don’t think they meant round the corner,” she explained. “I think they were referring to Africa. So I felt I didn’t really belong here, but then I’d go home and I’d meet relatives and they’d say, ‘oh Maggie, are you a lost Nigerian? You don’t speak the language, you’ve never been to Nigeria and you don’t belong there either’. But when you look up at space, you don’t see barriers and you don’t see borders. You just see our planet and stars and that sums it up for me.” It is a powerful message and one that Dr Aderin-
Dr Aderin-Pocock speaking at the CIPD 2024 Conference
Pocock has had to dig deep, fight for and commit to at every stage. Her parents separated and she was raised across both homes, attending 13 different schools. She is also dyslexic, which she sees as a positive for the creativity and soft skills it brings – particularly important in future for harnessing the deployment and development of AI – and is an ambassador for the charity, Made by Dyslexia. Despite the challenges, there came a point in her
This multidisciplinary approach has seen Dr Aderin-
Pocock work alongside organisations like English Heritage, who look after Stonehenge. It is also cross- cultural, taking her career all around the world to work with international teams. She highlights an ancient Arabic astrolabe, a tool that tracks the movement of stars, as a perfect example of STEAM. “It’s a scientific instrument. It’s got wonderful
engravings over the surface, so that makes it art, but if you look at the words inscribed around the edge, these are from the Qur’an, so it’s a wonderful cultural piece involving all sorts of creativity.” Perhaps the greatest influences on a young Maggie
were the televised lunar landings and series like ‘Star Trek’ and ‘The Clangers’, which link to her TV career today. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind were the words echoing in my head as I grew up,” she said. “I was taking my first few wobbly steps as Neil
Armstrong was taking his giant leap, but it had a profound effect on me and the whole world. For me, it set a dream. ‘Star Trek’ was people from all over the world coming together and working, including aliens like Spock. My absolute role model was Lieutenant Uhura. What a woman!” These influences have informed her “crazy dream”
and those she hopes to inspire in the next generation. Her experiences at school are also valuable and relatable to people and families who are globally mobile and for people who are neurodivergent. While today there is much greater cross-cultural understanding and teaching of global mindedness and citizenship, transitions care and conversations around belonging and identity, Dr Aderin-Pocock experienced the common feelings children and young people can face when they move schools or countries. “I went to many different schools and often people would say to me ‘why don’t you go back home?’ and I
early teenage years when she set her mind to studying hard and saw her grades tick up as a result, ultimately securing her a place at Imperial College, London. For her, science is by nature about dead ends, but it’s about having the skills to pick yourself up from it, learning throughout your life, being entrepreneurial and achieving your goals.
LEAN INTO A SENSE OF WONDER “The biggest thing we’ve got going for us in terms of selling science to people is that sense of wonder,” she said of the third prong to her approach. “We are doing things now that when I was at university I would never have thought possible. So we’re thinking big and thinking crazy and trying to change the lay of the land, to change the knowledge of humanity.” In the space industry, the OWL (overwhelmingly
large telescope) and its successor, ELT (extremely large telescope, currently under construction), epitomise this approach. These multinational collaborative projects are helping us better understand space, while satellite technologies are helping charities and NGOs deliver better support to people in refugee camps and the information to mitigate natural disasters. Developments in spectroscopy are also helping us with the question of whether or not there could be or are other Earth-like planets. “Any reality we are given is not set in stone,”
said Dr Aderin-Pocock. “We can transform the reality we are given into the reality we want.” Agreeing with international leader Christina Figueres on the “stubborn optimism” we need and the grit, determination and relentlessness to bring our goals – individual or global – to fruition, she says collaboration rather than confrontation is the way to achieve this. “Having a crazy dream is something
we all need in our lives. For me, it was wanting to get out into space and this is a truly crazy dream. When you fall over and things go wrong, you pick yourself up because you think about what you can achieve. You are also never sure where it’s going to take you.”
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GLOBAL LEADERSHIP HOT TOPIC – SPACE SE CTOR
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