Instrument to measure field hazards wins a prize
The winner of the “Early career woman physicist of the year” has thrown more light on the nature of hazards resulting from extremely low frequency magnetic fields – and developed software and hardware that she described as “a bit of kit to measure complex metrics”.
Elizabeth Ainsbury made these developments while studying for her PhD at Bristol University, and has since joined the Health Protection Agency. The award is made by the Institute of Physics.
She cited evidence that circularly polarised fields (spinning) have a greater effect on health than linearly polarised fields, leading to her project which she said was “to look at which metrics are important in measuring fields”.
Runners-up were Elaine Baxter, of QinetiQ Space Division, for her work as operations manager of the very low-cost TopSat technology demonstrator imaging satellite; and Andrea Ma at the Cavendish Laboratory, for successfully predicting the properties of diamond under pressures up to 500 GPa based on fundamental quantum mechanics.
More information from The Institute of Physics and The Health Protection Agency
