“My work means that I have to be able to come in on a Saturday evening and take care of my experiment, because my mini-brain doesn’t know that it’s Saturday!” she says. “I need to be flexible, and I have to have a partner who’s supportive of that.

“We’ve done a lot for women in science and technology in increasing their positions in different fields, but women can’t do it all,” she continues. “If you keep giving more to women, you’ve got to take something away, right? So I think now we have to focus on making it more acceptable for men to be involved in family and all that stuff.”

Lancaster also thinks it’s important to get schoolgirls interested in science and other male-dominated subjects from a young age. “I have a five-year-old, and she’s already talking about how she just wants to be a princess. I try to tell her: it’s great to wear a pretty dress, but it’s more important to be smart. We need to get young girls excited about more than just princess dresses.”

Mini-brains seem like a good place to start.

The Woman of the Week series is part of Stylist’s Visible Women campaign, dedicated to raising the profiles of brilliant women past and present. Find out more about the campaign here, and see more Visible Women stories here.

Scientist Madeline Lancaster is on a mission to understand how our brains really work