Lidia Favre-Quattropani

Lidia grew up in Geneva, Lausanne and Rolle and studied physics as an undergraduate at the University of Geneva before continuing on to do a PhD in condensed matter physics in the group of Øystein Fischer, working on scanning tunneling microscopy. After completing her PhD, she went to Paris on a SNSF grant for young researchers to do a postdoc at the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, based at the Louvre, and did a two-year postdoc on alteration processes of archeological bones to see how they change when they are buried. She did another postdoc at the University of Fribourg on coatings to protect archeological materials made of metals such as iron and silver. She then stopped working for two years when her daughter was born. Afterwards, she spent two years at the editorial office of Europhysics Letters, a journal that was based in Geneva at the time. She stopped working for another five years after her son was born before rejoining the working world as a scientific manager for the NCCR MaNEP—Materials with Novel Electronic Properties. She stayed until the end of the NCCR in 2013 and then came to MARVEL as scientific manager. In her free time, she looks after her children, and is active with the church, including leading catechism meetings with kids. 

Interview by Carey Sargent, EPFL, NCCR MARVEL, February 2019

The biggest challenge facing women in their careers is...

I would say that balancing work life and family life and finding opportunities to work part time. Particularly in the academic work I had to convince my employers, professors, that working part time is possible. Still, I have always managed to work part time, at 50 or 60%, since having children. 

I chose a scientific career because...

I love scientific domains. I was always good in math and I remember that when I was ten I asked whether one could have a job doing math. My father said you can be a mathematician and so I was saying “okay, I’ll be a mathematician.” It took some time to choose which science I wanted to study. I didn’t even consider physics for a long time because I didn’t want to be in the same field as my father. But then I thought about it and it became clear that this was the field for me.  

If I weren't in my current job, I would be...  

When I chose physics I was really hesitating between that and archeology, it was really an equal option. This course of study was in the Faculty of Letters though and this was really not the right faculty for me. I had to do science. But I’ve always been interested in archeology and that’s also why I chose to do the postdocs that I did. 

My greatest achievement to date has been...

My children.