Honorary Fellow cast away on Radio 4

On Sunday 10th August, the guest on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs was Wolfson Honorary Fellow, Professor Dame Carol Robinson.

Professor Robinson was the first female professor of Chemistry at both Oxford and Cambridge. She has been awarded multiple scientific prizes for her pioneering work studying complex macromolecules using the mass spectrometer.

She left school at 16 and joined Pfizer as a laboratory technician, which is where she began working with the mass spectrometer, which measures the mass of all the atoms in a particular sample. She studied for an ONC and HNC in Chemistry in the evenings and at weekends and later gained a PHD in Chemistry from Cambridge University.

She was appointed DBE in 2013 for services to science and industry. In 2021 she founded the Kavli Institute for NanoScience Discovery, an interdisciplinary science institute dedicated to studying structures and materials at an ultra-small scale.

Professor Robinson’s Desert Island Discs included tracks from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Coldplay and Alicia Keys, but it was Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ that she selected as her favourite track. Her book choice was ‘The Herbal Apothecary: 100 Medicinal Herbs and How to Use Them’ by JJ Pursell, and her luxury item was a portable mass spectrometer.

To listen to the episode on BBC Sounds, click here.