Driven to succeed in automotive chemistry
Ashley Ogden is the only female chemist and innovator at LINE-X, and hopes to inspire more women and girls to follow her into Stem
As a little girl, Ashley Ogden was often outside digging up dirt. She was always interested in rocks, archaeology and figuring out how things work, but it wasn’t until high school that her love of chemistry took root.
Ogden grew up in Elkmont, Alabama, US, whose population is only in the 500s. The course selection at high school was limited, but Ogden took every math and science class offered, and chemistry was by far her favourite.
‘I had a chemistry teacher who was really cool,’ Ogden recalls. ‘Any time we had downtime I would ask him if I could go organise the lab.’
After high school graduation, Ogden pursued chemistry at the University of Alabama. The adjustment from small-town America to this large public university, with about 38,000 students, was significant.