Athene Donald
| Dame Athene Donald | |||
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| Born | Athene Margaret Griffith 15 May 1953 London, England, UK |
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| Residence | Cambridge, England, UK | ||
| Nationality | British | ||
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| Alma mater | University of Cambridge (BA, PhD) | ||
| Thesis | Electron microscopy of grain boundary embrittled systems (1977) | ||
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| Spouse | Matthew J. Donald | ||
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Dame Athene Margaret Donald DBE FRS (née Griffith; born 15 May 1953) is a British physicist. She is Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge and Master of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Donald was born Athene Margaret Griffith in London and educated at Camden School for Girls and Girton College, Cambridge. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Science (Theoretical Physics) followed by a PhD in 1977.
She worked at Cornell University as a postdoctoral associate, where she switched working on metals to polymers, before returning to Cambridge (Department of Materials Science) in 1981 and to the Cavendish Laboratory in 1983. She became Professor of Experimental Physics in 1998. Her major domain of study is soft matter physics, particularly its applications to living organisms and the relationship between structure and other properties.
Her research has applied microscopy, and in particular Environmental Scanning Electron Microscopy to the study of both synthetic and biological systems, notably protein aggregation.
Further details of her research trajectory can be found in the citation for the Faraday Medal she was awarded by the Institute of Physics in 2010:
“Professor Donald's deeply innovative and productive research is in experimental soft condensed matter physics, incorporating polymer and colloidal physics, and more recently biological physics. Her early Cornell work on glassy polymer crazing remains very influential and was followed by insightful studies of shear deformation in liquid crystal polymers (LCPs). Here she was able to demonstrate the ubiquity of the so-called banded texture after shear of LCP's and study the underlying packing of the molecules by electron microscopy showing how they followed a serpentine trajectory in several thermotropics. She also carried out important work on lyotropic systems, including a synthetic polypeptide, studying its gelation and phase diagram.
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