At her Charedi girls’ school in Manchester Rivka Isaacson recalls “sewing house coats for when we were at home with our future children and learning to mitre a corner for our future husband’s tallis bag”.

But life hasn’t panned out for Isaacson quite the way the school may have anticipated: at the age of 49 she has just won the Elspeth Garman Prize from the British Biophysical Society for excellence in science engagement. 

The oldest of seven siblings, Isaascon grew up in the strictly Orthodox community of Broughton Park, Manchester, where she went to  Beis Yaacov Girls School. While the school offered a good selection of GCSEs, the curriculum focused more on Jewish studies and domestic activities such as sewing and making puff pastry.

Baking challah aged 13

Isaacson naturally found school easy, and chose to study biochemistry at university after taking a computerised career test at a centre she found in the Yellow Pages. “I think one of the advantages of my school was that I didn’t encounter the gender stereotype that women don’t do science as women didn’t do much besides wifedom, and baby production,” she says.

Although modest, Isaacson must have suitably impressed all prospective universities she applied to as she received unconditional offers from all of them. They were all in Manchester so that she could continue to live at home. “Maybe my quirkiness and unusual social norms made me stand out,” she says. At university, she discovered her love for working in a lab and, after completing a PhD in chemistry at Cambridge University, gained a fellowship through the Wellcome Trust for post-doctoral study at Harvard Medical School. She then came to London and since 2012 has been working at King’s College London, rising through the ranks from lecturer to professor of molecular biophysics, teaching students, and running a lab that explores the nanoscale machinery inside our cells. 

Thinking big: Rivka Isaacson with a 3D-printed magnified model of the ribsome, the cell's protein factory

Despite science academia being a male-dominated profession, Isaacson was undeterred. She says there are several eminent Jewish women who have made trailblazing contributions in biochemistry and who inspired her. The most notable Jewish chemist was Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), best known for her contributions to the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA. “Rosalind worked in a very different time and her achievements were all the more impressive being a female in her field,” she says.

In recent years, Isaacson has developed a close relationship with the renowned crystallographer Olga Kennard OBE, a Hungarian refugee who fled Nazi Germany in 1939. She contacted Kennard to research a talk she was asked to give for International Women’s Day at the National Portrait Gallery about the female structural biologists in the archive. In contrast to the large number of male structural biologists featured in the collection, there were only five women in that category, two of whom were Jewish – Kennard and Franklin. 

Isaacson also recalls being mentored by Laura Itzhaki, professor of pharmacology at Cambridge, when she started her PhD in Cambridge. “Laura showed me around and was so friendly and interesting and I’m sure it helped that, by chance, like me, she was also a Jewish woman from Manchester, albeit with a very different background to me. She is an amazing scientist and role model and one of our favourite therapeutic things is to have a good old whinge and strategise about research culture and sexism in academia,” she says.     

One of Isaacson’s research passions is exploring the parallels between the arts and sciences.

She explains this was initially viewed with suspicion by the wider scientific community, saying, “When I was applying for permanent academic positions around 15 years ago, I was advised to keep all my arts stuff quiet as it would be seen as a distraction – the tables have totally turned now, it has become widely recognised as high impact. What was radical interdisciplinarity is now a real USP.” 

She has been featured as a game-changer in science on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour and regularly reviews books on science and art interplay for the Times Higher Education. She also has a longstanding collaboration with the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Chichester University, through which she has given many conference talks and published widely in English literature journals explaining scientific concepts using the plots of novels. 

The scientist has taken her fascination with mixing disciplines further in a quest to attract more women and young people into her field.

In 2017, she developed a high-impact initiative called Viewing the Invisible, a series of events, featuring six science influencers being live-painted by established artists. The sessions were designed to highlight similarities between art and science and to improve the uptake of women and minorities into the field.

“Too often people are turned off science at school as it can be presented as dry and boring. I want them to see it can be a really creative and rewarding career,” she says.  This year, Isaacson is focusing specifically on teenagers, taking the live painting events into six mixed state secondary schools nationwide.“Research shows you can’t be what you can’t see and being a role model is a great way to do this.”

The painted artists will form exhibitions in the school corridors.

The scientist has received several notable public awards including being nominated for an impact award at King’s College London, and winning the 2021 Judith Howard Prize from the Biophysical Sciences Institute at Durham University. However, she says one of her career highlights was being invited as a guest to feature on the Royal Institution Christmas lecture last year. 

“I loved being on the Christmas Lectures, and hanging out in the green room with a ton of interesting people including [former BBC technology correspondent] Rory Cellan-Jones. I was amazed at the response – lots of people from my past got in touch to say they’d seen me which was fab.”

Since her university days, Isaacson has embraced a more modern outlook on Judaism. She is a member of New North London Synagogue in Finchley and her two children are at Jewish schools. She says: “I’m very ‘out’ about my Jewish identity and often post about Jewish things on Twitter.” 

Despite having a very Jewish-sounding name, she says few people at work make the connection and often mistake her for Swedish. 

When asked about the increase in antisemitism on campus, she says that she hasn’t personally encountered it and has felt supported by colleagues, but adds: “I do find the current campus encampments difficult, especially when they never have them for all the other world conflicts.

“It’s really important for everyone to be physically safe on campus and everywhere.” 

Brimming with enthusiasm, Isaacson concludes: “Personally I think being a scientist is a great career – it’s non-stop interesting and there are lots of ways of doing it depending on what level of autonomy, flexibility and lifestyle you want.”  

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www.kcl.ac.uk/news/viewing-the-invisible-breaks-down-boundaries-between-science-and-art