Beth Montague-Hellen:
LGBTQ+ Inclusion in STEM Fields

06th September, 14:00

Over the last decade, STEM fields have shifted in their acceptance and inclusion of LGBTQ+ staff and students. Organisations have sprung up, awards and grants have been given out, and Universities have put on events and conferences, but is this enough? This talk will address where we are now, what the current challenges in LGBTQ+ inclusion are, and will give some thoughts on what we need to do next.

Dr Beth Montague-Hellen started off academic life as a Bioinformatician, but while a postdoc realised that it was much more fun supporting other people’s research. In 2016 Beth retrained as a Librarian. Since then Beth has primarily worked in Scholarly Communications and Research Support at a number of different UK Higher Education institutions and is currently a Senior Research Librarian at the University of Nottingham.

Beth started the LGBTQ+ STEM blog as a way of making LGBTQ+people working in STEM field more visible to each other and was then persuaded through the medium of twitter to organise the first LGBTQ+ STEMinar. This conference has now run for 7 years and was awarded the Royal Society Athena Prize in 2020.