Celebration of Kathleen Lonsdale and Judith Milledge
29 February 2024
UCL Women in Earth Science - a special event celebrating two of our eminent UCL alumnae; Professor Kathleen Lonsdale and Dr Judith Milledge

In February this year, the Women in Earth Science (WiES) Group invited Mike Glazer (Emeritus Professor of Physics at Oxford) to give a talk about the time he spent at UCL, in the 1960s, as one of Professor Kathleen Lonsdale’s last PhD students. In those days, the Building where we now work and study housed UCL’s Department of Chemistry, in which Kathleen was one of the Professors.

Kathleen had no direct connection with the geologists at UCL, but the same was not true for her very close collaborator Dr Judith Milledge, who transferred from UCL Chemistry to UCL Geology (as it was then called) in the late 1970s. Kathleen and Judith (who died in 2021) published many papers together and it was largely at Judith’s prompting that the “Old Chemistry Building” was renamed as the “Kathleen Lonsdale Building” in 1981. In the 1970s, when Judith was still working in the Chemistry Department, Ian Wood was one of her PhD students. Ian, therefore, finished the session with a short presentation on Judith’s life and work, concentrating especially on her love of crystallographic apparatus, crystallographic computing and her studies of diamonds.

Prof Mike Glazer presented an illuminating account of Prof Kathleen Lonsdale’s career

Prof Ian Wood,one of her PhD students, gave a presentation on Judith Milledge’s life and work

Dr Monica Mendelssohn, commissioned the growth of a rather attractive blue diamond from Judith's cremation ashes. You can see Monica holding this in the group photograph taken after the event.
In this latter guise, Judith to some extent is still with us, as her friend and collaborator, Dr Monica Mendelssohn, commissioned the growth of a rather attractive blue diamond from her cremation ashes. You can see Monica holding this in the group photograph taken after the event.