L’Oréal

The world needs science – science needs women

Since 1998, a public-private partnership between L’Oréal and UNESCO has promoted women in science. The L’Oréal-UNESCO Awards For Women in Science recognises outstanding women researchers who have contributed to scientific progress.

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Reading the genome

Dr Marnie Blewitt wants to know how a human being is made: how does a single fertilised egg develop into an adult with millions of cells performing a myriad of different functions.

“How does a cell know which of its 30,000 or so genes should be active and which should be dormant?” says Marnie, a researcher at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research.

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L’Oréal Fellow looking for dark energy

In 1998 astronomers made an astonishing discovery—the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. The discovery required a complete rethink of the standard model used to explain how the Universe works.

“Now we know that stars, planets, galaxies and all that we can see make up just four per cent of the Universe,” says Dr Tamara Davis, a University of Queensland astrophysicist.

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Reading the hidden clock in a grain of sand

Dr Zenobia Jacobs wants to know where we came from, and how we got here. When did our distant ancestors leave Africa and spread across the world? Why? And when was Australia first settled?

Zenobia has developed a way of accurately dating when individual grains of sand were buried with human artefacts. And that technique (optically stimulated luminescence or OSL) is transforming our understanding of human evolution.

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