Megan Povey.
Courtesy of the University of Leeds.
This Pride Month, we are spotlighting an oral history with Megan Povey, a professor at the University of Leeds who has done groundbreaking work in food physics and the physics of soft matter. In the interview, she discusses her history of political activism, her mid-career gender transition, and how it all relates to her scientific work.
The interview is part of AIP’s oral history collection and was conducted in 2025 by historian Joe Martin and physicist Wilson Poon as part of a series conducted for Martin’s research on the history of the field of soft matter physics. These interview excerpts were selected by Society of Physics Students summer intern Amelie Heying.
“Whether it’s science in the lab, or whether it’s engaging with the union, or whether it’s going out on an anti-racism demo, or whatever, that’s all part and parcel of being alive.”
On surviving in academia
I think, to survive in this academic world, you have to, on the one hand, have a very consistent point of view, [and] on the other hand, be a complete opportunist. I mean, that sounds like a really weird combination. But if there’s money, you would be foolish to turn it down. I mean, I did turn some money down—I wouldn’t have anything to do with the defense industry, for example. But that’s why I came to work in food, because I thought I’d do less harm as a physicist. ...
For me, it’s always about, is there an opportunity? Is there an opportunity to collaborate? Is there funding? Can I follow up? I’ve got my own ideas, things I want to test. I just think of it entirely in terms of science and potential impact. I’m interested in impact. I don’t want to do just theory. I want my work to have an impact on the world. ...
My approach has always been to … try to carve out my own niche, where you don’t have to compete too much. [When food science was developing], the physics department here was … quite snobby about food, for example, so they didn’t want to collaborate with me. That’s all changed. But then it was seen as cooking, not proper physics. That’s something [food scientists] had to contend with, that we had to do thoroughgoing, proper science. It had to be kind of uncriticizable. That’s partly what drove the colloid science in [the University of Leeds], but it’s also fed into the teaching. So, there was a big emphasis on the fundamentals, physics, chemistry, mathematics.
On becoming politically active
I became politically active [in my late teens]. My first political engagement was a meeting about the troops moving into Northern Ireland. So, we had a big student union meeting. Now, I’d never—I wasn’t political in any way, but I went along to the meeting. Callaghan, who was the prime minister at the time, had chosen to send troops in, to keep the two sides apart. We decided that we were against sending the troops into Northern Ireland, and so we went and picketed the troops going onto the boats at Heysham Harbor, which was scary. So, a few hundred of us got ourselves down to the harbor at midnight and picketed the troops going onto the boats. That was my first kind of experience with politics, really. ...
To me, getting a good degree, being successful, was the most important thing, so I didn’t really get heavily involved. I was more interested in the political ideas and assessing them. I was kind of thinking, do I agree with any of these, or what do I think about them? But I think the most important formative thing was I just didn’t want my physics to be—get involved in making weapons of mass destruction. In my PhD, I discovered a way of cloaking aircraft using electromagnetism and magnetism. So, I was being offered jobs with Lockheed Martin and US defense contractors. [Instead, I decided] to go and do a postdoc. ...
It’s always been important to me that emergence is related to chaotic aspects of the world that we live in. There’s unpredictability, but, at the same time, there’s predictability. It’s contradiction. That’s what I got from Hegel and Marx, is this idea of contradiction and paradox, and then applying that to the material world, and thinking about physical and particularly more complex problems. So, if you’re going to design new foods and new processes, you have to be political about it because you’ve got to get people to accept it.
Megan Povey, at right, with colleagues.
Courtesy of Megan Povey.
On distrust of food science
There is an existential threat to all these companies that are making sugar confectionary. There’s no question in my mind they are responsible for a large proportion of deaths. ... You can’t get away from it you know—meat dish: sugar. So, there are these issues, and I think public perception is more accurate than it’s given credit for. Of course, the companies don’t like it because sugar’s addictive and it’s cheap…
Working on fatty spreads and fat polymorphism in general has been very, very interesting. I learned a great deal, working with Unilever [and] working with Nestlé. Although people talk about saturated fats being bad, actually, monounsaturated fats are really good for you. But there’s this myth that fat is bad, and there’s also a myth that fat makes you fat; it doesn’t. Sugar does, but … animal fats are generally healthy. Then, [large corporations] found they could get much more through the tills in supermarkets by putting sugary rather than fat products at the checkout—and fat’s much more expensive as well, so there’s this big interest in reducing fat, from the profit point of view of the companies. ...
There’s a lot of suspicion about food science. I think these public perceptions aren’t completely irrational. I think there should be much more transparency, because that would increase confidence. Also, I think people don’t feel they have any control over their lives. I think this is what leads to the election of people like Trump. It’s powerlessness, and then people don’t care. They don’t even really believe in the election process at all. They just go, well, fuck them, I’ll vote for Trump because I hate the other lot. That’s what happened around Brexit, isn’t it?
On science’s role in society
… As I became more politically involved, I thought it was important that scientists engage politically. Certainly, my view at the moment is, regardless of whatever political perspective you have, if you don’t engage in politics, somebody else will do it on your behalf and not in your interests. So, I think, for anybody, it is important to, at whatever level, in whatever way, to engage politically. That convinced me to make a science career, because I felt that it was important that scientists engaged in politics. ...
Most of my energies were channeled into the University and College Union. I became national negotiator on pensions, basically, because, my view, which I still hold, is that the City of London and the government want to steal people’s pensions—and that’s still happening. … Defending pensions, defending people’s future and past earnings, is well worth doing. ...
I do think we’ve got the tools that can solve humanity’s problems. I think people could have much healthier and happier lives. Actually, it would cost less. There don’t need to be climate costs. That’s all possible, but it’s not so easy. I’ve kept out of the big politics, because I just feel you too easily become a target rather than a facilitator. So, I think it’s much more important to train the students—show how successful a thoroughgoing scientific approach can be. I think we’ve been successful [at the University of Leeds]. That’s why the school’s grown, why we’re attracting great scientists, why the school’s making an impact, because it’s based on firm foundations, firm scientific foundations.
On transitioning mid-career
I couldn’t have transitioned if the whole social milieu in which LGBTQIA and a language, especially amongst young people, hadn’t developed. There [are now] words that you can use to explain and describe your feelings, which didn’t exist when I was a teenager. The social acceptance for gay life, generally, and transitioning amongst young people has completely changed. ...
It was a very scary thing to do, frankly. But other people had done it, so there were role models. Very respected authors have transitioned, and there’s a corpus of writing about gayness and about transitioning, which I could draw on. ...
About six to nine months into my transition, I realized that I’d had what I call a gender policeman in my head all my life. Alongside that came an enormous intellectual liberation, because that gender policeman worked 24/7. It meant any social interaction, I found it completely exhausting. The only environment where I was fine was in a purely scientific one, where I just knew what I was doing, and it was nothing to do with—at least I felt—nothing to do with gender. ...
[In the past, transness] just wasn’t talked about. Especially in physics, it’s just so compartmentalized. I’ve always been politically engaged, well, certainly since my late teens. I couldn’t understand why my colleagues weren’t. Also, there was this idea that political engagement, as a scientist, was somehow a betrayal of science, that politics and science were inconsistent. I think that has reduced but not entirely gone.
—
Amelie Heying
Society of Physics Students / American Institute of Physics
aheying@aip.org
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