I'm the only member of my family who didn't get a PhD. So, I'm like the failure of the family, cause all I have is a bachelor's, like a drop out.
I went to Brunel University and very much wanted to go on to do a PhD in management, but then my acting career started to take off. In those days when you switched on the box there were hardly any brown or black faces.
I came from this very traditional background and I benefited hugely from feminism. I felt privileged going to university and doing a PhD. Most people of my background don't get to do that.
For her PhD, Maria Goeppert Mayer, a theoretical physicist, came up with the idea of multi-photon physics. That means an atom absorbs two or more photons simultaneously.
My PhD project was actually doing something that required a high-intensity laser. It was supposed to work in a way that many, many photons of light would interact with an atom all at the same time.
My PhD was not fast out of the gate.
Gérard Mourou, who was my PhD supervisor, dreamed up the idea of increasing laser intensity by orders of magnitude. He did it while he was on a ski trip with his family. He probably shouldn’t have been thinking about lasers.
I've had people that I've given up on, kicked out - situations where I was becoming part of the problem because I was sort of enabling so I said, 'Godspeed, farewell.' And they've come back to me four years later and they're in a CDAAC program or they're getting a PhD.
I got a PhD from Harvard and a few years later, there was a girl from Sunderland who hadn't got into Oxford or Cambridge, even though she'd got perfect A-levels. Harvard asked me to come and recruit her because I was recruited out of university by Harvard - they were trying to show that people could make it.
The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.
