From using our fibre networks to monitor earthquakes, making optical fibres in space, and using laser light to detect diseases from our breath before there are any symptoms – this International Women’s Day – and our first since the commencement of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Optical Microcombs for Breakthrough Science (COMBS) – I am so pleased to be celebrating the amazing research being led by the women in our Centre.

I’d encourage you to follow these outstanding researchers to find out more about their amazing work and how we are working together to achieve our COMBS vision.

Our Chief Investigators: Meghan S. Miller, Jean Brodie, Irina Kabakova, Baohua Jia and Heike Ebendorff-Heidepriem.

Our Associate Investigators: Dawn Tan, Amanda Berry, Bao Yue Zhang, Blanca del Rosal Rabes, Voonhui Lai and Sarah Scholten.

Our Partner Investigators: Andrea Blanco Redondo, Aleksandra Foltynowicz, Christelle Monat, Victoria Coleman, Nina Lioznov and Alessia Pasquazi.

Our Centre Team: Nicci Coad, Rachael Vorwerk and Angela G.

Improving Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) in STEM is a major objective of our centre. We have established our EDI Committee (co-chaired by Sumeet Walia and Heike Ebendorff-Heidepriem), and have defined and are now using recruitment guidelines following best practice. We have pretty good balance in many areas of the Centre but (as is often the case) there is work to be done for our more senior roles. I believe it is particularly important to use our COMBS as a platform to help create more senior and ongoing roles for Women in STEM at our university nodes. We are grateful to be able to follow the pioneering and highly effective work of ASTRO 3D – ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (we hope we can do as well as you have!).

We also want to try new things over the lifetime of the Centre, learn what works and what doesn’t, and advance the frontier in EDI and particularly for Women in STEM. (If you have any ideas or want to get involved, feel free to reach out – we would love to learn more!).