Dr. Margaret Ann Armour

This past July, at a golf tournament held in Edmonton to raise funds for her beloved WISEST program, Dr. Margaret-Ann Armour recounted a story that tells as much about her as it does the organisation she champions. “I was at the Toronto Airport, recently, on my way through to catch my connecting flight home. All of a sudden, a girl I vaguely recognised ran up and threw her arms around me. ‘I was in the WISEST program a few years ago. Now I’m in university studying science!’” Dr. Armour beamed at her audience and added, “That’s the kind of thing that makes me most proud. To awaken a love of learning in a young woman’s mind. There’s nothing better.”

In late 1981, Gordon Kaplan, then the U of A’s Vice-President, Research, convinced Dr. Armour that something needed to be done about the dearth of women in science. He was assembling a group of 20 leaders who would look into the matter and, rather than publishing papers that would gather dust and never be read, actually do something to address the imbalance. A year later, Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science, and Technology (WISEST) was born. Its summer research program launched two years later and now boasts of having influenced almost 1,000 young women—and a few young men, including Jeeshan Chowdhury, one of this year’s Finalists for the ASTech Leaders of Tomorrow Award. “The next challenge,” says Dr. Armour, “is to develop and maintain an alumni database that allows WISEST to stay in touch with its graduates, many of whom have gone on to careers in science and technology.”

Margaret-Ann Armour was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on September 6, 1939, just three days after the start of World War II. Her father was lost to lingering effects of the global conflict and she was raised by a mother who turned to her training as a teacher to support the family. When Margaret-Ann was very young, her mum accepted a position in a small town midway between Dundee to the south and Aberdeen to the north along the east coast. The British streaming test known as 11-plus indicated she should pursue academic studies, and she and her mother moved again, this time to Penicuik (pronounced “Pennycook”), a paper-making town near Edinburgh. It was at the local school there, Lasswade, that her natural curiosity for how things worked flowered into a passion for science. Influenced by her chemistry teacher, a kind, gentle father figure with the incongruous name of Pop Davidson, the young Margaret-Ann discovered answers to questions such as, “Why can’t I eat raw dough but when I put it in the oven for a while it becomes delicious and healthful?” Davidson was a challenging but fair taskmaster who pushed his students to ask questions and seek solutions themselves.