The Network celebrates International Women's Day

Happiness belongs to you, as red belongs to the ruby, my mother used to tell me when I was a girl. Back then the phrase did not resonate as it does now; perhaps I did not fully understand it. As a child, happiness meant being close to my loved ones, the certainty of going to school, seeing my friends, my grandmothers' tight hugs, feeling held as a person within the social fabric I was born into. Today, forty-something years later, the phrase has a different nuance. I now belong to the generation that has the duty to do everything in its power so that today's girls and young women can exercise the rights that have always been theirs.

Today, in my role as coordinator of the Network of Argentine Scientists in Australia, I celebrate the intellectual, social and cultural contribution of our women scientists. Many people do not know us, so I am taking this day to tell you who we are:

I am an Adjunct Researcher at CONICET and an Adjunct Senior Researcher at the University of Tasmania. My research areas are ecophysiology and endocrinology, as tools to understand how environmental change affects the survival of sharks, rays and chimaeras.

I am a researcher at CSIRO and an Honorary Professor at the Australian National University. My field is artificial intelligence, specifically the automatic processing of human language. My passion is building technologies that are useful to society and supporting other women in science.

I am an Associate Professor at the University of Queensland. I work on urban planning, analysing the problems of cities and possible solutions to achieve a better quality of life for all their inhabitants, in harmony with nature and the physical environment of the urban structure. More than half of the world's population lives in cities, and it is important that they be inclusive, safe, sustainable and resilient.

I am a lawyer and university lecturer. I work in property law, analysing how legal systems include and protect different conceptions of land from a legal and epistemological perspective.

I am a biologist working as a Freshwater Scientist at the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) Victoria. My work focuses on the impacts of pollution on aquatic ecosystems. Through it, I provide advice and information to guide EPA's regulatory and strategic decisions to protect these ecosystems.

I am a geologist specialising in volcanology. I mostly study basalts to determine their chemical composition and, through their minerals, to work out when an eruption occurred. Studying volcanic products gives me a window into the inaccessible interior of the Earth, and they are also important for understanding a volcano's behaviour and eruptive frequency, which helps prevent disasters. I also really enjoy sharing what I know about volcanoes with students from kindergarten through to university.

I am an Assistant Researcher at CONICET and an Adjunct Professor at the National University of Córdoba. I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland from November 2018 to April 2020. I am a mathematician working in differential geometry. My research focuses on geometric flows, distinguished metrics and Ricci curvature on homogeneous Riemannian manifolds. My main contributions during my time in Australia relate to the Prescribed Ricci Curvature Problem.

I am a Professor of Geography at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and part of the university's research centre for sustainability and geoscience. My research and doctoral supervision areas are environmental management and policy, the Sustainable Development Goals, and remote sensing applications for natural resource management. I am interested in the science–policy interface.

I am a geographer, coordinator of this Network, and I work for the Australian Federal Government. For the past couple of years I have been using machine learning and big data techniques to understand patterns of social behaviour. Before joining the Australian Government, I spent twenty years working on agriculture, the environment, remote sensing and climate change.

Happy Women's Day to all women: those who came before us, those who are here, and those still to come.