Professor Alex Blakemore
Professor in Human Genomics

Membership and affiliation

Equality and widening participation

Whilst studying for her first degree and PhD, Alex was a lone parent with three young children. She has written about her experiences here, describing how she felt that even getting into university at all was like a miracle: due to her family circumstances, she had left school at 16 without A-levels and when she began her studies, the oldest of her three children was still under six and she was still breast-feeding her youngest.

Of course, things were somewhat different in those days: there were no tuition fees and there were grants for living costs too. Sheffield City Council also gave her free childcare, so that she could study and she finds it upsetting to think that such support would not be there for a young mother today (read her Huffington Post article about teenage mums here). Alex hopes that reading about her own journey from teenage mum to senior academic will encourage other students to see that motherhood is no bar to a STEM career.

Alex is committed to supporting scientists with family responsibilities and diverse career paths. She is a member of the University and Department level Athena SWAN teams working for gender equality in Higher Education and is a passionate supporter of diversity initiatives. In fact, Brunel’s evident commitment to living these values was a major factor in her deciding to join us.

Alex is also president of the Greater London Association of the British Federation of Women Graduates. She is very active on Twitter, and you can also find her on Linkedin, GoogleScholar and Researchgate.