Karimat El-Sayed is an Egyptian academic, crystallographer, and proponent of women's education. She is a professor of

crystallography Crystallography is the experimental science of determining the arrangement of atoms in crystalline solids. Crystallography is a fundamental subject in the fields of materials science and solid-state physics (condensed matter physics). The wor ...

at Ain Shams University. She was president of the International Federation of Crystals, Education Division for three years.

Biography

El-Sayed's father was an

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...

teacher; her brothers and sisters are doctors and scientists. Her father was open-minded about her educational ambitions but her mother worried about the family's reputation and tried to have her married off after she studied

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

and

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

at Ain Shams University. El-Sayed completed her PhD at

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

under

Kathleen Lonsdale Dame Kathleen Lonsdale ( Yardley; 28 January 1903 – 1 April 1971) was an Irish-born British pacifist, prison reformer and crystallographer. She proved, in 1929, that the benzene ring is flat by using X-ray diffraction methods to elucidate t ...

in 1965. Under Lonsdale's guidance she had been able to correlate the

atom Every atom is composed of a nucleus and one or more electrons bound to the nucleus. The nucleus is made of one or more protons and a number of neutrons. Only the most common variety of hydrogen has no neutrons. Every solid, liquid, gas, and ...

ic vibration of materials with the observed expansion of that material due to an increase in temperature.A Woman of Substance
Gulf News, 2003, retrieved March 17, 2014 Karimat El-Sayed founded the women's section of the Physics Department at King Abdul-Aziz University (1975). She was president of the International Federation of Crystals, Education Division for three years, and is the president of the Egyptian Committee on Crystallography for the 2014 International Year of Crystallography.

Views

El-Sayed has strong views about the role of women in science and cites figures that show that the majority of scientists working on materials, who create patents, are women. She lectures to younger women talking about her heroine

Marie Curie Marie Salomea Skłodowska–Curie ( , , ; born Maria Salomea Skłodowska, ; 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934) was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first ...

and offering herself as an alternative role model.

Awards

*2003: L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science.

Personal life

El-Sayed married Salah A. Tahoun a Soil scientist, professor at Zagazig University faculty of agriculture . They had three children. Her postdoctoral research studied small impurities in metals which was important as the discovery of transistors had shown how these small additions to a material could radically effect its properties.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sayed, Karimat Year of birth missing (living people) Ain Shams University alumni Academic staff of Ain Shams University Alumni of University College London Crystallographers L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science laureates 21st-century women scientists Living people