "I had Marie Curie. I want them to have the option of me."

They do; her students, and those from other universities say that she is their inspiration; their ticket to dream beyond the blueprints of life imposed on them by others.