Daphne Frances Jackson OBE (1936-1991)

Daphne Jackson was a Peterborough-born nuclear physicist who became the United Kingdom's first female Professor of Physics. Her greater legacy was to ensure that breaking through a barrier for herself was not enough: she created a pioneering scheme to help scientists return to research after career breaks, an idea that continues to transform lives decades after her death.

A Peterborough beginning

Daphne Frances Jackson was born in Peterborough on 23 September 1936 into a family with no tradition of universities or academic science.

Her father Albert was a skilled machine-tool worker and lathe turner. Her mother Frances had worked as a dressmaker and textile designer.

It was a household rooted much more closely in the world of practical skill and work than in the universities and laboratories that would later define Daphne's life.

Her ability was apparent early.

In 1947 she entered Peterborough County Grammar School for Girls. She became a prefect and, in 1954, head girl.

Physics presented a particular problem. Like many girls' schools of the period, the school did not offer the same depth of physics teaching routinely available to boys.

But Jackson's headmistress recognised her ability and arranged additional tuition.

It changed the trajectory of her life.

A girl educated in post-war Peterborough was about to enter a scientific profession in which women remained conspicuously rare.

One of two women

In 1955 Jackson left Peterborough to study physics at Imperial College London.

The imbalance she encountered was stark.

She was one of only two women studying physics in a cohort containing almost one hundred students.

She graduated in 1958 and could have pursued a conventional graduate career.

Instead she entered the still developing world of nuclear physics.

Building a scientific career

Professor Lewis Elton invited Jackson to become his first research student at Battersea College of Advanced Technology.

The institution later moved to Guildford and became the University of Surrey.

Jackson specialised in theoretical nuclear physics. Her doctoral research examined nuclear density distribution and the behaviour of lithium-6.

She completed her PhD in 1962 and was appointed a lecturer in the same year.

Her work with Elton contributed to the foundations of Surrey's Nuclear Physics Group, which would develop an international reputation.

Jackson was both a researcher and an unusually effective teacher. Former students later remembered her ability to make complicated mathematical and physical ideas appear logical and approachable.

Her rise through academic physics was rapid.

Britain's first female physics professor

In 1971, at the age of 34, Daphne Jackson was appointed Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey.

She was the first woman in Britain ever to hold a professorship in physics.

The achievement was remarkable not only because physics remained overwhelmingly male, but because Jackson had progressed from a Peterborough grammar school and a family without an academic background into the highest levels of British university science.

That same year she became Head of the Department of Physics.

Her task was no longer simply to conduct her own research. She was responsible for building a department, attracting talented researchers, securing research income and strengthening Surrey's international reputation.

She had entered physics as one of two women in a lecture theatre. Thirteen years later, she became Britain's first female professor of the subject.

Physics and medicine

Jackson's research increasingly moved towards one of the most important applications of modern physics: medicine.

Nuclear physics offered new ways to understand, detect and treat disease. Jackson worked on applications involving radiation and medical physics and collaborated with organisations including the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Hospital.

Her scientific output was substantial. Across her career she authored or co-authored more than one hundred scientific papers as well as books on nuclear physics.

At Surrey, she was instrumental in developing postgraduate teaching in Medical Physics and in Radiation and Environmental Protection.

The connection between fundamental science and practical human benefit mattered to her.

Yet another problem increasingly occupied Jackson's attention.

It was not a problem of physics.

It was a problem with the way scientific careers were organised.

Opening science to women

Jackson knew what it meant to build a career in an environment designed overwhelmingly around men.

But she had little interest in being celebrated merely as an exceptional woman who had succeeded.

She wanted the system itself to change.

Jackson became increasingly active in encouraging girls and women into science and engineering. She served as President of the Women's Engineering Society and helped support initiatives intended to challenge assumptions about who could become a scientist or engineer.

She was also closely involved with the Women into Science and Engineering initiative, better known as WISE.

The problem, however, did not end when women entered university.

Jackson repeatedly encountered highly qualified researchers who had left their careers to have children, care for relatives or move because of a partner's work.

When they tried to return, the scientific world often treated their knowledge as obsolete.

Years of education, specialist training and intellectual ability were simply being discarded.

The returners revolution

Jackson regarded the situation as an enormous waste.

Her answer was both practical and radical.

In 1985 she devised a fellowship scheme enabling researchers who had taken career breaks to return through a combination of part-time research and personalised retraining.

Instead of asking people to pretend the interruption in their careers had never happened, the scheme was designed around it.

“An appalling waste of talent.”

Daphne Jackson on qualified women unable to return to their professions

The idea addressed several barriers at once.

Fellows could rebuild current research experience, learn new techniques, regain confidence and do so through working arrangements compatible with caring responsibilities.

It was an extraordinarily forward-looking model.

Jackson initially developed the scheme to address the experiences of women in science and engineering.

The principle proved much bigger.

Researchers of any gender can now receive Daphne Jackson Fellowships, and the model has expanded beyond traditional STEM subjects into a much broader research landscape.

Recognition and final years

Jackson's influence extended across British science.

Alongside her work at Surrey she took senior roles in professional organisations, served on national committees and contributed to debates about science policy, education and equality.

In 1987 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

The honour recognised a career that now combined distinguished physics research, university leadership and determined campaigning for wider participation in science.

Her life was cut short.

Daphne Jackson died from cancer on 8 February 1991. She was only 54.

But the idea she had created survived her.

In 1992 the Daphne Jackson Trust was established in her memory to continue the return-to-research programme.

Jackson and Peterborough

Daphne Jackson's scientific career unfolded principally in London and Surrey, but its beginnings belong unmistakably to Peterborough.

She was born here.

She went to school here.

And it was a Peterborough headmistress who recognised that a talented girl with an interest in physics should not be prevented from pursuing it simply because the normal curriculum was not designed around her ambitions.

That detail now feels strikingly prophetic.

Much of Jackson's later career would be devoted to removing exactly those kinds of structural barriers for other people.

More than three decades after her death, the Trust reports that more than 500 researchers have been helped back into research careers.

Few legacies are easier to measure.

Every fellowship represents expertise that might otherwise have been lost, research that might not have happened and a career that was allowed to begin again.

Daphne Jackson did not simply become the first woman to reach the top of British physics. She changed the route so that others could follow.

Her story places a Peterborough schoolgirl at the heart of two important twentieth-century changes: the development of nuclear and medical physics, and the long struggle to make scientific careers available to people whose lives do not follow a perfectly uninterrupted path.